Visiting Artist Lecture Vivian Beer

Leah Woods had posted fliers around the Service Building for visiting artist Vivian Beer, and stopped by the ceramics room during class to encourage students to attend. I was thrilled to attend because there haven't been very many(if any) sculpture artist lectures and I thought she had an awesome name!

I believed Vivian Beer's artist lecture was executed very well and certainly left me with a feeling inspiration. She first talked about her life growing up on the rural coast of Maine pretty much living without electricity or running water, spending most of her time out and about the wilderness. Beer flipped through many pictures she had taken from the outdoors that inspired her, kind of like her little collection box of favorite images that she keeps for motivational ideas for her work-- clouds, trees, landscapes. Beer uses the images around her to abstract her ideas from, so with the overflow of images thrown at us today through television, magazines, newspapers, and billboards, Vivian's image collection has grown to include new trendy shapes.

Many of Vivian Beer's works tiptoe the line between functional and non functional. Some pieces of furniture are elevated to tower above the viewer, giving a new perspective to what a chair is and possibly how it is and isn't used. She enjoys the idea of the chair the most, because a chair is most personable-- it has arms, legs and a back; can be in the kitchen or the dining room, or on the front porch; the chair can be anywhere.

Most of Beer's work is designed with sheet metal, her preferred medium which she pounds and shapes into forms that sometimes strikingly resemble a sleek new Ferrari. She wanted the people who sit on her benches to feel a sense of excitement that they would if they were sitting in one of those expensive suave cars.

She began experimenting with auto body paint finishes and soon her furniture and sculpture took on a whole new dazzle. She described the candy red paint she would layer on top of a hot pink paint coat making the red a vibrant hue of sparkle and color.



Another interesting aspect I found about her presentation, were the photographs taken of her sculptures. The blur of a person in the background walking by, examining, and/or sitting in the bench or chair gave the furniture a more approachable dimension. These weren't photos documenting cold quiet metal sculptures, the people in the pictures made them seem more interactive, functional, and playful which seems to be more of her intended purpose for those pieces.