Round Cars

Sun, 30 Mar 2008 09:50:02 GMT

clipped by: raven714
clipper's remarks: The VW ball is in a private collection. Mr. Fisk, who was born in Vermont in 1970, has made other balls with auto themes: a school bus, a green John Deere tractor, a drab brown U.P.S. truck and a white Mister Softee ice cream truck, complete with lights.

“A U.P.S. guy saw the U.P.S. ball and stopped by the house of the owner,” Mr. Fisk said. “He thought it was a package ready for shipping.”

His spheres come with windows and steering wheels. He does all the work using metal and glass fabrication skills he taught himself. He has also sculptured a street ball, a sphere of asphalt marked with painted dotted lines. Mr. Fisk’s barn ball, with wood painted red and a window, was used for the cover of the Phish album “Round Room.”

He has moved beyond the balls into new modes of sculpture. “The new theme for some reason seems to be garbage,” he said. Among his latest pieces, shown at the Taxter & Spengemann Gallery in Manhattan, is a sculpture of a garbage can and another of a garbage b

Clip Source: bigpicture.typepad.com

IT looks like a Volkswagen Microbus, the sort that starred in last year’s film “Little Miss Sunshine,” somehow squeezed into a sphere six feet in diameter.

The ball is the work of the artist Lars-Eric Fisk of Burlington, Vt., who specializes in sphere-shaped sculpture. His work has been shown in museums including the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park in Lincoln, Mass., outside Boston, and the Dartmouth College museum.

In the catalog for the DeCordova exhibition, he called the sphere was a “simple, seamless form expressing movement and the concept of endlessness and timelessness without a beginning, without an ending.”

“Everyone gets it,” Mr. Fisk said of his use of the sphere in a recent interview.

He completed the VW ball in 1999. “I don’t know why, but the VW ball keeps surfacing every few years on the Internet,” he said.

Tags: round cars