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Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
"What is art?" might be the essential start to looking at inspiration and forces that guide each of us on our "Journeys to the Masterpiece".

My own working concept is that



Art is an evolved cognitive tool in diverse
cultures, whereby creative thoughts that
might arouse emotions, (and new ideas),
are exported from a gifted persons mind
to be fabricated in a compelling form
thatothers can readily experience.​

In doing so, I postulate there is an "Arc of Communication", (completed imperfectly), which by its evolutive and iterative nature, itself, can inspire new works, so that the individual recruits others to participate and experience the works and they become influencers and sources of moving barriers and making society more competitive.

Asher
 
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Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
What stimulates me to create: I am greedy for beauty, a butterfly that flutters past, an autumn sienna leaf swirled away by rainwater, a father, (daughter on his shoulders), vanishing in a crowd, the gong sounds of a Chinese New Year dragon, disappearing before I arrive. My cameras always in my hand. I constantly sample what moves me. I bring home rusty metal crushed by trucks, old dead sienna woody palm branches ripped off in a storm, broken china, chains, rocks and flotsam washed up on the beach. My photography studio is always busy: pregnancy couples. a child with a dog, nude with flowers and jute ribbons, a conductor in tails with his baton!

The nascence of my work: These glimpses, feed a passion to create physical art forms that inspire and one can treasure, befriend and posses. I’m am dawn dreamer. Barely awake, I imagine new compositions and structures that I have to get up to sketch so I can sleep again.

Then I sketch repeatedly, save a select few, make models and develop until the work suddenly draws air in its nostrils and a voice and bids me to stop! Maquettes collect on my workbench. Eventually one demands to be held again and I’m driven to create in earnest.

My photographic and sculptural work must be original, built with durable materials using advanced techniques so that what I imagine is delivered and can evoke the uplifting emotions and feelings I have imagined.

Asher
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
For me, privately shown art is very different than that for the public space.

In private, we a ethnically proud of our heritage, religious or not and to different extent comfortable with the human form, dressed or not.

So even the finest private art, in a diverse public space can end up being divisive, insulting and hurtful.The Cross of Jesus, so revered as a symbol of hope, might, to Muslims, evoke ideas of pillage and abuse at the hands of the Crusaders of centuries ago. Columbus, who brought riches to Spain might be viewed differently by natives of the Americas.

In art for private collection: I personally celebrate beauty of everything from leaves, butterflies, the female form, mountains, homes, pregnant couples, children with their mother or pets or a rusty metal remnant of industry in a roadway, crushed by trucks. Sometimes my models pose in staged sets to create art with voices on social issues.

For Public Art, however, the work must bring unity.

I seek first to extract from the former collections symbology which is non-divisive.

So while I will not use anything erotic, I steal the shape of a woman’s hips for the sail of “Puff of Wind” and the hair of Botticelli’s Venus for the form of the waves of the speeding vessel. I reference Stonehenge in my giant steel arch in “Steel Henge” and a man and woman debating a new relationship in ”The Conversation. Likewise I mimic a maze for a hotel used on the set of Kubrick “The Shining” but would never show horror.

All work in the public arena, for me, at least, should be uplifting and inspirational, healing and attempting to bring unity and the mood to invent, create and succeed.

These are my own ideas, I would welcome your critique and feedback and your own thoughts that might direct our art.

Asher
 
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