From the Rockwell Museum's Website:
'Board and staff of the Rockwell Museum of Western Art are pleased to announce that a new outdoor art sculpture has been installed for public display near the Museum. Jack Knife, a nearly five foot tall bronze sculpture, features an iconic cowboy on a bucking horse. This bronze sculpture is on display in Buechner Park, green space created by Corning Incorporated located kitty-corner to the Rockwell Museum at the intersection of Denison Parkway and Cedar Street. Buechner Park is named in memory of the late Thomas S. Buechner, an acclaimed artist, founding director of The Corning Museum of Glass and longtime supporter of the Rockwell Museum of Western Art.
Bronze casts of this sculpture, Jack Knife, also stand front and center in the heart of the Scottsdale, Ariz., arts district, as well as the grounds of the Tucson Museum of Art.
Nationally recognized master artist, Ed Mell, is from Arizona and created the award-winning monumental sculpture, Jack Knife, in 1993.
"Jack Knife has a reverence for the Old West. It is not traditional, but yet it has a traditional theme. The angularity accelerates the power and energy of the rider and horse, more than accurate depiction," Mell said.
Specs:
Ed Mell, (American, born 1942), Jack Knife, 1993, bronze, edition of 12, 54 x 44 x 32 inches.
Ed Mell, (American, born 1942), Jack Knife,
1993, bronze, edition of 12, 54 x 44 x 32 inches.
The Work of Art
Though best known as a painter, Mell is equally respected as a sculptor. Jack Knife, an award-winning composition first conceived in 1993, is his most iconic three-dimensional work. Currently, Mell's famous cowboy and bucking bronco stands front and center in the heart of the Scottsdale, AZ, arts district. A second monumental cast graces the grounds of the Tucson Museum of Art. The present cast, offered by Owings Gallery, Santa Fe, N.M., is the last of 12 full-size bronze casts to be offered for sale; the other 11 casts are held in various private and public collections.
While any artist depicting a cowboy on a bucking horse owes an artistic debt to Frederic Remington's Bronco Buster, Jack Knife draws its visual power less from comparisons to the past, and more from the energy of the present moment. It captures the dilemma of the modern West - a place of unlimited opportunity, nevertheless constrained by limited natural resources and a fragile ecosystem. While Remington challenged the limits of bronze to suggest the power and skill needed to subdue a fierce bronco, Mell challenges the limits of abstraction. Jack Knife, light on the kind of realistic detail so important to Remington's bronzes, instead focuses on the essence of the man versus nature struggle. The energy of the struggle - metaphorically, the struggle to "tame" and settle the West - is constrained by the solidity of the bronze. The angular planes of the sculpture, which owe much to Mell's painting style, set against the sky suggest a union of the past and present, of abstraction and reality, of the old West and the new.
For Mell, the beauty of nature is often so overwhelming that it cannot be fully capture realistically. "I work from nature," says Mell, "and sometimes I push it a little further. Seeing the real thing has much more impact than a photographic representation of nature, so in order to duplicate nature, I like to push it a little further and bring back some of the impact that nature has in real life." It is this need to abstract, to translate nature into something more essential and elemental, which makes Mell's work so powerful and iconic.'
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