the Soul of the Machine

The Mechanical Poetry of Arthur Ganson

When you and I use the word design, we use it to mean a complex in which the various components are ordered in respect one with the other. That's a design in contradistinction to randomness. There is a deliberate, deliberate placement and ordering. So I say then that human mind is gradually discovering. If you are looking at a plurality of generalized principles, there is a great A Priori Design of Universe. And the human mind has access to the rules and the design of Universe a little glimpse of it, because as we keep pulling the curtain up slightly we realize that there is a lot more than we don't know.

Buckminster Fuller

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Arthur Ganson is an artist-engineer with a great inventive and whimsical mind. Some of his sculptures remind me of Remedios Varo, a surrealist spanish painter that worked and lived in Mexico City when I was a young student. Her work influenced me very deeply. When I first saw her paintings and her sculptures (made with bird and reptile bones), art, and the poetry of art as a way of life opened before me as a beautiful and misterious way that I was determined to follow. As with any way, you sometimes get lost. When I found Arthur Ganson's sculptures it was like a wake up call to stand up and continue walking along that beautiful and misterious way of poetic discovery and exploration.

Remedios Varo (1913-1963)

If you would like to buy a DVD with most of Ganson's work and the process of creation, you can get it here
Read more about Arthur Ganson at this Smithsonian site.
If you are interested in the work of Remedios Varo (and you should be) there is an Amazon link to the right.