Alan Wolfson is the artist.
Friday, July 11, 2014
Sculpture Miniatures
Fascinating miniatures of city street scenes, this one my favorite. They capture quite well that moment when everything is past its prime - some gone seedy, some clinging to respectability - and is nostalgic without glossing over reality. I didn't dare look how much they would cost.
Alan Wolfson is the artist.
Alan Wolfson is the artist.
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5 comments:
Realistic miniaturization is hypnotic. I once lost myself for months in the construction of an elaborate dollhouse. I almost bought a kit for needlepointing miniature Persian carpets, complete with a fly-tying magnifying glass. To this day I regret not grabbing it. If my niece weren't too old to appreciate her dollhouse any more (she's a doctor), I'd probably crochet tiny bedspreads and curtains using gossamer-weight thread.
My husband has the same bug, but his outlet was always aircraft and the like. My neighbor across the street is fantastically skilled at making radio-controlled aircraft perfect in every tiny detail.
This guy makes amazing miniatures posed in front of real-life backgrounds, in such a way that the miniatures look like part of the scene.
Like this one.
(Here's how it's done.)
Hypnotic to make and think about the details, yes. I am perilously close at the moment to starting to make miniature gardens in a dish, despite having an actual garden that's a mess. There's something compelling about the tininess of it, the staging of each part.
(I once speculated that this impulse is why the British royal family is so fascinating to Americans. The genetic relationships, the crowns and scepters and thrones, titles, events - royal weddings, royal christenings, royal walks in the garden - perfect in every tiny detail! Wonder whether anyone else sees the same similarity of the impulse. It feels very similar to me.)
This is like a modern version of the Thorne rooms at the Chicago Art Museum. These are a historical sequence of doll-house-scale rooms, tracking American interior design from early colonial times to the 1950s.
See:
http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/thorne
Seconding Earl's recommendation.
There is a children's book about the Throne miniature rooms called Sixty-Eight Rooms by Marianne Malone. AVI's wife
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