Word: rickey
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...makes a moving thing," says Sculptor George Rickey, "one is always surprised, no matter how preconceived the design, at the movement itself. It seems to come from elsewhere. The pliers only made the arrival possible." In recent years, Rickey's pliers - along with welding torch and sheet-metal cutters - have produced whole families of curiously moving metal sculptures that gambol and gimbal in the wind, slicing segments of time like pendulums or spinning until the sunlight splinters into a spectral blur (see color...
...Turrets to Mobiles. It took Rickey a long time to realize that he could use movement itself, as another artist might use colors, to create art. As a boy, he was gifted with a strong mechanical bent, perhaps inherited from his grandfather, who was a clockmaker, and his father, a mechanical engineer who was sent to Scotland from South Bend, Ind., to manage the Singer sewing machine factory in Clydebank. Rickey also showed an early facility for drawing, and while at Balliol College, Oxford, he used to cross the street to sketch at the Ruskin School of Drawing...
Upon his return to the U.S., he continued painting while teaching history and art, including three years at the exclusive boys' school, Groton. In World War II, the Army Air Corps put Sergeant Rickey to teaching the use and maintenance of remote-controlled gun turrets in B-29 bombers. Surrounded by servos and selsyns, he made his first moving sculpture. Unlike Alexander Calder's mobiles, which evoke stems and leaves, Rickey's relate to wheels and other mechanical forms. The influence of the constructivists* on him has been strong...
Speed of Light. Today kinetic artists see their art as expressing not only the machine but also nature itself. Says Critic-Sculptor George Rickey: "Nature is rarely still. She follows natural laws: gravity, Newton's laws of motion, the traffic laws of topology." Gabo proclaimed: "Look at a ray of sun-the quietest of the silent strengths-it runs 300,000 kilometers in a second. Our starry sky -does anyone hear it?" But whether attuned to the music of the spheres or the metallic clanking of makeshift machines, artists by the score are now trying to make poetry...
...Branch Rickey might have become a practicing attorney-but he quit after trying one case. He might have been elected Governor of Missouri-but he chose to turn down the Republican nomination in 1940. From the day he played his first pickup game in the 1890s until he died last week at 83, baseball was his career, his hobby and his life. He never really rued his decision ("The game has given me joy"), but there were times when he wondered aloud, balancing a baseball in his palm: "This symbol? Is it worth a man's whole life...