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A Pig from my Past

Pigs on the Wing

And any fool knows a dog needs a home,
A shelter from pigs on the wing.
An ode to Scott McNeil, the builder of the Pink Floyd Pig balloon. A gentle sweet fellow whom I had the pleasure of working with at Macy's Parade studio for a number of years before AIDS and time took him too soon.

Return to Kong

Cragged ivory, chipped and scathed emerges from gums both shrinking and swollen  to divinely dapple divided luminance upon engorged papillae or,... dig the shadows across the tongue. In this return to a long waiting model, I've changed it quite a bit for 3d print out. In the same way that Photoshop's paint is forever wet on demand, sculptures of a digital nature are forever pliant. In order to achieve a 9 inch tall print out, the mesh required being broken into 2 parts. A 4 inch base will be printed seperately and effectively raise the print out to more than a foot in height.

I'm going to be doing a lot of this in my quest to find the outer limits of what the Makerbot can do in the way creating larger models.

Office/Bed Room

In an earlier post about Sonia's loft, I wrote about the psychological damage that can be wrought by making your child sleep in something other than a bedroom and, what that might do to her self esteem. I'm sure that in many situations these may be seriously legitimate concerns but, to be honest, I was just having some tongue in cheek fun. I am reminded of a man I knew. His quandary was about; weather or not to circumcise his new born son. On one hand, he felt that at it's core, circumcision was a barbaric primitive ritual of mutilation designed more to be a mark or a branding to identify and differentiate their tribes of peeps and, in so doing, hopefully remain unadulterated by those who chose to believe something different. How well has that worked? He further went on to scoff over the health benefits of circumcision as it was a practice begun more than 5,000 years before any true, evidential science or real medical knowledge existed on this planet. On the other hand, he earnestly worried about the possibilities of his son being irreparably screwed up by identity crisis issues as he grew older...Why doesn't my penis look like dad's. It must be an impossible thing to explain to a two year old and how will it manifest it's self when puberty rears its throbbing head? Though the comparative of primitive male genital alteration(think sharp stones or, sea shells when they began doing this) and making your kid sleep in the kitchen may seem on the opposite end of the parenting spectrum, there are clear parallels. As for those concerns, I had none as in building Sonia's loft, I had created for her a baby bear version of the papa bear configuration. She was delighted.



Among the many reasons I have for loving my apartment, it's consistent saving grace has been its ceiling height. Though the apartments plan is just 400 square feet, by it's ceiling height it has a 600 square foot apartment's equivalent of cubic foot volume. Fully realizing its value, I've tried tried to exploit it where ever I could. As a result, objects and art work rise to almost every wall's tallest dimension.
When I first took the apartment the loft existed as an opened platform that was strangely an inch and a half shy of being wide enough for a queen size mattress. Fixing that issue of width was as easy as an extra 2"x4" upon which I screwed a length of 2' plywood shelving so as to create the blind. The blind not only serves to prevent me from rolling out of  bed to the certain probabilities of being killed or crippled, it also gave me a perfect wall to hang the Ichthyosaur fossil. Some might feel that the visual pun of sleeping with the fishes, a la Luca Brasi may be a bit on the ominous side of macabre but, to sleep like the dead is only meant to describe a deep and undisturbed slumber. And, perhaps one needs to remember, the Ichthyosaur isn't really a fish.



Access to my loft is by what an old girl friend coined as the sladder (part stair, part ladder). I pried it from the wall to which it was attached and moved it a foot further toward the center of the room so as to create an extra 2 square feet of platform. In a small space those couple of square feet may often represent the difference between awkward and comfortable. Moving the sladder did eat 2 square feet of floor but it gave me an extra 10 cubic feet of storage. That may not sound like a hell of a lot for all of the effort but, in a tiny pad with only one real closet, it's a hallelujah moment. The trade off was a no brainer, 2 wins to one loss.
My office is in what was once a dressing area and closet. My desks are made out of same re-purposed shelving as Sonia's. Beneath my computer, the floor is a block of stone baring evidence that in its earliest iteration, I would be sitting in front of where the stove once was.

About my bones; I am not ghoul. I inherited these bones from my dad. He had a real appreciation for their shapes and nuances. Having studied anatomy I loved them as well. I find the divergence of their morphologies stunning. I think that most figurative sculptors have a bone thing going on. In fact one of Henry Moore's  most prized and inspirational objects was an elephant's skull. The prize of this fleet is the human skull. My dad told me that she was 1,500 years old but, didn't know where she came form. She lived to be approximately 28 years old and remarkably has all of her teeth. Before she died she went blind. Evidence of this is found in a large convex deformation on the left side of the occipital plate. The brain tumor that would eventually kill her blinded her first by its origin in the part of the brain reserved for vision. My dad used to call her Alice. I have no idea why? Who was Alice? What did the name mean to him? Was she a lost love? Was she a woman for whom he had affection or, loathing? Alive or lost, another mystery about my dad, another thing that I'll never know.
 If you possess an ostio-intrigue or are bent to the point of paleo-curiosity, most of my specimens can be found for surprisingly reasonable prices at uptown N.Y.C.'s Maxilla Mandible, just north of the American Museum of Natural History or, down town at Evolution. They are both absolutely fascinating stores.

Interestingly, for all of the objects that this small room holds, very little is actually on the floor, 2 chairs(one carved from an Indonesian Teak root ball), a dresser and the space beneath my desk tops which is mostly used as storage for guitar cases.

Jeff Koons Rabbit Experiments

Above, Makerbot prints of Zbrush model

I've been studying a lot of my favorite modern masters lately, Pablo Picasso, Joan Miro, Jean Arp and Constantin Brancusi. In so doing, I found my way to Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst and Paul McCarthy. Iconoclasts, all. In this study of Jeff Koons Rabbit I've found parallels between all of the above mentioned in terms of surface development, rhythm, volumes and underlying order. In the deformations, I am not only finding basic abstractions through twisting both acute and gentle velocities but, re-contextualize the object from what it is at it's core, a manifestation of Marcel Duchamp's "ready made" and bringing it to a more seemingly organic realm. As the reflections of Jeff and a collage of his painting swirl within the surfaces, their subjects too are trans-morphed into something that to me seems more of a chaotic organic dance out of a static origin. Of course, this effect is achieved though a very anti chaotic geometric order. Perhaps it's needless to say that this is a project that took on a life of it's own. Jeff Koon's Rabbit has somehow become one of the great art icons of my generation, Ironically, it's derived from among the cheapest of Chinese Mylar trinkets. Despite that, it has an industrial art deco sleekness to it that is executed with a Rolls Royce fit and finish.

It started as a simple modeling exercise but, as I created the reflections it began to occur to me that this might yield a new take on portraiture. For another video in which Jeff slides from one shape's surface to another within his notorious master work, please click HERE

Zbrush vs Paper Mache', Mr. Peanut

Rather than re-extol the virtues of Zbrush, I'll let the pictures tell that bit of the tale. When I first started with the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade Studio, all large sculpture was done in paper mache' and covered in fiberglass. The paper mache' was formed over rolled tissue that was tucked into chicken wire which in turn had been formed over a plywood or steel armature. In Mr. Peanuts case the armature was both plywood and steel. The hat was entirely plywood. I love the challenge of building armatures not only for the romance of welding but, more because armatures embody all of the most elemental geometry that will determine the liveliness of the piece. On the other hand, shaping chicken wire will turn your mitts into hamburger meat. Once done with the wire it's time to turn your tattered finger tips to the paper mache'. First, you roll large sheets of packing tissue into tubes which get tucked into the chicken wire. The tissue had two purposes it seemed. The first was to pad the form while providing and absorbent surface that is locked into the chicken wire, acting as a stable substraight for the brown paper layers. I believe that the second purpose was to efficiently absorb the blood as you are punctured by the tucking process more times than you'd be able to count. I can assure you that if any of these sculptures still exist, much genetic evidence may be found therein. Next, there is the brown paper stage. 18"x 24" sheets of thin brown tempered paper with a longitudinal grain are folded 8 time to create a 16 ply strip. So many strips are required in this process that when it came to folding time, the entire shop staff would be employed for this task so as to do 20 hrs. of folding in 1 hour. Time to mix the paste! The studio would stock 35 gallon drums of wall paper paste. Derived from wheat, it is directly related to what folks whom are my age may remember as preschool paste. To a young palette it was yummy but for some reason the teacher always discouraged our eating it. The paste would be paddle stirred with an electric drill in a bucket with water until it attained a smooth, whitish, semi translucent, sticky slurry. If that description evokes visions of industrial scale animal husbandry, then you are imagining correctly, buckets of the stuff, sloshing and spilling, getting all over every thing, up to your elbows, on your face, in your hair. Please remember, we're talking about glue. The buckets would be placed into custom built stands that would accommodate both them and and a box of the folded brown paper strips. One at a time, the strips would be dunked into the buckets of paste. Excess paste would be removed from the strips by pulling them through you your fore and middle finger. Yes, paper cuts between my fingers were often involved. For Mr. Peanut, we had run out of our typical paste and resorted to an alternative brand just to get the project started. For reasons unbeknownst it stank like spoiled milk or, more accurately, infant's vomit. So, there I am, up to my elbows in what seems like bull seamen mixed with baby puke, symmetrically applying the brown sticky strips in a chris crossed configuration, creating herring bone patterns that bare great resemblance to wooden parquet floors. As the glue dries, the brown paper shrinks along it's grain and pulls itself tightly and smoothly over the shapes. When the paper mache' is completed it is time for fiberglass. That's a process I'll describe in another post in the near future.

Tragically, this is the only shot that I have of the elephant. It is easily one of the coolest things that I've built and without question the most complex armature that I'd ever welded together. It was 20' long, 16' wide from one outer tip of the ear to the other and 16' tall. On the deck and it's platform it rose to 23'. It's skin textures were studied and fastidious, it's gestures sublime. It took me 3 months of acutely focused energy and attention to complete.

Crocodile Sans Dentada

This 1/12th scale model was 32" long. The finished sculpture derived from it was 32' long. The jaw alone was 8' in length and hydraulically actuated. I designed and sculpted this model for the Animal Planet float. As time was short and the design scope of this float was very large, I built 2 identical steel armatures for the crocodile. The first armature was meant to serve for the clay model. The second armature was to serve as the blue print for the full sized crocodile's internal steel frame. In that, the full sized armature and the clay model would be finish within the same time frame. In keeping with that race with the metal shop on the assembly floor, certain details on the model  were deemed unnecessary. As the scales would be a mirrored detail, the model has scales only on one side of it's body. I had enough photographic reference to know exactly how the teeth would lay out, sculpting them into the model would have been a fussy, time consuming detail, hens their deletion. In the end, the clay model and the full sized armature clad in foam blocks and ready for carving were completed at the same time.

Snoopy to Abstraction

This post is dedicated to a series of extremely abstract images derived solely from this very silly Snoopy sculpt, shot in natural light. Much of the work that I've done though out the entirety of my career has been commercial in nature, a lot of cartoony sort of stuff but, that is not to say compromised sort of stuff. It has long been my feeling that a shape is a shape, regardless of what part it may play in the whole or, for that matter, what the whole may in fact be. All shapes have similar needs and properties. They all concern surfaces and parameters. As they become more complex, they bend to their transitions and relationships, regardless of their infinite applications. I take great pride in how I handle my shapes. To paraphrase Michelangelo: Shapes are the lantern by which all images exist. Above and beyond that, for me, it’s about poetry and the harmony of numbers singing their volumes as they dance, roll, collide and merge. Beyond our finger tips,They are born in our eyes as light traverses every bump and valley, every crease and swell, every compounded curve or, flatted plane. Within the human form and it’s situations, there are enough shapes to build a universe. I am able to speak through my art because the nature of shapes has been my language.

For more on this series, please click HERE

Where The Wild Things Are, a signed first edition

A tale of a wonderful art odyssey with one of the most influential artists all time and, how this rare and valuable artifact came to be. For more, click HERE

This last video brought tears to my eyes not because he’s gone but, because it brought me back to him and the experience of having worked with him and our funny phone calls after I had left Macy’s.
To have worked in the presence of his mighty working spirit is something that changed me as an artist forever. I’ve had the opportunity to have worked with many brilliant and historically significant artists through out my career some, perhaps genius.

Maurice was on a different level all together. He possessed a brutal clarity between his  aesthetic sensibilities and his core convictions but, through that brutality stood an exquisite balance of refinement and naked honesty. He was his work, more so than any artist I would ever meet.
Maurice was a beauty, a magnificent creature, the likes of which humanity has known but a handful of times.

He left me with an experience that I will hold among my highest till it’s my turn for time to take me.