Portrait fo Amelie; Chelsea Hotel, NYC, 2019 | Photography: Tony Notarberardino
Tell us about some of your most notable clients and collaborations. SF: Of late, Ferrari. They seem to like me and there’s only a few letters different in our name. Our work together is performance sculpture, they fly me to Pebble Beach and I live-sculpt a 1959 250 Testa Rossa off a big aluminum spool over a three-hour event. It adds color and authenticity, I suppose— although, Ferrari doesn’t need me for more color or authenticity. Artistic parsley, I guess—or Parmesan.
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London, Athens and Moscow; each portrait has a corresponding portrait story, written on a typewriter, about the model and our portrait sitting— imagine that, except the exhibition was in a basement, in a nightclub, in the dark. The whole unseen show was taken down, and what wasn’t damaged by the rich ended up in a garage in Islington with a leaky roof for six months. What is a dream client/subject for you?
I’ve done some large-scale spectacle pieces captured on time-lapse, too. I actually love doing corporate work; unlike most galleries, they pay up, often in advance, meet their agreements, including post-sculpture massage—it’s in my rider—and I don’t have to sue them in the end to get my work back. Presumably they just destroy it. I’m just kidding. But they might.
SF: Thank you for asking. If I may dream: She will arrange for a neverending portrait on a never-ending spool, on a never-ending monthly retainer. I’ll cancel all other clients, suspend exhibitions permanently, make a thoughtful bend when I feel like it, and when not working you can find me through binoculars in Central Park, on the Boating Pond with my daughter. She’s old enough to row.
Describe a memorable exhibition for us.
Where does this dry, witty sense of humor originate?
SF: I can think of one I’d like to forget. Imagine an exhibition of two dozen nude portraits sculpted in Paris, New York,
SF: New York of course, and its seasons. We have all of them: Good to bad to worse to Hudson Yards. Have you ever
walked on East Broome Street by the open vegetable and fish markets in high Summer? Do that, and stop a moment to close your eyes, and sniff. We’ll pass on that one. Where do you look for inspiration in the “Art world?” SF: I go to the MoMA once a week, but only for the children’s butter pasta—it’s half the price of the adult pasta and it comes with a free cookie. Joking aside, what do you aim to evoke with your work? What are you trying to communicate to audiences? SF: I like that you say, ‘audiences.’ In art, unless it’s performance art, we are removed from our audience in the making of it, and when we show, the artwork is performing, not the artist. But this is why I work with models— friends, mostly, and performers I admire—for the company, and for the immediate applause, frankly, when the piece is done. As a child of the stage, the sound of a standing O is hard to forget. Working with the model is a dance and a collaboration, a pas de deux and a performance for the two of