Friday, June 8, 2018

Artist of the day, June 8: Gabriel Schama, woodcut artist, sculptor

Gabriel Schama (1985) graduated from Columbia University in 2008 with a bachelor’s in architecture. Variously employed in metal fabrication, furniture making, and photography, Schama started crowdfunding his artwork in 2012 on Kickstarter and has been entirely self-employed for the past couple of years.

The formal qualities of his artwork tend to emerge from the particularities and structural limitations of layered plywood and paper. For years he worked simply for the experience of pushing up against the boundaries of what seemed possible within the simple set of rules from which all the cut paper work flowed: cut, glue, stack, repeat, until finished.

When he first started prototyping ideas in laser-cut plywood, it became brilliantly clear that he needed a machine to push beyond the soft limits of art paper. I received enough patronage to buy his own laser cutter and never looked back. Much of his creative energy has gone into mastering Adobe Illustrator,  favoring the many shortcuts and tools the digital process affords me.

Gabriel Schama work is an aesthetic practice rather than a conceptual one, but he like to think of  work as belonging to an ancient, continuous line of craftsmen, who have adorned the fabrics, facades and structures of civilization for thousands of years. he was in the habit of sketching architectural motifs from the murals and columns of old temples and palaces many years before he ever noticed the same curves and patterns seeping into his own work.

Whatever ideas or concepts he may have for a piece, everything still eventually filters through this idiosyncratic process, which for better or worse, he remain utterly obsessed with.

© 2018. All images are copyrighted © by Gabriel Schama. The use of any image from this site is prohibited unless prior written permission is obtained.




 Mr Gabriel Schama




















































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