This volume is the first full-length examination of the life and art of James Surls, one of America’s most important living sculptors and one of the most distinctive creative forces on the international art scene in the last several decades. In a seminal essay, art historian Mark Thistlethwaite discusses Surls’s personal history, beginning in East Texas and continuing today in the Colorado meadows. He describes the creation of Surls’s visual language of eyes, knives, diamonds, and flowers and the influences that have shaped him as an artist. In addition, the volume contains an interview with the artist, a tribute by his wife, Charmaine Locke, an artist herself, and commentary by Mark A. Roglán, curator of the exhibition In the Meadows: Recent Sculpture, Drawings, and Prints of James Surls (January 24-April 20, 2003). Sixty-two black-and-white and ninety-eight color illustrations, including images of early works, are featured in this catalogue, which showcases more than sixty pieces forming the core of the Meadows Museum exhibition.
What Readers Are Saying:
“James Surls taps into an archaic, woodland force that is real and powerful.” --Art in America
“Surls is an artist of remarkable power and mystery, part of a visionary, mystic tradition. His sculptures evoke a sense of ancient, present, and future worlds. He strips away the veneer of the world—its false innocence—to reveal a hidden content of anxiety, aggression, vulnerability, and fierceness.” --Sculpture Magazine
“His forms thrive on contradiction: complex as well as simple, erotic yet poetic, violent and serene. Their common denominator is the embodiment of what Surls refers to as his own ‘center’ and that of the cosmos.” --Sculpture Magazine
“His forms thrive on contradiction: complex as well as simple, erotic yet poetic, violent and serene. Their common denominator is the embodiment of what Surls refers to as his own ‘center’ and that of the cosmos.” --ARTnews
“Surls’ sculpture is infused, at the start, with a real sense of fright: the noonday demon lurking in the woodpile. Of course, Surls’ sense of the demonic is filtered through quite a lot of art history, from Miró to the ornery, meticulously crafted constructions of the late H.C. Westermann.” --Time Magazine
“Does it have content? Does it have soul? Ask those questions of art, and it will always tell you the truth.” --James Surls
“Surls has created a body of sculpture and drawing that is at once intellectually challenging and visually compelling and which stands alone among the profusion of twentieth century art styles.” --Sue Graze, Visions: James Surls, 1974-1984
“Surls’ work is explicitly visionary, recalling in some cases the direct carving and brut fabrication of German Expressionist sculpture and, at other times, intimate and obsessively whittled folk art objects.” --Michael Auping, Structure to Resemblance: Work by Eight American Sculptors