Every few years, I invite readers and colleagues to contribute guest columns in the series Technology and my Hobby/Passion. Over a hundred contributed in the last decade on their birding, charities, cooking, music, sports and every other passion, and how it keeps evolving with technology. Click here and scroll down to read them all.
This time it is Sam Noto,(Pic 1 - see appendix below for details of each) who I worked with at PwC in the early 90s. His Amazon bio says "Having spent much of his youth in the military and in business, Noto became a full-time art student in his early forties, earning his MFA in sculpture from the University of Maryland-College Park in 1995. Working directly with a wide range of media, a "persistent curiosity" about materials and techniques has directed him through an engaging stylistic trajectory over the past three decades, and continues to lead him toward new pathways of creative expression." Here he explains his passion for sculpting:
Sculpting is the second act in my career. Actually, more like my 7th or 8th. Let me explain. I first remember painting one of the by the number kits. I quite liked the experience plus I had a girlfriend, a painter. Somewhere there's a painting of me in a kimono. It was really, really cool. I always wanted to be an artist...but
...my family were doctors and lawyers and workers. ((Pic 2 on right.) My family wanted me to be either a doctor, a lawyer, a priest or an accountant. I didn't want to be a lawyer. I had no interest in that at all. Being a doctor was totally out of my realm of possibilities. With no family or friend to mentor me, I had to do it on my own and I did.
Accounting was not my favorite subject, but I toughed it out. I worked for two CPA firms. I got a job with the federal government. I was a systems accountant with the Fish and Wildlife Service in Washington, D.C. I was okay with it, so I did that until it was acceptable for me to change.
(Pic 3 on left) While I was at PwC I met Vinnie. Soon after I realized I was finished with the accounting profession, time to move on! However, I couldn't drop everything and become an artist. I couldn't be Gauguin who left his precious daughter. Gauguin was a stockbroker who wanted to turn his stockbroker coat in for an artist coat. That was something that was not going to happen to me. I'm not driven that way. I couldn't leave my wife and son. Family is first. The day my son graduated from Georgetown University and said he didn't want to pursue an advanced degree, I felt it was finally my time. My wife, Charleen had her own career and was doing very well, it was my turn.
I went over to the University of Maryland. I walked in the door and I signed up for whatever course they'd let me take, as a special student. I started taking sculpture courses. Maryland was the right place for me. It was truly a university. It was not a tech school. They didn't teach how to. I figured out how. I really was very, very comfortable with the theory part of art. Very comfortable, indeed, as a student, to follow the rigors of university system where I formed my own theories.
The “Courage to Create” by Rollo May was my bible. May taught me that limits are the source of creativity. I got through graduate school and I started driving around the Washington Beltway attending more courses and teaching others. I taught in high schools and colleges. As an adjunct professor you are a contractor and were paid by the number of courses you taught. I taught a bunch of Air Force guys. Actually, I wasn't teaching them how to sculpt, I was teaching them how to think, how to be an artist.
I did what came naturally and I had the best two and a half years of my life. I totally enjoyed graduate school. I was right where I needed to be.
My biggest fear of going into this was I didn't understand abstraction in a way that I could relate to. There are people who do abstraction intuitively. I had to approach it a different way because I had no background to absorb knowledge in this way.
The artist is a professional. It is a real profession just like being an engineer or an accountant. There's a common body of knowledge and there is an unique jargon. I understood that from my study of accounting.
Marcel Duchamp was a major influence on me because his words and thoughts resonated with me. I understood what he was doing and it made no sense at all. That's why I was attracted to it.
In art we have had a plethora of "isms". Impressionism was probably the most prominent “ism” because the artists wanted to brake all the molds from the past. They didn't want to follow formal paintings. Then surrealism came along, whose manifesto basically said, if it comes out of your mind, then it's real; it's art. Wow, heavy stuff!
All of a sudden, there was no more “isms”. Art was over as we understood it, new ideas came from everywhere. One of which was a movement in art called Dada, and Dada is anti-art. Thank you Marcel Duchamp!
I've considered four artists as being a major influence on 20th Century art: Duchamp, Jackson Pollock, Joseph Beuys and the latest one is Banksy, a street artist who is famous for being invisible. His latest piece, a painting sold for $1 million at auction. In the frame that he used to present the work he built in a shredder. As soon as he sold it, the purchaser turned it on, and shredded the painting, and now it's worth $2 million.
If you can figure that out, does that makes any sense? It shouldn’t, that's what I like about this new era. Tradition is gone, so now it's up to you. You are free to do whatever you want. I like the Dada influence.
I have evolved from one material to another; rawhide, copper, marble, steel. When I see material, I see a sculpture and see what I can do, what it might possibly become. The material becomes my muse.
I started with rawhide and stone. I was into stone carving. I really liked that. I was becoming reasonably proficient. However, I didn't want to go any further with it. Mixing stone and steel are when I began to really get into doing some significant work. I had to teach myself how to be a welder. I took every class I could find and I learned how to weld and after a while I began to teach others the basics. Recently I purchased a TIG welder, the latest technology. While exciting, I am still learning to use it.
I usually work in a series format. Most of the pieces shown here are from the Anxiety series which was on display at the American University Museum Sculpture Garden from September 2014 to March 2015.
(Pic 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 below)
My friend, Dr.Claudia Rousseau wrote a book on my work titled Persistent Curiosity. She wrote the following about the Anxiety series.
"Looking and handling these pieces, I began to feel that the constructions I was making seemed to suggest anxieties in abstract form. Some connote nightmares (Bed, What is in Your Closet?) while others suggest betrayal (Whose Side Are You On?) and/or frustration (But I'm From New York, Blue Bird Can't Sing). Whose Side Are You On is all about balance—a healthy respect of its weight is required here—about being edgy but somehow centered. In a few of these works Noto has added color as an active element; some are just rusted steel. The "Anxiety" series closes with Lotus 2. The piece, whose curves nevertheless seem somewhat harsh with their textured and rusted surfaces. They seem to suggest that inner balance only comes with work, and perhaps through it."
The prime work is called "Anxiety". I was examining my own anxieties over a lifetime. When I began, it was about Catholicism and religion that a young boy had to deal with, I made the Immaculate Conception and all these symbols of Catholicism that I lived with. I went to a parochial school, so we got heaven and hell beat into us every day. I rebelled against it all and did all these sculptures about all those things that we were told that we had to revere. I didn't make fun of them. I just made my impression of them as they emerged out of the material.
I usually don't make anything from scratch. I just use the shapes the material comes in from the scrap yard. For example, the copper started with scrap from a roof of a historic building that burned down. The copper roof was salvaged and given to artists. I picked up a quite a bit of it, but it sat in my studio for ten years. I try to select metal from scrap yards and took five loads along with the copper as well as iron in my pickup truck and I brought it back to the studio. I made eight piles. Each pile became a sculpture. I didn't know what it was going to be, so for each pile, I applied the principles of art while assembling the scrap. I used a lot of arches and the circles. I used some straight lines, but not too many. Each sculpture developed on its own. Many times, I didn't know what it was until I was finished and sometimes that took me another year or so to figure out.
That in a nutshell is my last 25 years or so. Here is one of my still unfinished works (Pic 11):
If you would like to learn more about my work, my book is available on Amazon. Or if you find yourself in Washington, DC, I will be happy to give you a tour of my studio. Fair warning, as Vinnie will tell you I can talk for hours about my passion!
Appendix - Exhibits by titles, date, material and size
The Analyst Cam series
As we have moved to virtual vendor briefings I get invited to in my analyst role, I have increasingly been excerpting short segments (with permission from vendors), as part of my Analyst Cam series.
Here are some so far:
Apple iPhone 12 - the virtual launch event
Rimini Street - the "secret sauce"
Unit4 ERPx - design principles and components of the next gen product
Zoho Workplace - Collaboration suite and a vertical application for construction industry
Rimini Street - Survey of PeopleSoft customers
Neeley Business School, TCU - Board of Advisors meeting - acrobatics rapidly moving away from campus to online courses, diversity etc.
Plex - Customer dataset showing impact of COVID-19 on manufacturing and the bounce back in N. America since
Aternity Digital Experience Management
Workfront analyst briefing
Utmost Total Workforce Management
Sidetrade ML applied to customer invoices and collections
Rootstock low code briefing
Workfront Scenario Planning
October 01, 2020 in Industry Commentary | Permalink | Comments (0)