ADRIAN LANDON

"Grand Cheval 2"

"I grew up in New York City and attended the Lycee Francais de New York, thus experiencing a doubly international upbringing, and have always had a passion for drawing things, taking pictures, designing, dreaming.  After a year of Industrial Design at the Academy of Art in San Francisco and a year of traveling in the west and south-west United States, I returned to the city in April 2009 and decided to learn the craft of welding and forging.  Fortunately, a friend recommended to me a sort of artistic haven in the heart of New York: The Arts Students League, the place where I found much more than I expected and was able to keep and nourish my artistic freedom.

I owe a large part of my inspiration to my father, a violin maker since the age of fifteen, and like his father and grandfather, an expert horseman.  Therefore I had the privilege of growing up in a violin shop and on horse farms, always surrounded by beautiful instruments with intriguing shapes, classical music, and incredibly powerful and majestic animals.  I am now learning the trade of violin making myself and am also an expert horseman.

My first figurative metal piece was a life-size horse head, which at the time was a great challenge.  After that I made a few small horses and at one point decided to go all the way and make a whole life-size horse.  I really didn’t know what I was getting myself into, and I was starting to take up all the space of the metal sculpture studio of The Art Student’s League on 57th Street.  It came to the point where I didn’t have the room to finish it and one solution presented itself: the Vytlacil campus of The Art Student’s League in upstate New York, which has much more space and can accommodate large pieces.

Ever since then I’ve been working there.  I have been finding it more and more difficult to work in a smaller scale, and now I want to make a whole herd of horses.  This is my second life-size horse, which I decided to give more movement than the first. 

All my sculpture which I use sheet metal for are hand forged with anvil and hammer.  All of the pieces of metal that make up the sculpture are cut and formed from flat sheets, an extremely labor-intensive process."