When he was 4 years old, artist Erik Ulfers carved the New York City skyline into the headboard of his bed.
“My parents were furious,” he says. “We were living in Iowa, but I was already trying to envision my future in the big city.”
That future would include a successful career in theater and television set design (most notably the sets used on CNN news shows) and, more recently, a full-time foray into fine art. Ulfers works in two disparate media, making gouache-and-pencil portraits of fantastical flying creatures (a rooster crossed with what might be a sparrow; a griffin-like creature with a rat’s tail) and intricate clock-inspired assemblages he calls “timepieces.”
“I’ve always drawn and painted,” Ulfers says. “When I started my design company, I had a side hustle doing paintings. Then I started building these clock assemblages about 10 years ago.”
The “timepieces” sprang from years of making tiny models of stage and set designs for his clients. “Back then, we didn’t have computer rendering programs,” Ulfers says. “You had to create delicate, intricate work – whole environments in quarter-inch scale. Once we stopped working that way, I had tons of junk left over, little pieces I’d been using to represent other things in my design work.”
Ulfers combines that “junk,” which is strewn across surfaces in his otherwise tidy studio space, into striking sculptures of wood, marble epoxy and bits of brass.
“My ambition is to communicate something that’s about more than time,” he says of his assemblage work. “I don’t start with a sketch of the piece, because they need to be less calculated. I pull together pieces and layer them until they’re right. Some of them take months before I look at the piece and say, ‘Stop. This one is done.’” Learn more about his work at erikulfersclockworks.com
Colored Pencils
“It’s not the color so much as the etching quality these give. I use them to create texture on the feathers in my paintings.”
Dremel Tool
“It’s great for sanding, cutting, making screw holes.”
Glues
“The right glue is important, and Loctite is the best. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve glued my fingers together. I probably don’t have fingerprints anymore.”
Clothespins
“I use these to stabilize a piece while I’m working. You think there’d be some fancy art-world version of these.”
Winsor & Newton Paints
“Of all the paints, this has the best color saturation. The black is really black.”
Bits of gilt “stuff”
“I have boxes and boxes of shiny gold pieces of this and that. I never know what I’m going to find.”
