Randall's Urban Architectural Sculptures

This is my new Griffin spandrel panel, replicated from photos of an original that came from the Senator Hotel, Atlantic City.

I think I will consider the modelling of the body and head is done, and now a lot of cleaning up and refining the edges of the feathers- it looks “cleaner” in the photo than it does in reality, here’s a lot of stray crumbs and rough edges that need refining, cleanup and detailing yet, but I’m happy how it came out.
I wound up filling the neck in and starting that over, it was just looking concave where it should be convex and I gave up trying to build the feathers up there to do it and just filled it all over and lined in the feathers there.

I decided the wood tool toothed texture would work for the background, no “rays” and making the body of the griffin a contrasting smooth finished with a rounded spoon shaped wood tool to give the surface a little tooling effect and to remove “streaks” as I call them from fingers used to smooth which seems to leave little scratches and odd marks from finger prints.

Will wind up 26″ by 17-1/4″, replicated from a photo of the original from the Senator hotel, Atlantic City, NJ demolished in 1999

It is funny working on this Griffin and thinking back to the book I have about the fossils and the ancient Greeks and others finding dinosaur and protoceratops fossil bones and fragments, huge skeletons and concluding they were all a race of giant humanoids, warriors or gods, but the Griffin differed in that because of certain anatomy- this was assumed by the ancients to have been remains of WINGS.

NOW we know Griffins never existed as depicted but the ancients believed they DID, and even wrote about winged creatures in many journals, books and other literature whose bones were found in various locations.

These pieces were salvaged when the Morton High School (Hammond Indiana) was demolished in 1991. This was George Elmslies final project before his death. Elmslie was the chief ornamental designer for Louis Sullivan. This piece is cataloged as an M-5 Main building cornice from the book Architectural Ornament by Krutty and Schmitt.

These pieces are also mentioned extensively in a book titled Sullivanesque.

The design however is more like a frieze with repeating sections, reproductions will be model Nr.3600 taken in part from the embeded number stamped in the clay on the bottom of the original.

27-1/4″ X 13-1/2″ X 4-1/4″

Similar to architectural Art Deco it at first glace appears to be a transitional style between Victorian and Art Deco since it contains elements resembling both, however, this is not the case.

The piece will be reproduced shortly and casts made available in my web store.

Originals like this are hot collector’s items and go for $600-$1200 each now when they come up for sale.

The model is now finished today and is drying out.