The Kelpies of Falkirk. Scotland.
Photographed many times and many ways. I could only manage a snap shot in the middle of the day but it was interesting to hear of the controversy and varied opinions at the time these were sculptured and erected.
From 2014, a newspaper article ......"unveiled the latest misbegotten "masterpiece" of public art. It is big. It is bold. And it is rotten.
Glasgow's Andy Scott is the artist responsible for the Kelpies, a sculpture of colossal Clydesdale horse heads that tower 30 metres over Helix Park, Falkirk, near the M9 motorway. What for? For "regeneration", of course. It is claimed the £5m, 300-tonne sculptures will bring in £1.5m a year through guided tours – providing enough people mistake them for a worthwhile work of art.
Leonardo da Vinci once planned to build a colossal bronze horse, but he put imagination and vision into it. He never finished the work, and yet his exquisitely illustrated notes for this unrealised dream statue stimulate the mind. The Kelpies are merely banal and obvious.
It is unfair to compare any artist with Leonardo, but imposing your work on the landscape on this scale suggests you may be lacking in modesty. Scott's horses are neither well observed nor powerfully imagined – they are simply stale equine symbols. Without the precision and originality of Leonardo's obsessive studies of the anatomy and movement of the horse, or similar depictions of equine truth by the likes of Degas or the 18th-century artist George Stubbs, what's the point of portraying horses? The Kelpies is just a kitsch exercise in art "for the people", carefully stripped of difficulty, controversy and meaning..."
The Kelpies of Falkirk. Scotland.
Photographed many times and many ways. I could only manage a snap shot in the middle of the day but it was interesting to hear of the controversy and varied opinions at the time these were sculptured and erected.
From 2014, a newspaper article ......"unveiled the latest misbegotten "masterpiece" of public art. It is big. It is bold. And it is rotten.
Glasgow's Andy Scott is the artist responsible for the Kelpies, a sculpture of colossal Clydesdale horse heads that tower 30 metres over Helix Park, Falkirk, near the M9 motorway. What for? For "regeneration", of course. It is claimed the £5m, 300-tonne sculptures will bring in £1.5m a year through guided tours – providing enough people mistake them for a worthwhile work of art.
Leonardo da Vinci once planned to build a colossal bronze horse, but he put imagination and vision into it. He never finished the work, and yet his exquisitely illustrated notes for this unrealised dream statue stimulate the mind. The Kelpies are merely banal and obvious.
It is unfair to compare any artist with Leonardo, but imposing your work on the landscape on this scale suggests you may be lacking in modesty. Scott's horses are neither well observed nor powerfully imagined – they are simply stale equine symbols. Without the precision and originality of Leonardo's obsessive studies of the anatomy and movement of the horse, or similar depictions of equine truth by the likes of Degas or the 18th-century artist George Stubbs, what's the point of portraying horses? The Kelpies is just a kitsch exercise in art "for the people", carefully stripped of difficulty, controversy and meaning..."