In Snow Flurry (design), how is the Design discussed?
The design, called a "cascade of white discs", is based on snowfall that artist Alexander Calder experienced from his home in Roxbury, Connecticut. It also bears similarities to Calder's 1946 Blizzard (Roxbury Flurry), which is considered a sister work. Another similar Calder mobile is the 1961 Nineteen White Discs. A New Statesman review says that the title Snow Flurry makes sense, but that on first sight it "looked ... like a great cabbage white, complete with proboscis, tendrils, aerials and those paned butterfly wings in every unadorned wire".The Modernist design comprises "a series of different sized, circular white discs delicately hanging from twig like wire branches, casting shadows ... and slowly turning". The mobiles are all "practically the same", using white painted sheet metal and dark metal wire. The sizes of the circular discs get smaller the further from the apex they are; the mobile is structured in a pyramid formation. As a whole, it can rotate a full 360 degrees, but the various branches are restricted as to how far they can turn independently. Described as "evocative" in a HuffPost review, the mobile is intended to move when breezes take it so "the flurries float like light snowflakes"; the movement and the shadows produced by the mobile add to the visual appeal.Talking about one of the Snow Flurry mobiles at the Beyeler Foundation in 2012, Calder's son said:
You'll see that the movement of the mobile is gesture, of course, it's gesture before abstract expressionism. It is all about gesture. If you start to study the assembly of the sculpture, you see the white disks, the different scales [...] And if you start to follow it, it's almost like conducting a piece of music, Calder is very related to music. He is very related to rhythm, all his obsession with jazz, the harmonies of life and life cycles, the spirals, there are lots of spirals in this work.
mobiles Modernist Alexander Calder New Statesman Roxbury, Connecticut mobile HuffPost Beyeler Foundation