Dolphin Sofa

This first image is the Zbrush model rendered with Keyshot. The following 4 images show the 10"long Shapeways SLS 3d print. As you can see, it's a remarkably true to the model. It does however, have a bit of a tooth to it. Shapeways offers this material polished in a tumbler but, that process is reserved for print outs that are 200mm (about 7.5") or, less. 

 Sofas and couches come in all shapes and size but, this was a new one for me. I was contacted by Eric Winston, owner of SFDS, a fantastic, 15,000 square foot scene fabrication/design studio in the heart of Greenpoint Brooklyn. Eric needed among some other wonderful elements, a 10’ long, hand carved dolphin sofa for the Marriott Vacation Club in Newport Coast CA. I jumped at the chance. I’d been wanting to do a crazy sofa for as long as I could remember. I’ve done all sorts of crazy chairs, tables, cabinets and beds for as long as I’ve been sculpting but, in all of the that time, never a sofa. Eric cleared a huge room for me to sculpt it in. His excellent fabrication staff built a hotwire table for me from no more than one of my napkin sketches and boom, it began.

Half way into the carve, Eric's studio was visited by Mario Marsicano from Jellio. I've worked with Jellio on a number of interesting projects. I knew that Eric did projects with Jellio but, I didn't know that the sofa was one of them. There were so many diverse projects going on in the studio at the time, 2 major stage sets, a big job for instagram, giant wooden dinosaur assemblies, all sorts of different furniture designs, as far as I knew I was sculpting Eric and the Marriott. Finding out that this was for Jellio once my hands were already deeply into it was an additional bonus. For more with Jellio, click on the following links.
Gummi King
Ice Cream That You Can Sit On
King Kong

Eric's 5 year old angel, Ella.

 The above images show the sofa from various angles, carved, filled and ready for hard coating. The project progressed at a very fast rate due in largest part to my having figured out the sculpture in Zbrush. I have always done models in the past for larger sculpts. The luxury of doing models in Zbrush, as opposed to a more traditional clay approach is that you end up with a model that is not only more easily editable but, all of my build elevations were derived from it as well. The elevations were simply projected onto the block from different sides and the sculpture was immediately roughed out, top to bottom, side to side, front to back.

An astute eye may notice that the sofa against the grid only measures 9'. In order to increase the seating area, during the projection, the length of the sofa would be stretched to 10'. As a result, everything changed a bit but, all for the better. In a very long career, this was well worth the wait. In the wonderful world of fanciful furniture, this is an example as fabulously fun as you could hope to fathomably find.

La Bocca Della Verita Green Man Hybrid

My Father had a propensity for collecting odd artifacts and nick nacks, some extremely fine, some extremely not. Among his marvelous menageries was a reproduction of a Green Man keystone. He told me that it was the mouth of truth and if a person put their hand in it's mouth and told a lie, the sculpture would bite off the hand. It was an intriguing tale that made an intriguing object more intriguing. Years later, I decided to make a larger version that would take up a greater piece of wall and perhaps imbued with a greater capacity to detect bigger lies. The piece pictured here is 4 feet tall, carved from Styrofoam and coated with joint compound.

As it turned out, a number of cities during the middle ages employed similar carved quasi contraptions to rat out wrong doing and doers. It was a cowardly snitchy thing, a means by which accusations could be cast anonymously to the authorities. I'm sure that this thing must have screwed up the lives of many innocently accused while protecting the anonymity of many atrocious liers. Its quite the twist on its original intention.

When Leonardo was a very young man, he fell prey to such a device. Some one employed a similar mouth to accuse him of consorting with a younger male prostitute. Florence was reputed for being pretty gay back then. It's no big wonder. There are penises everywhere you look. One might call the town penis proud with its plethera of pollished peckers poised for presentaion. Gay or straight matters not, the fact is that Florence is littered with statues of fully frontal male nudes. Be that as it may, being found gay back then was often punishable by death. In the end Leonardo was vindicated though the allegation was probably true. It makes me shutter to think that the world could have been deprived of one of the greatest minds by such an ultimately stupid thing.

At the time that I had carved this, I had never seen Roman Holiday with Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn, a movie by which the Bocca Della Verita became most famous. In my post carving research I've found that it was not a keystone but, rather, most probably first intended as a manhole cover.

There is more. To learn the legend further and, find out how the stone's power came to pass, please click HERE

Guitar Stand

Once upon a time, I bought a guitar believing that I might actually be able to learn how to play it. I didn't but, I was so enamored of it's shape that I was compelled to carve the  lively, funky stand seen in this photo. Years went by. A dear friend asked if I would like to give learning guitar a try once more. I jumped at his kind offer and became addicted. Learning guitar introduced me to multitudes of musicians and many aspects of my life have been forever transformed in the process. If it were not for this stand, carved at a time when I didn't know a note, my life would be very different.

Chinese Dragon

The Chinese Dragon pictured here is easily the largest single foam carving that I'd ever had my hands in. It was created for the Fun Town Splash Town amusement park in Sacco Maine. I based the design on a China town bit of kitche, a small, resin dragon statuette with exceptionally good details. The back was perfectly arched so as to serve as a portal through which park goers would enter the attraction. Aptly named Dragon's Descent,  you're strapped into it's specialized seats and harness system and the 220' tall tower slowly begins carrying you aloft to one of the highest and most majestic panaramas in all of Maine, before brutally hurtling you downward at speeds greater than the gravitational pull of the earth could achieve without the colossal, maniacal mechanical assistance of this terrifying towers sadistically concocted inner workings. I cut off the statuette's head and turned it inward to face the guests whom would be passing under it's belly. Once the model had been modified, it was photographed and 1/12 scale drawings were made from those photos. The drawing were then projected onto 3/4" plywood. The shapes would be cut from the plywood and the plywood was scabbed together and joined by flanged steel pipes to serve as 2' wide hollow, structural core, upon which would be mounted a total of 36 2' x 2' x 8' EPS foam blocks for carving. The dragon was so large that it had to be designed in 4 sections that would be craned together on site. In fact, it required 2  40' flat bed trailers to safely transport its separated components to the park. The full sculpture would be 18.5' tall, 32' long and 12' wide. It's eyes and throat glowed crimson red with inner lamps as smoke would billow out of it's nostrils and mouth via Rosco smoke machines and an inventive PVC plumbing system. The dragon also had a sound box with a proximity switch inside of it, allowing the dragon to growl as guests approached. A lavish Chinese garden was planted as the attraction's setting to complete the visual spectacle.

This story wouldn't be complete without a word on Maine lobster. Everything that you've heard is true. It is orgasmic. We were tied to the installation for the better part of that week and enjoyed lobster rolls every day for lunch. There was simply nothing better. On our last day we went to a local lobster shack right on the water. The lobster was so fresh that we had speculated that it was being pulled in fresh from the shack's kitchen window. I had a lobster bisk, velvety red with roe, so thick and rich and chock full of lobster that my spoon  actually stood up in it. That course was followed by a "Lazy Man's" lobster, which consisted of 2lbs. of shelled lobster claws and tails in an earth ware bowl that had been broiled in a bath of butter and bread crumbs to beyond what mere mortals could describe as perfection. There is a heaven. My taste buds call it Sacco Maine.

Little Airstream

A seriously fun project for an amusement park attraction, entirely carved from 1lbs. EPS., including the wheels and tires. It was very easy to dream variations on these happy simple shapes. I would have loved to have built a mold of this and cast a Fiberglas shell that could be bolted to a landscape trailer. In the bottom photo, I wanted to present the door both opened and closed. When the 2 photos were together, they were so close in terms of color balance and exposure that I couldn't help but, to join them as one.

Sofa/Work Bench/Storage

Finding a sofa that is not only just the right size but, one that does all that it has to above and beyond merely being comfortable, is easier said than done.

I needed a sofa that could seat 4 at the same height as the rest of my chairs (a guitar thing) and sleep 2 when the need arises. I had a tick over 6' to work with, meaning a sofa with arms was out of the question. I also was and always am in need of storage. Further, I didn't want the black shadowy dust trap that is comonly the big gap between the sofa and the floor. Lastly, sofa's tend to project further into the room than this room could afford. Every square inch of floor space is at an absolute premium. That meant that the back cushion would have to move as close to the wall as possible. In that I realized that if hinged, the sofa's back could serve as a work table. A mirror would solve my black gap issues, visually extending,the carpet beneath the sofa and in so doing, camoflage 12 cubic feet of storage.

Cephalopod

An 18 foot long, 24 inch thick, polyurethane hard coated, carved, spackled and sanded, EPS foam cephalopod, painted with purple polka dots, a perfect complement to any Christmas window display.

New Michael Ferrari-Fontana Website

Finally finished...for now. The new website is pretty comprehesive. I've taken all of the best images and information from all of the sites and blogs that I've built in the past and combined them in one place. It's full of new artwork and stories. Everything is explained, linked, easy to navigate and for the first time in my art career, I'm using my full name. Please click HERE to vistit michaelferrarifontana.com

Sculpture Chair 4

One of the most rewarding aspects of creating abstract compositions is free association. As I assembled this image I thought about banyon roots and tangled forests and what mysteries may lurk beneath and behind the bark clad bars and beams. I found myself drifting through medieval notions of folklore's irrational fears and Hieronymus Bosh's garden of earthly delights. The skewed matrix of limbs and branches became tendrils and then nerves bundles, steering me toward pharmaceutical illustrations and animations of neuro path ways and the "Incredible Journey". The nerves became columns merging seamlessly into groinless vaults and, as they did I found it reflexively natural to imagine this setting populated by people and creatures. I could almost hear musical strains, wafting and swelling through one oval opening only to be pulled through another and then gently diminished. There is so much strange dreaming in such an abstraction, especially when one considers, at it's heart, the sole component in this image is only a chair. For more photos of this in a more easily understood context please click HERE.

Parabolic Facade

Twisting geometry always seems to toss the spectator through a loop. That's why it's so much fun but, it's also a reason to flog ones noggin whilst figuring out the next bend. What wasoriginally proposed as a flat with forced perspective ended up becoming an issue of bisecting, decreased radii. Sound tricky? It is. To further add challenge, This project was done without drawings. A crude but, elegant 1/12 scale model served as the only guide. This object was essentially done on the fly and with a crazy, tight dead line to boot. It bends both longitudinallyand vertically in order to achieve it's parabolic concavity. The upper arches were cut out toaccommodate pneumatically actuated puppets and, as if this wasn't complicated enough, the entire fabrication was designed to mount flushly, via birds mouth, to a convex parabolic shape. The finished construct was both formal and funky and weighed in at under 30 lbs. For more on this project please click HERE

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