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

The Prince of Saint Marks Place

So many thanks to all of my beautiful friends not only for their congratulations but, more for them being major components in making my life richer than I could have ever imagined.
The talent that graces my home with grooves that elevate the soul has transformed me on most every level. My home has evolved in so many ways to accommodate the gift of that grace.
The gifts often come in equal measure from those who don’t play but, so openly express joy from the energy found within this space on those magic evenings. In that, we are all equally part of this wondrous scene.
Every one who has participated, every song, every dance, every beautiful smile and, lovely expression has played a huge part in making my home worthy of Penelope Green’s superlative article.
A million thanks to all of you. More thanks to Ken than I can count for introducing me to an art form that I somehow, at the time, didn’t think I had genetic predisposition for. The same countless thanks to Joshuasuzanne for being so close to me and introducing me to Penelope and, of course, a bottomless thank you to Penelope for introducing our very special environment to so many readers around the world. To read the full New York Times article please click HERE

The Penny Throne

If you've ever been faced with the question of what to do with 15 thousand pennies, I seem to have found an answer. The Penny Throne started life as a model rendered in Super Sculpty. I had never used this material before and would only use it once again. It's a polymer clay that hardens when it's baked and is sort of sandable. The main attraction of it is that you don't need to make a mold in order to have a hard, stable sculpt but, the ardor of finishing this material radically diminishes that advantage. Being pleased with the plumpness and over all look of the 4 inch by 5 inch model, I set about the carving of the 4 foot by 5 foot chair.

I had originally carved the chair as an experiment. The design was initially conceived as a love seat but, the space that it was intended for wouldn't accommodate a 7 foot long stretched version of it. When the carving was completed and hard coated with a urethane resin, It was painted to look like malachite with a red velvet cushion. The problem was that I didn’t have the time to have the cushion made and, the chair was scheduled to appear in an exhibit that following weekend. My solution was to carve and hard coat a cushion shape and wrap it in velvet. It looked great, velvety and inviting but, it was in fact, as hard as a fire hydrant. At one point it was my turn to mind the gallery. I sat at the far end of the exhibit space and watched one person after the other throw themselves into this illusion of comfy, cushiness with candid abandon, expecting to be warmly absorbed by the chair. One by one, I witnessed the repeated birth of  broken asses. Now that the chair has a real cushion, coccyx bones are more safely cossetted from being cracked.

 As for the pennies, I felt that the chair needed a make over. I’ve always been a big fan of Tom Otterness’s sculptures. So many of them have used pennies as their recurrent theme. His "Real World" is a penny Magnum opus that can be seen at the Hudson River Park in lower Manhattan. There is also more than a modicum of Macy's Balloon design about this form, making the penny a perfect medium for the visual pun of fiscal inflation. There were other influences including Joan Miro's Moon bird and Johnny Swing who's coined furniture creations are truly magnificent.

 The penny is so many things to almost everyone. It's our smallest standard of currency, so seemingly insignificant that it's abandonment has been under serious consideration, yet it's the primary binary component in more monies than not. As it turned out, it’s a very dramatic way to cover a piece of furniture. When it darkens I simply wire wheel it with a power drill and it's bright and shiny all over again. Just like a penny, shiny and new. What I’d really like to do is mold and cast this in copper and photo chronicle it becoming green. The seating area would be covered in a cultivated moss. As an outdoor piece, I see it as one of a series of four arranged in a circle. With streaming rivulets of verdigris patina. It would seem from so many angles to be unearthly yet, organic, alien but familiar and above and beyond all else, fun and inviting.

Aside from the whimsy and dreaming of setting scenarios there was a practical side to doing this if you can believe it. Good fabric is not cheap. Leather would have been interesting, somewhere between base ball mitt and American Indian bison artifact but, the patterning and seaming would have been a nightmare and a half and, elaborate paint jobs are never simple. Both of those refinishing routes would prove too fragile. This is a chair that's seen a lot of use. The paint had already been damaged and repaired a few times. This time around I wanted something permanent and impervious. 15,000 pennies sounds like a big number especially when being pain stakingly applied individually to compound curvatures but, it's really just $150 and a case of adhesives. While it's true, the chair has gained considerable weight, my guess is that it may tip the scales around 160 lbs. or, roughly the weight of me. That may sound more portly than practical but a copper cast might weigh in closer to half a ton and require specialize equipment  to move it around.

All said and done, the penny throne is a monumental sculpture that's practical enough to be lounged around on in the comfort of my home and no matter my economy, I can sit on this small fortune.

In this last illustration I've re-sculpted the Penny Throne in Zbrush. Now that it exists as an stl. file, it can be printed as small as a Monopoly piece or, robotically carved to actual size

Greenwood Legal

Designing this site for Ken was an interesting challenge. We sat down and looked at a variety of different legal websites in order to get a sense of what the industry standard and layouts seem to be. We found a number of nice looking sites, simple, direct and to their points but, all a bit on the bland, washed out side. Anyone who knows Ken knows, Ken's not bland or washed out. Ken is colorful. His business base has rapidly expanded to encompass most of our nations major city's so, as you click from page to page, the backgrounds change from city to city and, from sunset to sunrise. This allowed me to make use of some of natures most saturated pallets without being overly garish. When I think of established law firms, dark woods, rich leathers and fancy brass plaques spring to my mind but, at their best, there is always a sleek, succinct simplicity. I believe that those assets contrast very nicely with the deep hues of the background city scapes.

Ken is also a world traveler and is promoting his next Inca adventure. If there are any hard core, jungle trekkers out there, visit Greenwood Legal and click on the bottom left link. Please click HERE

Beaded Chair

I had originally intended to paint the fourth sculpture chair a deep cobalt blue in the same vein as Yves Klien but, in the end, I felt that that was too simple a solution. I had never tiled a piece of sculpture before. I thought about Niki de Saint Phalle and her wonderfully mosaic clad happy shapes, so off I went to the my local tile show room to see what they had. It was a real eye opener. In one way or another, I was impressed with everything that I saw. In the end I decided on metalized cobalt glass droplets. The droplets came glued to 12"x12" mesh sheets. The hassle of separating the beads from the sheets was a tale of toil that I will spare the reader. Suffice it to say, the entire endeavour of tiling this chair was toil intensive. A few days into the project I found my self running out of materials. on the way to the tile show room, I stopped at the hard ware store to buy more adhesives. Much to my shock, amazement and, delight, I found bags of the same droplets, unbound by any meshed sheeting, as they were intended for lining the bottoms of fish tanks.