LESLIE THORNTON

My earliest training was at Leeds College of Fine Art (1945-48) and the basic discipline of art training was life and particularly antiques drawing. My knowledge of sculpture was exhilarated by visits to the British Museum and actually handling very early Cycladic terracotta figures, simple and direct. It was an inspiring experience I could never forget.


I continued my studies in the British Museum while at the Royal College of Art (1949-51), where I became interested in European contemporary work in sculpture and painting, in addition to the emerging English metal sculpture.


Graduating from the Royal College in 1951, I started experimenting in linear drawing using steel and iron and moving freely between figurative and non-figurative. Figures enclosed within structures or emerging from assemblances, reflect the human predicament both playful and threatening.


I did not set up abstract sculpture in opposition to figurative. A piece of sculpture should be both. Figurative to the extent that it is a represenation of space. The spaces between and around objects and settings are almost as rich as the objects themselves.


Later in my career I became attracted to volume and mass using geometry and colour in welded structures in aluminium and stainless steel.


http://www.leslie-thornton.net/