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I recently was wandering around the Smithsonian's National Portrait Galley and was up in a very rarely visited corner of the building and came across this sculpture. It stunned me, resonating on some basic level. Sure, it's Raquel Welch in a bikini and resonates for the obvious reasons, but that wasn't it.
I knew I had seen it a long time ago. It took a while to place it, and then it came to me from the depth of my mind. A picture of it was in one of the first Playboys I had ever seen. I was just a little kid, and my older cousins had snagged some of my uncle's hidden Playboy stash. I must have been around 6 or 7 years old. We were sleeping out in our bus, made up as a camper.
I've since traced it to an issue from 1970.
Frank Gallo is the artist who made this. I've worked with epoxy resin and fiberglass, and I'm not sure how he did it. It's so smooth. He made some kind of mold, but with the negative angles, like where it curves around at her waist, and where her hair is, you would never be able to release this from a mold. I'm curious how he did it.
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