from an apartment building in
New York City,
~ I present ~
81 Irving Place Gremlin capital Nr 81
Cast by Randall
I have an older impression mold of this adorable little sculpture which is on a still standing apartment building at 81 Irving Place at 19th Street in Manhattan. The building was designed by the well known Architect George F. Pelham in 1929. Pelham was the architect of literally hundreds of different buildings in NYC spanning decades. 717 East 9th Street ( http://www.urbansculptures.com/buildingphotos/Plate-36-b.html ) was designed by Pelham in 1898.
This little Gnome-like fellow or gremlin forms a capital crowning a spiraled column between the windows on the ground floor near the sidewalk. As was customary practice, likely Pelham at the very least provided sketches if not detailed drawings of the designs to the artists at the terra cotta company where all the originals were made.
At least one commercial firm has made partial impressions of this piece many years ago and casts out of plaster, the casts I've seen around in catalogues were always bumpy, warped looking and distorted, and only included the very minimum face part of the piece as they were cut down.
My cast-stone version of this is much nicer, and deeper- which includes more details and a backing block. The backing block forms a nice flat background surface to show the 3-D sculpture off better. The additions and changes were done by Randall and these portions are copyrighted.
81 Irving Place at 19th Street in Manhattan. The building was designed by the well known Architect George F. Pelham in 1929. Pelham was the architect of literally hundreds of different buildings in NYC spanning decades.
Note that the terracotta is ONLY available in brick red and ONLY on a limited selection- the designs in the TERRACOTTA category, not to be confused with the red terracotta FINISH! which is on cast-stone only.
Prices include shipping and are shown on each sculpture on the CART PAGES.
I use FEDEX ground service for all shipments in the lower 48 states. I do not ship outside the USA.
If you are looking for something for the garden or to build into a wall, I offer a growing number of hand-pressed, kiln fired red terracotta works. for many reasons, concrete is no longer available.
All of my interior sculptures have a heavy wire embedded on the back to hang them on the wall.
These hand sculpted models are created from scratch by Randall in water based clay, and typically take an average of 20-30 hours to set up, layout and sculpt each master model.
When the clay master models are finished, they are permanently captured with silicone mold compounds which can pick up even a fingerprint and faithfully transfer it to a cast made in it. From the molds, interior cast-stone as well as a growing number of kiln fired terracotta sculptures are made available for clients to purchase.
Existing savaged pieces are limited to what happens to be for sale at high prices, often damaged, rarely found in pairs and being typically large in scale (meant to be seen from the street from 5 floors below) they are difficult to display in today's smaller homes and apartments. Instead of making molds of these pieces, Randall creates new original models based on authentic 19th century and early 20th century Victorian, Art Deco and Louis Sullivan style architectural sculptures. While I do have a small number of older designs directly molded from antique pieces, these are being phased out over time as I create my own original models.
By no means! keep in mind- your walls weigh thousands of pounds and support the roof. HOWEVER- do not use plastic or self adhesive picture hangars of any kind, or try to simply put a screw into the thin sheetrock-these will not hold, and are not designed to.
Install your mounting hooks or other hangars into the solid wood STUD inside the wall, these are spaced 16" apart. You should use an anchor rated to hold at least twice the shipping weight of the sculpture.
To show what a sheetrock wall can hold, here is a photo of two shelves I installed on my bedroom wall for original sculptures that I couldn't mount any other way, the brackets are screwed into the wall studs with 3" screws. The weight for the stone and terra-cotta shown-the top shelf; 175# and 125# for the lower shelf- 300# total.
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Prices Revised Dec 24th, 2013
