art medals, plaques and reliefs

The art medal, and therefore also the art of making medals, is a relatively little known area in the art world. This may be partly due to the fact that these works are mostly well hidden in safes or even in bank vaults and are therefore not on regular view. This method of storage is quite frequently used even for medals that do not have a particularly high value. Maybe, because many pieces cannot be obtained easily and their acquisition is frequently associated with some major effort or with a stroke of luck, this causes the collector to view these works with greater affection. Also, art medals are frequently of a smaller size than paintings, and can therefore appear less presentable. At the same time, the relative lack of respect given to this area of art may be caused by the many, mass produced, coin like objects that are typified by somewhat dreary, unimaginative images.

The opportunities of expressing oneself, offered by creating an art medal, a plaque or a small sculpture, of either cast or struck variety, are little known. This website was created with the aim to close this information gap a little bit and to stimulate your interest in the art medal. To this end, this website gives numerous links to other websites, which show struck or cast medals and plaques from a variety of areas.Commercial interest or activities are not connected with this site.

In case you are interested to learn about the possibilities for a private individual to create his/ her own founded (art?)medals, you can inform yourself with the help of a special example presented in this website - insofar this website is a really personal one. Creating art medals can be an interesting possibility to get a collection of medals, plaques and reliefs with motives which you really like and you are interested in:

This website shows a small selection of medals, plaques and reliefs made by Thomas Diehn ( Thomas K Diehn ) , D-38302 Wolfenbüttel. The images presented here are not only intended to give an impression of the authors works, but may be a stimulation for the visitor of this website to design and to manufacture his /her own medals or plaques - even without having studied arts.

The noncommercial designing of medals or plaques "just for fun" has surely some advantages : The absolute free choice of the motive - independent of the special wishes of a client, you have the freedom to neglect the mainstream and you can disregard any economic constraints and concessions in order to sell a certain number of medals. And you have the possibility to use more time than reasonable for the realization of a motive- and not to forget - you can make your own experiments without any special considerations concerning other than your own intentions.

It's is without any meaning, whether there is a consensus that the medals shown here are art medals or not in a "strict" sense- whatever this may be. The concept of art has become more and more dubious - in a wide range it seems to be a matter of definition and taste, dependent very much on the personality of the observer, dependent of the "Zeitgeist" and of certain economic interests combined with public promotion - certainly more a matter of the backbone than of the brain (see for instance the medal below "The fundamental discussion"): And the backbone can be influenced by many dubious factors - not only by economic interests (I have to admit however, that the same is valid "for the brain" nearly to the same extend).

The author only hopes in favour of the visitors of this website, that they will find it of some interest to look at the pictures and get some stimulations to think about their impressions and to look into other websites with the help of the links given, to see what medaillic art and art medals in general can be.

This may help to make artmedals, art plaques and art reliefs more known to a greater public- which is the intention of this strict noncommercial website. It seems to the webmaster that art reliefs are relatively disrespected in modern art- which is not really justified. Caring about art medals nowadays is a little bit like swimming against the (main)stream- but , as you certainly will know: Only the dead fish always swim with the stream.

At best the visitors will get by this website even a stimulation to create their own (art) medals.

The fundamental discussion ( 2002)

This website has deliberately been kept very plain and simple in order to show to art medal creators and collectors what can be achieved with a little effort and simple tools, so that they might possibly also be interested in presenting their work on the internet. I am hoping for the indulgence of the experienced website designer.

To see the larger versions of the images, just "click" at the small ones.

Images

more medals and plaques

Should you be interested in creating a link to your domain or homepage, dealing with a similar subject, after you have viewed this site, or if you would just like to contact me, please send your message to t.diehn@fh-wolfenbuettel.de

If you create your own medals and if you are interested in a presentation of your works in the Internet I could possibly help you or give you some advice- of course gratuitously.

Last change of this website :   25.02.2010
02/18/2010