Making The Cosmic Void Light Sculpture

This piece represents the culmination of a lot of things happening in my life.  Technically, it was an extremely challenging sculpture that took me a little longer than I anticipated. The mold alone was a real head scratchier. I thought about it for weeks and I didn't quite figure it out until I was making it! All of the light sculptures I created before this one had to be rigged with lights, after creation. With this piece, I actually sculpted in the brackets behind it to fit a specific lighting set, meaning I can make multiples with considerably less light fabrication time. The piece started out very different. As I progressed it slowly changed, but the initial block out process was quick and a lot of fun.

At one point I wanted to make little pods for miniature people I sculpted a while back. I later changed my mind.

Below is a shot of the finished clay sculpture. Can you find the chicken bones?

After the front half of the sculpture was molded, I pulled out the original clay and created a quarter inch thickness of clay inside it to create a the back of the piece. This is where things started to get tricky. The pour spout was a brain teaser, but I deiced that it needed to be at the bottom of the piece. This allows it to be filled from a vertical position, bottom to top without making as many bubbles. You can also see my vents at the top of the piece. These allow the air to escape as the resin flows inside.

Here is a shot of the finished mold.

I used a skull underneath the central face and allowed enough space for it to fit inside of the mold. This allowed me to insert the skull inside before I cast the finished piece.

Finally, it would not have been possible to make this the way I did without my new investment; a 10 gallon Pressure Pot tank. This tank greatly helps to eliminate air bubbles, ESPECIALLY FOR CASTING TRANSLUCENT MATERIAL. The mold fits SNUGLY into that tank. If it were any larger,this would not have worked. Below is a shot of the mold in the pressure pot. Tight fit!

The first casting is born!! Check out how you can see the teeth from the skull underneath the translucent resin!

Painting this sucker is a whole lot of fun! BUT before that, I attached my LED light strips to the inside of the piece. As I mentioned before, I sculpted in special brackets on the inside of the piece to hold some light strips I purchased. Below, it is all lit up without paint. The red bits are supposed to be veins I made using pieces of bright red yearn and 5 min epoxy glue. It wasn't quite what I was going for but it adds depth.

My first paint attempt turned out pretty good. I used DEKA stained glass paints that have to be special ordered from overseas. If you ever happen to get you hands on some, USE A RESPIRATOR MASK, that stuff stinks! Anyway, the goal here is to give it that glow from within look without blowing out all of the detail. It's quite tricky to achieve and I'm looking forward to painting a few more. Below are some shots with the lights on and lights off. The appearance also changes greatly due to the mount of surface light you have on the piece. The images below have a lot of surface light. This piece will be on display and for sale at Crated At The Port of Los Angeles in association with the HP Love Craft Film-Festival and Cuthluhu Con 2014 until the end of October.

This green version below is for the Auguste Clown Gallery in Australia, my first international show! I call this one "Incorporeal." They are doing a Halloween group show and I am so proud to have been invited to participate.

I wasn't sure if my plug in lights would work in Australia, due to their sockets being different, so this one glows in the dark! Here are shots of what it looks like in darkness with a black light charge.

This last one pictured below is still a WIP for a show at the Copro Gallery October 18th -November 8th. I'm going red, and in this stage all I seem to think about is red gummy bears! Wish me luck!

a VESSEL revived from STASIS

In 2005, I completed film called STASIS. (Still image above) It consisted of 8 minutes of pure, surreal, sci-fi, bio-mechanical, insanity. A simple visual story about a woman resurrected from the dead in a living machine. I built the 2 sets in my living room, over a 3 year period. With the help of a few good friends like David Lea, Chris Fields, George Longo, my brother Jonathan and my girlfriend, now wife, Erica Hite, we made a little piece of something from my mind which was very much inspired by the masterful works of H.R. Giger, and The Matrix. Below, is a black light painting I did in 2000. This painting was the start of STASIS. I love to paint in the dark. To bring light where only darkness was, has some interesting qualities, especially in altered states.

I discovered Giger's work at the age of 10 after my best friend's dad took my friend Mike and I to see ALIENS. My parents would not have taken me because of the R rating. I am eternally grateful to have seen it at that age because it changed my life!  By the time I was 14, I was airbrushing mural sized black and white ALIEN stuff. When I hit college, I sculpted my first Alien costume, and even a miniature-working electronic Alien head with a raccoon skull . Looking back, those were sort of bad, but I never really stopped incorporating bio-mechanics and I'm now almost 38 and full-time designer and sculptor. Bringing Giger's work into the 3rd dimension is something that has driven me to spend months on 1 sculpted piece. His death deeply saddened me. One of my goals in life was to visit his Museum in Zurich Switzerland and meet the man.

Many others have inspired me on the way in my life, like Clive Barker, who I actually had the chance to work with. One day in October of 2009, at his house, Clive said to me, "You'll have to come over next time Giger visits." My jaw dropped, then he handed me an Ernst Fuchs book, who I had never heard of before. I literally could not stop looking at that book while he was talking to me. It was like seeing the work of Giger's dad, or estranged father. I still need to give Clive back the book. I've never seen so many amazing books in one place on anything you could think of. Clive's amazing home was like a cabinet of curiosities. Every nook had some interesting sculpture or book... and the paintings, WOW, that man loves to PAINT!

OK, back to STASIS.  After I released STASIS, I did the film festival circuit from 2005-2006, won some awards, and ended up at "Slamdance", the alternate to Sundance in Park city Utah in Jan of '06. I made a lot of contacts, new friends, and had some momentum for funding to produce and direct part two! Parties every night, promoting every day, it was a blast.

Pictured above, I was hanging out with Dean Haglund and friends. He was one of the "Lone Gunmen" from X-Files. Great guy!

The whole mentality of Slamdance was great. They promoted a TEAM environment, where you were supposed to help your fellow filmaker and not be competitive with each other. To promote our films we all teamed up to pass out fliers, but were unable to just give them to a passer by. It was illegal unless we spoke to the person and asked first. This was challenging. Luckily, I brought a crazy light up mask of one of my characters. I wore day and night in Park City in my WWII German officers coat. I walked the streets and people just came up to me. I passed out all of my fliers. I saw all kinds of people, even met Nick Nolte in the mask one night heading back to my condo around 2 AM. I think he was a bit drunk and did a double take then said, "The devil does walk the streets here." Nick was all dapper dressed and was a nice guy to this strange kid. I got an add in the newspaper during the week for being such a freak. It was fun and kept my head warm!

However, a month after the Slamdance, my brother Jonathan was in a nearly fatal car crash. He was in a coma for about a month and a half. I dropped everything I was doing and focused on helping him. He fully recovered after 3 major surgeries and a year of PT. I cannot imagine what it was really like for him to go through. We are closer than ever and I thank GOD for his survival. Every day we watched the machines that kept him alive. As morbid as this sounds, I was fascinated by those machines. I've looked at this photo of my brother in intensive care many times and marveled at the at the REAL bio-mechanical symbiosis happening here.

I learned some valuable life lessons from that time. Above we stand together, strong in October 2010. I'm the short, bald one. However, by the time I got back to STASIS 2, things were cold in terms of my contacts, but I didn't care. In 2008-2009, I picked it back up and began working on the storyboards and set pieces. Then I met and partnered with Brock DeShane and we started talking about a feature or episodic animated series. With his contacts and my work, we started generating more interest in a newly titled project called PLASMA. Three years went by and it just was not quite working. Perhaps because we lived states away from each other, or we just had different visions. I don't know, but it sort of fell apart and I called it quits on PLASMA in 2012. I was done with trying to do another stop-motion film and threw myself into doing gallery pieces. The theme in almost all of my lit sculptural pieces come from the story I want to tell in stop-motion.  On the back burner of all of these years since 2005, I have been creating bio-mechanical character puppet sculpts and set pieces in my spare time and updating my equipment. At this point, we have 7 puppets, 3 sets, a high-end Canon camera, editing programs, new computer, motorized slider, lights, camera lenses and most important of all, people interested in working on it with me. All we need at this point are materials to cast the puppets in, armatures for the puppets, a few more props, 2-3 more sets, maybe an 1100 square foot warehouse, some help animating and VESSEL might actually happen! If we can pull it off, I want to dedicate it to H.R. Giger. This man has inspired me more than anyone living or dead. Let me be clear that I am not doing this because I want to make money. NO, I am doing this because I want to share something that has been playing in my head for over 10 years now. The part of my soul that resonates with Giger's work won't seem to rest until I do it.

Behind the Veil

I'm super excited about the upcoming CONJOINED IV show! Im honored to have Chet Zar and the Copro Gallery using my sculpture "Behind The Veil" for promoting the show. This prompted me in having the piece created in chrome plated BRONZE by Grant Standard at Black Hills Bronze! I met Grant at Conjoined II back in 2012 and have been itching to do something in metal with him and his talented crew.  This is my very first sculpture to be made in bronze and I can't wait to see it on the wall at the show. Below are a few shots of the bronze process.

After completing, my sculpture called "Bliss" in Monster Makers Clay, I striped down the clay to reveal the skull I placed in at the start of this project. Doing this, insured that I would have the correct registration and depth for when I merge these two pieces into one. This will be done in the near future so stay tuned!

Above is the destruction of 'Bliss" and the beginning of "Behind the Veil".

Here I am putting the finishing touches on the sculpt, it took quite a bit of time to get everything just right and if I look too close at it I'm still not 100% happy...maybe 90%?

This is a shot of the outer fiberglass jacket created to hold the silicone in place.

Here is a pristine shot of the inside of the mold when it arrived at Black Hills bronze in north Dakota and below are images of the wax process for bronze.

I love this shot of the in-process wax coating of the mold taken by Grant Standard, it looks so surreal. We are looking and a concave image by our minds automatically invert it so that it looks convex!

The wax is born from my silicone mold, to create an investment mold for metal.

This is the ceramic shell in process over the wax. I believe this is the first layer of the investment mold. Note the spews at the bottom of the piece. Those will serve as air vents and the pouring spout.

Here is the completed investment mold.  Once the wax is burned out of the mold it is ready for the HOT METAL to be poured!!!!

I love my friend Mike Biasi's comment he made on this image, " Oh the joys of standing in front of a burnout kiln near the crucible while wearing heavy protective gear. Even if its cold outside, those guys are roasting..."

Red Hot MOLD!

It's strange to see these broken mold pieces and know exactly what parts of the sculpture they came from.

Here is a first look at the metal after Grant and his crew cleaned it up a bit. She is a true beauty!

And finally here she is back from chrome plating!! WOW! I cant wait to see this in person. So Excited!!!

DONE! I'm so pleased to have had Grant Standard and his crew do this for me. They did an AMAZING job and I cannot thank them enough. I'm already planing out my next metal piece for next year!

Hive Tarot 5

This Saturday, January 4, is the opening of the fifth Tarot art show at the Hive Gallery in Los Angeles. If you happen to be in the area, please stop between 8-11:30 pm located at 729 Spring Street, LA 90014 and check it out!!

This year I was tasked through random selection with creating card XIV, Temperance. I did this in a sculptural form using assemblage and epoxy clay. What I found really interesting about this particular card was the extreme relevance to my current situation in life. This card is about balance and harmony.  For me, my balancing/harmony can be off in terms of how I live my life. Between work, family, diet, and exercise my life is a mess! This particular theme really resonated with me and reminded me of how important balancing my day to day is, and what is most important in my life. There are more meanings to this card than just balance and I hope the studied Tarot reader can spot my attempt to do this 11" x 14"x 4" sculpted card right. I'll be at the show opening night eager to discuss!

Krab Jab Studios!

I'm very pleased to to be a part of the Chamber of Wonders show at Krab Jab Studios from Dec 14-Jan 2nd. This amazing show is curated by Yvette Endrijautzki. Opening is 6:00 to 9:00 Saturday the 14th. I won't be able to attend but please check it out if you are in the Seattle area. Below is a sneak peek of some of the art with one of my little undead heads called "Beautiful Dead."