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Ali Baudoin
Ali Baudoin has sustained a national
reputation in sculpture that spans more than 25 years. His sculpture
commissions dot the globe as a monumental public art and scores
of private commissions.
Born in Rochester, Minnesota,
Baudoin grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in a family of artists.
As a young man he received advice from printmaker Gustave Baumann
to pursue metal sculpture as a career. Ali holds a BFA degree
in sculpture from then University of New Mexico in Albuquerque,
and an MFA degree from the University of Washington in Seattle.
He studied at the Santa Fe Institute with Beverly Pepper and
Lee Millican. In order to understand Eastern art principles and
philosophies, he studied ikebana, and holds instructor's degree
from the Ichyio School of Ikebana in Tokyo, Japan.
Ali Baudoin is an artist with
an extraordinary range of abilities and interests. His background
in mythology, eastern aesthetics and Greek art serves his sensibility
as an artist. He is widely recognized as a genius metal worker.
His sensuous, evocative forms epitomize the classical line of
American Modernism. grace, simplicity, and monumentality are
expressed through the process of fabrication he has perfected.
Baudoin works in the tradition
of Direct Metal Sculpture, bringing life to the cold unyielding
material of stainless steel and bronze. In creating a sculpture,
a series of maquettes are created. When the maquette possesses
the mystery and tension that is required, enlargements are completed
and a pattern is created. At that point, the metal is sheared,
tacked, welded, ground, and buffed into a series of compound
and complex patterns of curves. He uses the "monocoque"
construction technique to achieve a wedding of strength with
the desired volume as his forms. Ali developed his use of "monocoque"
construction as a graduate student, studying the Boeing research
notes at the University of Washington Engineering Library. Baudoin
juxtaposes volume to shape, positive to negative forms bringing
a sense of the real to an almost alien grouping of forms.
Of his work, the artist says:
"Illusion is the magic that activates the interest in a
work of art. It allows us to slip from our realities into our
dreams. The space around the forms becomes a positive shape.
This compounds the tension and sculptural movement of the form."
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