My participation with "Little Wise Owls"

“Automata“ painted fiberglass form. My third year as a participant in Chicago’s Greektown public sculpture program. My contribution is currently installed in front of the National Hellenic Museum on Halsted and Van Buren. I designed my owl after the mechanical engineering of Ancient Greece that included vending machines, mobile temple doors and statues that had automated parts. These machines with gears, tubes, axel rods, etc were typically powered by pneumatics, water, steam and weight displacement. My process involved shooting images of the fiberglass forms, downloading them into my computer, digitally stripping the images into contour templates, using a Wacom digital pad and pen to draw/paint in my concept, then outlining on the actual sculpture with black paint, add layers of bronze and gold acrylic paint onto the surface and then brush two layers of an exterior waterproof transparent sealer. The form was then coated with a marine resin varnish. "Automata" is installed in front of  the museum.

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(C) Mark Nelson