This research is focused on Tony Cragg, a British sculptor born in Liverpool and his incredibly unusual abstract works. He was born in 1949, so he is currently in his early 60s and still actively making sculptures. He first studied art on the foundation course at the Gloucestershire College of Art and Design, Cheltenham and then at the Wimbledon School of Art. During that period he was taught by Roger Ackling, who is also a sculptor that makes fascinating abstract sculptures that share a common style. Roger Acking introduced Cragg to Richard Long and Bill Woodrow, who are also advanced sculptors.
He has been influenced and motivated by these sculptors but managed to create an entirely different style than the ones he has been exposed to. His style of sculpture has a touch of classical and modernism, making it unique and have a completely different appeal than what sculpture is usually seen as. Cragg is very visual, he looks in depth at everything and from that brings his inspiration for his sculptures. His works start off as simple preliminary drawings, and through that he figures out the design to make the real project.
In Craggs’ early years he made sculptures using simple techniques such as stacking, splitting, and crushing. In 1978 he collected discarded plastic fragments and arranged them into color categories. Shortly after this he made works on the floor and wall reliefs, which formed images. Then his style switched over to being more modernized in his recent works, but they all still has a distinctive look to it that doesn’t completely categorize it in just the modern. The basis of his work was mainly through abstract observation, to simplify the images that he was seeing to their very basic structure and function.
He uses a variety of different materials which consist of stone, clay, bronze, glass, different synthetic materials like polystyrene, carbon- or glass-fiber. His sensitivity to different materials is and has been the starting point for his work. To a great extent, his choice of material has determined the form, which a sculpture has taken on. I discovered that the material he has chosen for his works gives a wonderful sense of texture that defines the form Cragg is trying to depict very well. The material of his sculptures also exhorts an emotion that is expressed randomly when viewed at different angles.
The focus of my research is getting to understand what Craggs style of sculpture really is in the perspective of the art world. Many people fail to see the true value of abstract art and sculpture simply because it doesn’t have that illusionary effect or that it isn’t recognizable as anything we see in reality. Unfortunately I was one of them. I’ve been pushing my artistic abilities to get the realism I see in life into my artworks, and when I saw abstract sculptures or abstract art work in general it angered me. I didn’t like knowing that these people made something so simple and that is fascinating many people when I bang my head on the desk to make the most complicated thing I can see look like a photograph or a real figure in all its presences just to receive the same or less amount of appreciation. However this ignorance isn’t what should be defining ‘Art’. Art is what people see and how they see it, weather it is something recognizable or not and that is what I aim to present in my research.
In conclusion, I’ve had an entirely different understanding of art and all its forms through my researching, and I can say with full confidence that I’ve made an incredible discovery in recognizing and appreciating them. It opened a whole new door for me and my work and I feel a great amount of influence from viewing abstract work now than I ever did in the past. I do believe that Tony Craggs artwork has intrigued me especially because there is some complexities present even in his modern sculptures that exhibit basic shapes and that was what lured me to his ever so varied works. Some of his works I did recognize as him trying to be illusionistic much to my understanding. But since he is an artist of many talents, I stumbled across his not so complex abstract works and I was amazed at what I could see after being able to understand his sculptures. I could see what he saw when he was making them, and I want to thank him for being an enormous inspiration of the abstract style and making me see what art can really be. 
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