This is your first taste of Harv-art. It's a piece that I did with homage to the famous Archaeopteryx fossil in the Berlin Museum. The skeleton is done with recycled aluminum from wire and other sources, pounded flat on an anvil to give a texture and then polished with steel wool to give it a sheen. I cut all the little shapes of the bones and glued them to the backing with superglue. The 'bones' are laid out on pastel imprints of the feathers and other body outlines from the fossil image. Further articulation of pastels mimics the surrounding stone matrix. The base for all of this is a pastel paper afixed to a foamboard backing. Michaelangelo could not have done a more excellent synthesis of sculpture and pastel painting, don't you agree?

Well, maybe that is overstating things a tad, but I am proud of this piece and have never seen anything quite like it. I plan to do a larger version someday using copper instead of aluminum. This piece is currently in a private collection in Chicago.

OK,..... so I gave it to my son Aaron who lives in Chicago now. It's still 'in a private collection in Chicago'!