Howdy folks and greetings from the Great Plains of North Texas!
As most of my friends know, I've been finding wire sculptors for months now and I found a new one to share with you today.
This guy is from England like so many of the artists I feature and he's created a way to make incredible life-sized sculptures from chicken wire. His name is Derek Kinzett.
He specializes in humans and fairies. I don't know how big fairies are supposed to be but his are human-sized like this one. Well, there's two of them here but the big one is human-sized:
Each piece takes at least 100 hours to create. He's developed a method by which he carves a sculpture out of foam and then wraps it with 3 of 4 layers of chicken wire and then removes the foam, I assume by melting it.
This makes them see-through to some degree and makes people do a double take, especially in certain light conditions or at night!
Each piece sells for about $7,700 or 6,000 pounds. He gets commissioned to put them up all over the world.
He sprays the sculptures with zinc to keep them from rusting and then applies an acrylic aluminium spray so the color is the original wire color.
Derek's hands are covered with callouses because he doesn't wear gloves. He says gloves impair his sense of touch and impact on the quality of the sculpture.
Callouses or no, I have no idea how he does this work without gloves. I'd be wearing Kevlar gloves!
Check out this motorcycle he built:
Talk about painstaking!
I'd like to know how this one stands up in that position:
I think the guy is flat-out amazing and he's only 45 yrs old so he's got lots of years ahead of him to create even more fascinating art. You can see his completes works here: derekkinzettwiresculpture.co.uk
Thanks for stopping by folks, God bless you all!
-jonboy
Texas
PS- Speaking of sculptures, I just found out about this one. It's located in New Jersey across the bay from the World Trade Center. It's called The Tear Of Grief.
I was surprised to learn that this is a memorial from Russia to honor the fallen of the 9-11 terrorist attacks. I didn't know they had done this and I thought it was a nice gesture but many people hate it.
In fact, it was first given to Jersey City and they rejected it but it was accepted by the city of Bayonne.
Foreign Policy magazine listed it as one of the world's ugliest statues, The New Yorker magazine said it looked like a giant tea biscuit...lol..
And Jersey City called it "an insensitive, self-aggrandizing piece of pompousness by one of the world's blatant self-promoters".source I didn't think it was that bad so I guess I have no taste!
The Russian sculptor who created it spent $12 million of his own money on it. I wonder how he felt about the reception it got?