Stephen Colbert Portrait / Bust

Summer before last, Bre Pettis, founder of Makerbot was on the Colbert Report. Part of the segment revolved around scanning Stephens head in order to print a copy of it in the Makerbot. It was all pretty hilarious, as is usually the case with the Report. For that show, the sign off was done with a printed puppet head(a la ventriloquist dummy). Makerbot made the mesh of Steven's head available through Thingaverse, encouraging 3d folks to play with it or, mash it into variants. It was a big wow moment for me. I was just beginning to learn Zbrush at the time, expressly for the purposes of 3d printing and prototyping. I figured that having access to Stephen's gross geometry would make the portrait a piece of cake...so not so. The scan of Stephen's head is a frighteningly lumpy, bumpy, blob of a thing but, I was commited to the notion and charged into it's basic masses.

I set out to create a presidential style bust but, a little sillier. It was actually quite a bit of work and in the end, probably took as long as if I'd done it in clay. The big difference of course is that this can be printed or carved directly from the file. It's a suddenly strange and wonderful thing to be in possession of Stephen Colbert's head. He's mine to play with now...mwa ha ha ha!!!! 

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.

Horton

Being my age, I had the luxury of growing up with Suess & Sendak. So did my daughter and it's my hope that children do for as long as there are children but, I grew up as these books were just hitting the book store shelves. At that time most of my toys were made out of wood or metal. I think that the quality of a toy may have been determined by how much injury it could inflict upon another child if it should be used as a weapon. I remember my father telling me that when he was a child he knocked out his little sisters front teeth with a toy fire engine. Those were the days, when toys were toys and child psychology didn't exist. If I'm to believe my pop's story, my grandfather put his cigar out on my pop's prepubescent nose for his dastardly dental deed.
 Of all of Dr. Suess's characters, Horton was the one that most impressed me. To my young mind he was as big as a T Rex but he was gentle and kind and generous to a fault. He meant what he said and he said what he meant and his mind was opened to possibilities out side of his norm, 100 percent. Imbued with those fine qualities, I thought that he would make a great sample and studio mascot. I carved Horton using a tiny Christmas ornament as my reference. Ear to ear he may have been an inch and a half across. As he hangs on my wall he's five feet wide.

Zbrush Characters

Charles Darwin Makerbot Print

If everyone has their own personal Pantheon, a place in which their heroes reside, Charles Darwin is among the giants in mine. For a species obsessed by having an unending hunger for evidential explanations, he sated all of man kind and allowed Science and biology to move forward in ways it never had in the past. For the first time since life began it's founding primordial writhing, he opened the door to the Genome and, in so doing, charted a course for filling in the blanks of a billion years of ignorance. It was a privilege to sculpt him.

I'm particularly pleased with this shot. This bust is only 6" tall yet it manages to maintain it's classical air as if it were fully life sized. Charles was printed on my MakerBot Replicator 2 at a high resolution setting and took 7.5 hrs. If you squint a little, so as to obscure the striations, it becomes easy to see this as  marble, not bad for what is really a hot melted extrusion of corn starch based biodegradable plastic printed on my desk top.

Eduardo Ferrari-Fontana

Eduardo Ferrari-Fontana was my grandfather. in the beginning of the 20th century he was hailed as the greatest Vagnerian tenor of his day. He was a rock star before the first world war. He jet set on steamships before there were jets. When he was well into his 40's he took a teenager to be his wife and then had babies with her in 5 major cities throughout Europe, South America and Canada. According to my father...

     

He spent his money as quickly as he made it. He would throw crazy parties in which he would invite strangers whom he'd met on the street. He attended one of these parties wearing only his underwear in order to test the tolerance of those attending. He was eccentric, generous, scholarly, a real showman and extraordinarily talented. He died when my dad was the tender age of 9.

Since I've started using my hyphenated last name, I've been bumping into him a lot on the google image search pages, particularly the tattered yellow profile. I wondered what it must have looked like in it's day before these last one hundred years and the advent of low resolution scanners. What I thought for a moment, would be a quick spotting job, became a reconstructive illustration. I don't mind admitting that it took me the better part of a day to bring him back to a closer proximity of the image's original quality. please click on the image to see it in greater detail. To find out more about Eduardo and actually hear him perform please click HERE and HERE and HERE.

Family Life Masks

Some 30 years ago my mother commissioned Willa Shalit (daughter of Gene Shalit) to make life masks of the immediate family. The masks are low resolution plaster bandage casts as opposed to higher resolution casts achieved by molds made from alginate or silicone. In these, every detail and pore are not revealed but, in that something somehow is gained. As fascinating as medical grade surface information can be in it's portrayal of every nuance, crease and crevice, it sometimes distracts us from the underlying geometries and those beauties and truths therein. A good friend of mine had described it as the difference between a sketch and a highly finished drawing. Sometimes the sketch is more beautiful.

As time marched on the masks had discolored, 3 decades of dirt had settled in unflattering ways. My mother asked me if I could restore them and give them a scenic bronze finish. The masks were lightly spackled, primed and given a quick deliberately rough faux bronze paint treatment as they would be mounted high on a wall over a bay window and need to be read at a distance.

There was a strangeness returning to these masks. Children are a frightening clock. In these masks, my mother is approximately my age and I am my daughters. As I moved the masks around my studio, looking for interesting settings and light, I posed my mothers mask with the cast of Sonia with here eyes opened. There's a startling "Back to the Future"effect in that suddenly Bubby's the same age as Pops and Sonia's the same age as my youngest sister, Nikki.

My father's mask is conspicuously missing from these photos. My parents divorce was particularly bitter and my mother no longer wanted it in the house. My fathers face now finds it's self in my younger sister, Alisa's home.

These masks also signifiy my introduction to life casting. Shortly after these masks were cast I would serve as Willa's assitant for a series of classes that she taught in plaster bandage and alginate life casting at the New York Accadamy.

Eric Krupnik Death Mask and Portrait

Eric seemed to touch and change everyone he met whithin his all too short life. He certainly had his hand in changing me. For the tale of his last days on planet earth and how this cast came to be after his passing, click HERE

There we were, Eric and I. For the very last time I would spend with this dear, dear friend. I stoked his cheek and kissed his forehead and told him that this would be beautiful. I told him it wouldn’t take very long and that I promised not to fuck it up. I knelt down beside his box to unpack the kit and started to cry out loud. My heart was pounding like a Koto drum. I could feel the stress spreading across my chest and shoulders. I could feel the tension traveling down my arms and tingle in my finger tips. My eyes were swelling shut as tears were splashing onto the inside of my glasses. I could feel the weight and motion of those tears dangling from the bottom edges of my lenses and see the splintered light and reflections dancing within them but, I didn’t skip a beat or loose my rhythm. I was determined to run this as if it were just another casting, to not let the torrent of tears and tidal waves of emotion stand in the way of professionalism or methodology. I rose from the unpacked kit, took off my glasses to shake the tears from them, wiped my eyes on my forearm and, went to get a pail of water. When I returned I stood over Eric and noticed that there was dried mucus around his nose and mouth. At first I was dismayed that the hospital would let him be delivered in such a state but, quickly realized that hospitals only do what they have to and that preparing a body is somebody else’s business. I cleaned him up while explaining to him what I was doing and what the steps of the process would be as if he were alive and could hear me. Then I shut his eyes. They closed so easily. I breathed a huge sigh of relief and to my amazement, when shut, they seamed to rise in the corners just like his smile. As his closed eyes smiled back at me, I marveled at how a fluke of geometry can mirror the essence of ones soul. I asked his permission to turn his head because I couldn’t get to his left ear in his current position and could almost hear him say “Mike, my good friend, my head is in your hands.” I reached into the box and placed my hands on either side of his head. With the heels of my hands at his jaw, my thumbs on his cheek bones, his ears between my fore and middle fingers and my pinky and ring fingers at the sides of his neck, I tried to move his head but it didn’t budge. This was my first encounter with rigamortice since elementary school biology. A fetal pig’s leg as it turns out is considerably less resistant than the head and neck of a human being. I said “Eric, man, your not making this any easier for me are you?” He said “come on you mighty beast, give it a little horse power” I took deep breath and applied lateral force incrementally. My arms were starting to shake. I didn’t know if I could do it. I broke out in a soaking sweat and felt waves of nausea and tears sweep over me. I was twisted with the gut wrenching fear that I was going to break his neck. My head swam backward to a time when I broke a mans nose in a fight and could feel the bones crackle and collapse beneath my knuckles. I could taste vomit in the back of my throat as tears began spilling from my eyes, landing on his chest and soaking into his faded hospital gown. I had visions of his vertebra shattering. I had visions of his head coming off in my hands. I was a fraction of a second away from giving up and then I heard him say “Come on you big pussy cat, we’re almost there. You can do it Mike. I’m not going to break. You’re the man.” I gulped another deep breath, applied more force and suddenly his head was free and moved with the silken smoothness of a well greased ball bearing. I was drenched as if I had just run a marathon and my knees were seriously weak. I may have fallen over if I weren’t hanging on so tightly to his head. I straightened myself up and breathed for the first time in what felt like ages. I could hear him say “That wasn’t so bad was it?” I replied in a very loving tone “Eric, fuck you.” I laughed out loud and he just kept on smiling that beautiful smile of his. The hardest part was over. I untied his string necklaces and placed then on his chest. I rolled a towel in a plastic bag and placed it behind his head to act as a catch or, dam. I mixed the alginate and started the mold. It seemed as if I were done in no time. I cleaned up my mess and I cleaned up Eric and put his necklaces back on him. I placed the mold, packed in wet paper towel, back into the same plastic bag that I had brought the kit in. With my hand on his chest, above his still heart, I gave him a last kiss and bid him his final farewell knowing I was the last person to ever spend time with him. I zipped closed the bag and shut the cardboard box and let my self out of the building as if I had never been there. As I hit the street the air felt crisp and welcoming in my lungs. The first taxi I hailed stopped for me and I was back on St. Marks before I knew it. With the mold of Eric’s head still in the bag beneath my arm, I entered Dojo’s to have a drink with Bette and Peppy and who ever else was still there from the memorial. I had a few drinks but, barely spoke of what had just transpired. I said my goodnights and made my way home. I walked in through my door and found that my sister Alisa had left hot soup on my stove and a box of Kleenex on my coffee table waiting for me, a lovely gesture of comfort and condolence. Contrary to my exhausted state, I only found sleep in fleeting winks. This had been as tough and trying a day as ever I had known.