Sumo wrestling toads will fight it out at ArtPrize in Grand Rapids, Michigan

ArtPrize is in its second year.
With over $450,000 in prize money up for grabs it's the biggest art contest I know of, the public decides the winner, and it would be rude not to have a bash!
There's over 1,700 artists entered this year!

Here's a photoshop scramble to show what my piece might look like...

Here's how ArtPrize works...
It's very interestingly run.
Artists sign up to the website with their proposed idea (not necessarily finished).
Venues sign up, announcing they'd like to host some art.
Artists and venues approach each other, and when they'd like to team up, sign a contract.
When a registered artist signs up with a registered venue, you're officially entered!
Any type of venue can take part from museums to tatoo parlors, as can any type of artist (with or without tatoos).
The public sees the art on display all around the city and they vote for their favorites.

There will also be some additional prizes awarded by sponsors instead of voted on by the public, but the $450,000 put up by the organizer is divided up between the top ten winners, publicly voted on, with a top prize of $250,000!

My entry...
My Sumo Wrestling Toads form the centerpiece of my entry, called 'Amphibian Struggle'.
You can see my public profile on the ArtPrize website by clicking HERE.
There'll be a video looping near the bronzes, which includes over 100 cartoon frogs I drew on my iPhone with the brushes app, amongst other things.

It's an expensive proposition- casting, crating and sending bronzes around, so luckily I was able to enlist the help of Peter Wright.
He has been responsible for assuming the financial burden of some of my larger, usually more esoteric pieces.
Once the sculpting is finished, he takes them from my sculpting table to the foundry, and on through the production cycle in exchange for a share of the profits.

I can safely say I wouldn't have enjoyed such an immediate and thorough immersion into the sculpture community had I not been lucky enough to partner up with Peter very early on.
So lucky for me he's paying for the costs incurred to enter, and so if I win any prize money, he's getting half the winnings! There'd be a slight variation if I won first prize...

My pledge...
If I win the $250,000 first prize, since my theme is the struggle amphibians face to survive, I'll be donating $50,000 off the top to Amphibian Ark. Peter and I will have to make do with half each of what's left!
Amphibian Ark are an organization dedicated to saving as many species of amphibians from extinction as possible.
Amphibians are currently facing more threats than they can handle, and while plenty of species have us to thank for their impending doom, ironically we are also their best and only hope for survival.

And that's what Amphibian Ark are dedicated to doing, by providing captive breeding programs for species who can't currently survive in the wild, until whatever threat facing them passes.

$50,000 is their estimated cost to save a single species, so I'll give them that much to throw my lot in with others working to save the yellow legged frog of the Sierra Nevada mountains.

So if you're in Grand Rapids, Michigan, between Sept 23 and Oct 10, why not pop on over to the public museum and check out my entry.
By all means vote for it too, if you'd like!



Click these links to visit my website... SteveWorthingtonArt.com - Sculpture that loves you back
or my Etsy store, CritterVille

My parrot, and some super cool ringtones...

Meridee calls it my parrot, because it’s bright green and talks to me.
I take it everywhere and it will startle people with its perfect impersonations of croaking toads, tree frogs, gobbling turkeys and howling coyotes.

Or cow-outies as some friends of ours three year old likes to say.

It’s not really a parrot of course. It’s my iPhone with a shiny green cover.

I loaded a bunch of free ringtones which are recordings of various animal sounds.

I was over at Lee’s recently, discussing this or that outside near his workshop. He was working on some of my turtles, toads and tree frogs at the time. He suddenly became very distracted, looking all about the ground for the plains spadefoot toads that had unexpectedly started calling nearby.

While I of course simply fished them out of my pocket, in green shiny iPhone form, and shut them up from croaking before seeing what they really had to say.

Realizing the true source of the sounds, he rolled his eyes and muttered, almost under his breath, ‘Ahh, obsessed’.

Here’s the ringtones. If you’ve ever wanted a howler monkey in your pocket, now’s your chance! (They sound like a very drunk man belching uncontrollably in a small echo chamber. Breaks the ice at parties!).

When I was a kid I developed a kind of signature. It was a super quick cartoon frog which I could dash off in a couple of seconds. I scribbled it on everything.

One of the things I'm doing on my phone is drawing a frog everytime I find myself waiting in line, or waiting anywhere for anything , come to think of it.
I'm using the same basic template in so far as it's the same dozen lines or so, drawn with my finger on the phone but varying the speed or general proportions to see slight variations in each frog.

I even started doing left handed frogs facing the other way to see if would add some more variety.

Each one seems to have its own personality.
My favorites I think are ones done so fast I'm not thinking about them at all. It's fun to see how they turn out.
I'm planning on assembling masses of them together in a giant 'quilt like' print, with a bit more jiggery pokery to boot, to represent endangered amphibian species.

Less destructive than grafitti-ing it everywhere around town! (see, I'm all grown up now).


Oh, I forgot it was Thanksgiving coming up so I'll email the details of my new WIN two mice contest to everyone who's signed up to 'Get Email Updates' (see side bar if you want to sign up) on Dec 1st, and announce the winners on Dec 7th.


SteveWorthingtonArt.com - Sculpture that loves you back
My Etsy store, CritterVille.

New shiny toy and new work in progress report.

My thousand year old cell phone stopped working.
I don't want some new fangled thingamabob texty toy doodad to make a phone call.
So I took it in, got a new card installed and voila! (as they say in France), it worked.
For about a day. Then it died for good.
Merde (as they also say a lot in France).

So it seemed there was no choice but to get the all singing and all dancing iPhone to replace it.
Not only can I now browse the internet while Meridee takes fourteen times longer than she says she will in the supermarket, but I can check my email in the woods, take pictures of baby lizards if I should find them on the bedroom carpet, and finger paint straight onto the tiny screen (you need the $4.99 brushes app for that, but it's well worth it)!

See what I mean?...


These new fangled phone things are amazing.
You can do a trillion times more with them than you can with your tv remote, and it's three trillion times easier to figure out how.
I still don't know how to use my remote.

Lee is off to make a mold on a life size angel or something. So he'll be on location in Colorado for he reckons 2 to 3 weeks.
So I went round his place yesterday to check my waxes before he mails them overnight to the foundry. They need them by Monday to turn them around for their next drop off back in Santa Fe, which will give us time to get them finished and patinas applied (I hope!) in time for my show at Manitou Galleries on Nov 6.

I'll give the foundry a call next week to make sure we're still in good shape.

I was pretty excited to see my small-ish turtle, mid sized bumper to bumper bits, bottle stoppers, and tree frogs especially.
I've been a frog nut since I can remember.








Once at school the teacher accused me of looking inside a book during a memory test.
We had to bring a book in from home, and read a paragraph and re-write it in class with the book closed. I was word perfect, which is why the teacher accused me of looking, which I of course proved not to be the case by writing it out again. Along with the next paragraph. And the paragraph after that.
Then I re-drew the pictures.
It was of course the frog section of an animal encyclopedia. I had read the frog section about a trillion times at home and copied the frog drawings probably every time as well!

So I suppose I did have a slightly unfair advantage, but it was quite satisfying to be such a smartypants and stick it to the teacher!
(I'm sure I would have hated to have me as a student)...

My website and Etsy store.