Metal never looked so good.
Associate Professor of Art, Constance DeJong, has given metal its glory day in a new book about her and her work titled Metal. DeJong takes cold, hard metal to a new place where the utilitarian object becomes not only fine art, but emotion evoking, eye-catching, stunning art.
"Try not to think about anything," DeJong said. "Look at the work, and let your eye go over it. Open your heart to it. When you look at a sunset you don't try to figure it out."
Although figuring DeJong's art out is not an option, she literately figured out her shapes with mathematical equations. She began using the formulas to distance herself from her pieces, to get away form her limited ideas about form, she said.
"You have a chance of coming up with a form that is bigger than you are," she said. "In the universe, math is the cosmological language."
The process of finding the form seems complicated, still the outcome is very simple. DeJong said she doesn't find her work to be minimalistic. It reflects human emotion in a way that makes it more reductive in nature, more engaging.
Get content from The Daily Lobo delivered to your inbox
DeJong admits metal in itself can be intimidating, but she finds the precision metal offers along with its pliability to have instinctually drawn her in.
It's clear that DeJong found her calling. Her work draws the viewer into her world where metal bends and twists with no problem at all, takes on shapes that only exist in the imagination and can make a person understand exactly what beauty feels like.
She has been called a poet of steel and copper, of stain and patina, and nothing could be closer to the truth.
As for the book itself, it only mirrors the exquisiteness of DeJong's work. The book's author, Arden Reed, has a near- personal attachment to the artist and he has been writing about her art since 1980.
"I love the way Arden writes," DeJong said. "It's more like a story than anything else, and it's engaging for that reason."
The reproductions of the works are stunning and make the viewer feel like they are right there with the piece. After Reed's story of DeJong's work, an interview done by the late UNM professor Gus Blaisdell really lets the reader meet DeJong.
As far as her teaching methods go, DeJong's believes her students should find what they like to do, and do it. It is clear she has done the same. Her affection for her work radiates onto whoever views it and instills the same feelings in them. This body of work, and this book specifically, are indeed a labor of love.
