The Greek God Hephaestus created magnificent armor, weapons, and devices for Zeus and the Olympian Gods: Zeus’ Aegis, Hermes’ winged helmet and sandals, Helios’ Sun Chariot, Pandora’s Box, and female metal robot assistants. Hephaestus worked deep in his workshop under a volcano on the Greek island of Lemnos, drawing only from his imagination, talent, and ingenuity.
Larry Schuster’s art is created in this tradition. Larry draws from his own innate essence, perceptions, dreams, thoughts, and imagination to create magnificent works of splendor.
As a small child, Larry mystified his family as they playfully made shapes from the yellow adobe earth just beyond their farmyard fence. Larry expertly sculpted a striking, flat, triangular, African mask, with a flair for design that left his family wondering, “Where did this boy come from?”
Larry Schuster’s work continues to astound and awe. An artist’s creative process is not easily expressed in words, but Larry Schuster’s life work predominantly explores three strands: the Mythological and Archetypal, Nature as Master Engineer and Artist, and a Paradoxical Response to Plato’s Theory of Forms (ἰδέαι), all manmade objects are mere imperfect copies of an ideal and perfect object (such as a table or a sword) which exists in the ether.
MYTHOLOGICAL AND ARCHETYPAL
In creating Egypt Eternity, Atmospheres, and Obelisk Erupting, Larry Schuster explores the hallucinatory, often confounding world of the Mythological and Archetypal, transforming soft-edged illusion into striking works of gold, silver, copper, steel, stone, glass, and plexiglass. Through use of light and spectral shadow, size and dimension flow as shifting phantasia.
Egypt Eternity is composed of an 8′ sheet of clear plexiglass, held in place by steel pyramids, and a copper runway. Lightning bolts of stainless steel and silver flashes through the winged stained glass form of Nekhbet, the Egyptian Vulture Goddess.
Obelisk Erupting rises from a 6′ diameter alluvial black and jade green marble base, layered black-veined obelisk entwined with steel roots and limbs thrusts upward, supporting a three-sided trellis of plexiglass and blue stained glass (this project is in process).
Atmospheres emanates from a translucent glass enclosure, 16” by 10” by 10”. A surreal tree bends in a cosmic wind.
NATURE AS ARTIST AND MASTER ENGINEER
“I have a deep respect for the complexity, symmetry and gracefulness found in the natural world. The delicacy of a dragonfly wing, the gentle cure of a leaf, the circuitous path taken by a vine towards its perceived destination.”
“An underlying theme of many of my works is to take something beautiful and unique from nature’s palette, and, in an ultimately unobtainable way, attempt to pit man’s ability to take cold and shapeless materials and to combine the two into art that is inspiring and thought-provoking.”
Lacewing Alighting explores the possibilities of using stained glass, brass and copper to create a three dimensional, luminescent, object of beauty.
Stained glass, brass, brass-plated vines, amethyst geode and black marble · 28″ H x 14″ W x 14″ D, with a 24” wing span.
DRAGONfly
Larry Schuster confronts the challenge of making a large and intricate wing surface that is supported with great structural strength. Larry created a new technology, building wooden forms, then designing a veining of engineered stainless steel, welding it together, then attaching the sections of stained glass to form the delicate geometric luminescent wings. The body is sculpted and hand-machined stainless steel.
A contemporary sculpture of stainless steel and stained glass · 8.5’ wing span · 1,200 pieces of glass per wing · Will have approx. 10,000 pieces when completed.
PARADOX: Response to Plato’s Theory of Forms (ἰδέαι).
“Not A Table”
“This sculpture is intended to invoke a paradoxical dilemma for the viewer.“
“As in René Magritte’s famous painting of a smoking pipe with the caption below the image stating “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (“This is not a pipe”), when asked once about this image, he replied that of course it was not a pipe, just try to fill it with tobacco! In other words, the image of a thing is not the thing itself.”
“I took a slightly different message from the painting. First impressions of an artwork can be misleading and color all perceptions that follow, sometimes to the exclusion of the deeper meaning intended by the artist. I have found this to be the case, at times, with this piece.
So what is the deeper meaning? The sculpture has been intentionally made impractical, precarious, and even dangerous in an attempt to draw the viewer’s mind away from the fact that it is in the form of something that is considered solely practical and functional and to think of the form as beautiful and completely functionless.”
Glass, stainless steel, marble and mahogany legs · Table approx. 48” x 48” · Height w/ base approx. 46”.
Red Ribbon In The Wind was inspired by the challenge of creating the illusion of flight, a red ribbon of glass drifting gently in the wind. stained glass ,woodlayer with gold leaf , 32″ L x 17″H x 4″D
Windswept Vine
Vine Ascending
GRAPEVINE SCULPTURES
“The Central Coast of California, near my home, is the center of flourishing wine making. After decades, the old vines no longer produce and are found abandoned by the side of the highway. I found these old, gnarled, grapevine pieces intriguing. In working with these natural forms, I created metal sculptural elements that both added to and contrasted to nature’s work, as well as a motion of the wind, in a static piece.”
Contemporary sculpture: Grapevine, stone, stainless steel and brass · 36″ H x 30″ W x 15″ D
LARRY SCHUSTER ARTIST STUDIO
