Lost World,
Presented at Chalk Festival, Florida.
I’m delighted to share my latest image, Lost World. It’s an entirely new kind of illusion I invented for Chalk Festival in Florida. Lost World depicts the Pleistocene era, which saw the extinction of the megalodon shark and many of the other animals. Since Florida is the best source in the world for Pleistocene mammals (who knew?), I thought I’d highlight that to fit this year’s Chalk Festival theme Garden of Wonders.
Some of you might recognize the shark from a previous Chalk Festival event in Venice, Florida. A fantastic team of artists restored it, consuming hundreds of gallons of paint over ten days, so I could incorporate it into an entirely new illusion.
Lost World is two football fields long and all the people in it are real! The artwork is located at the Venice Municipal Airport Fairgrounds.
I had so much fun inventing an entirely new kind of perspective to create a never-seen-before illusion. I love challenges, and figuring out how to construct an original image with the beloved megalodon shark was just the push I needed to come up with something over-the-top.
Because the shark is so colossal, to capture all of it, you need to be on an 18′ high platform. So that was my starting point. I then designed the art to envelop the shark by attaching a panorama image to the scaffolding, where the camera was mounted.
As festival attendees posed with the artwork, photographs capturing them with the entire image were delivered digitally. I cannot thank all the enthusiastic artists and volunteers enough. They truly made this an astounding experience for the thousands who came. I can’t wait to see what we can do together next year — we’ve pulled off some pretty spectacular oversized images working together!
