I was asked to lend a branch necklace for a photo shoot based on Frida Kahlo’s Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird (below middle) and accepted without knowing any other information-- after all, it’s Vanity Fair and my favorite jewish-mexican-german-female surrealist painter.
But it just kept getting better. After submitting a sketch (bottom) and getting the thumbs-up I started building a frame for the branch out of brass wire and sketching designs for the hummingbird. Eventually someone mentioned that I needed to make sure the necklace was large enough to fit “Seth”, and I was perplexed and a bit excited-- this is, of course, Vanity Fair and full of celebrity. Could it be that I was making a necklace for a guy-- huh?-- and that it might be for Seth Rogen? It became an even more irresistible challenge.
It occurred to me that if the piece needed to be “boy sized” it might be helpful to have a man around... so I bought one (a mannequin) and added a photo from the one-sheet for The Pineapple Express of Seth’s head on top of a copy of Kahlo’s painting and stuck it in the form.
Eventually the hummingbird was sculpted by the amazing Waylon Dobson from a drawing, cast into sterling silver, blackened and finally polished.
The wire frame was welded branch by branch together, textured with a florentine burr and ultimately given a brown patina with a liver of sulphur bath.
The end result by Norman Jean Roy is so much more breathtaking than I could have imaged-- a painting, a photograph, truly an artist’s work.
