See these links also for animation I produced for Frank Stella at the conclusion of the Smoke Sculpture work, and for the first digital sculpture work I did for him in 1985.
Smoke Sculptures (1990 - 1992)
Sculpture & Graphics
for Frank Stella
by
Michael O'Rourke
Between 1990-1992, I did an extensive series of sculptural work for Frank Stella. This work was sometimes later known as the "smoke sculptures" of Frank Stella. The work began with me digitally modeling a number of sculptural forms, from those producing small-scale physical sculptures, and finally producing construction-drawing information to permit very large scale sculptures cast in various metals. For more information, click here.
Click on the images below to see more images and more information, both about the processes and the uses Stella put my work to.
In addition to using my graphics as fabrication drawings for his sculpture, Stella used the drawings I produced, sometimes known as his smoke drawings, very extensively as a central and recurring motif in his paintings and prints for many years. His Moby Dick, Deckle Edge , and Imaginary Places are among the series that relied especially heavily on the smoke drawings I had produced. As late as 2015 Stella was still using the graphics I produced 25 years previously in some of his paintings.
Credit/Acknowledgment:
To my knowledge, Mr. Stella never publicly acknowledged that I did this work, either the sculpture or the graphics -- or that any human being did it. When the process was mentioned at all, phrasing was used to suggest that it happened automatically. In a 1995 NY Times article Stella's studio foreman described the sculpture and graphics I produced by saying simply that "photographs of smoke were scanned into the computer", ingnoring the fact that after scanning the photographs I then worked for two years to produce the three-dimensinoal sculptures and the graphics. In the 1997 book, "Frank Stella at Tyler Graphics", the smoke-ring graphics I produced are featured on the cover of the book, the inner flap, and within every print referenced in the book. The book's characterisation of this imagery is simply that it was "computer generated". In Stella's 2015 retrospective at the Whitney Museum, no mention is made of the process whereby the smoke sculptural forms and graphics I produced and that Stella used extensively for 25 years came about. These mis-representations were never corrected by Stella, his employees, or any of the exhibitors to my knowledge.
