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Sculpture by Gerola (continued)
Steel is a curious medium, as confrontational as it is utilitarian. With it they build bicycles, bridges, jetliners and vehicles for commerce and communication, as well as weapons to destroy. There a literal shortage of it nationwide, after exporting all scrap to foreign smelters. Steel abused or misused is ghastly. Don knows this better than most. His stepfather and mentor was the Chief Engineer of Materials for the fallen World Trade Center. Better to beat sharp swords into rusty plowshares. Working in wood or textiles is much easier than the same material used to cut both, only up to 3" thick. But how do you imbue steel with whimsy? Takes a lot of imagination and skill, a multidisciplinary background, and a couple decades of your life.
Creating sculpture is an esoteric and gritty enterprise. You almost never see a piece being made, still jagged from months of cutting, grinding and welding, before its surface is painted or treated to pay homage to its intended site. Unlike Duchamps' first kinetic almost a century ago, not one piece of a Gerola sculpture is from "found" material. Each piece is individually CAD drawn, extravagantly cut from native, virgin hot rolled plate, then painstakingly fitted and welded.
Each piece arrives through his "process", as he calls it. They all start as an inspiration from nature, whether horses galloping, human limbs exercising, meandering curves of a river, organic forms of craning bird necks or flowing grasses, or sinuously twisting tree branches and roots. Some of his best forms resemble creatures, grasses or trees stretching from earth to embrace sky. Subconsciously, he fuses these into a singular manifestation, which resurfaces as a two dimensional drawing.
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