Henry Moore is a British sculptor whose interest is in the depiction of the human form.
INFLUENCES
His early influences were artifacts from the British Museum. He was strongly influenced by primitive African art (African masks) and an Aztec sacrificial sculpture depicting a genderless reclining figure. European modernists like Jean Arp, Brancusi, Picasso and Giacometti also influenced his work later on.
METHODOLOGY
Along the course of his career his works were made from cast bronze and modelling (with clay and plaster). However, he also produced works by directly carving into mediums like wood and stone. He enjoyed the raw, intense and direct feeling of carving straight with his tools into such materials, a technique derived from European modernism and non-Western art.
COMMONLY DEPICTED SUBJECT MATTER
The forms of his sculptures are organic, fluid and abstract. He famously sculpted many Reclining Figures (symbolic of the relationship between man and nature). His daughter inspired him such that Mother and Child were oft repeated motifs in his work. The way he did his artwork not to produce beautiful commercial things but because he was unafraid of making art that he was passionate about is a motivation to me.
While the human form did inspire him, he also obtained inspiration from natural forms like pebbles, shells, and bones. This shows that he didn't fix and restrict his artistic view to a single channel; he experimented and he grew from medium to medium and inspiration to inspiration. This can help me in my coursework to try different things and not set my mind from the start on a specific medium. It will give more space for developing artistic passion and less room for fear of experimentation. His artworks made visual statements about nature; they accentuated the belief that nature is an art within itself.
OTHER ARTWORKS
Besides sculpting, he also did drawings.
Artworks like Grey Tube Shelter were created using watercolour and wax crayons. I find this technique very interesting as I once saw someone doing something similar, only she was using a yellow-whitish liquid made for that purpose: When the liquid dried, when you painted over it with watercolour, the watercolour wouldn't show on the parts where the liquid was.
Henry Moore used a white wax crayon to draw the figures, then painted over the entire paper using dark watercolour.
Meanwhile, here's a few interesting short clips which can give us an idea of how Henry Moore's larger-than-life sculptures are installed. <iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/lpvQaOplAU4" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/COZr37-2dE8" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> (try skipping to about 2:00min to avoid redundant scenes like the truck driving slowly to the destination and redundant visual rhetoric like flowers swaying in the wind.)
