Alexander Calder's Natural Movements

Alexander Calder came from a long line of artists. His mom was a painter, his dad and grandfather were both famous American sculptures. Since art was an everyday occurrence in Calder life, he grew up always loving to create things and was encouraged to do so. He even had his own little studio as a young child where he made his own toys. Even though he loved making things growing up, he never saw art as a career in his future. Calder wanted to do into engineering and his parents encouraged that because they didn’t want Calder to suffer the life of an artist. Alexander Calder got his mechanical engineering degree at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey in the year 1919.
As Alexander lived his life as an engineer he became …show more content…
One of the first mobiles he made hung from the ceiling, and was shown off in Paris. It would make natural movements which got Calder to experiment with weight and balance of his mobiles. Then his engineering skills began to kick in, and he added little motors to his mobiles to make them move in different ways. He didn’t like how predictable the movements were so he decided he preferred the unpredictable movements of the wind and air better. Calder then began to move then from the ceiling to several mobile-stabile, which is just a standing mobile rather than a hanging mobile. In the 1930’s Calder mastered his style of mobiles lots of them curved that were planted on the ground and often looked like spiders. Along with his famous mobiles he also did sculpting with wire, sheet metal and other various materials. Most of them were three dimensional, playful, and looked like spidery lines and curves, similar to his mobiles. Calder was a very talented man, so his art just wasn’t wire and sculpting. Alexander Calder also was into making jewelry with wire in the 1930’s. His first jewelry was made for his mother as a birthday present! Calder made it with brass wire and string and lots of broken …show more content…
He made this in the year 1948. Finny Fish is made out of Rod, wire, glass fragments, sheet metal, brass, sardine can key, and paint. It is 21 by 61 inches long and tall. Finny Fish is obviously shaped like a fish. The fish is three dimensional and is hanging from a ceiling. Instead of the fish having regular scales, he has little hanging pieces of shinny bits of colorful glass that all connect with wire. The outline of the fish is a yellowish rod, while the tail is a burgundy colored rod with the shape of a V. Inside the tail is wire coming from the center and going at an angle outwards towards to corners of the tail. There are a lot of shapes in the scales of Finny fish. The scales are mostly broken pieces of glass, other pieces are shaped like circles or ovals. There are some scales shapes like a shark tooth or little swirly metal piece. If you look closely you can see near the tail that there is a sardine can key. The colors of the scales are brown, blue, and a transparent blue, see transparent green and silver from the metal. The scales are all formed with thin gold pieces of wire and are the shape of octagons. They are left open so that the pieces of class and other things can be hung from the middle of the open thin wire. The colors are all places in random places so there is no pattern for what shape or color goes where inside the fish shape. There is an empty circle for the eye and hanging from the