My Scrapbook: Chandler Gets Busted!

My Scrapbook

Raymond Chandler Bust by Bryan Moore
The Raymond Chandler Bronze Bust Project

 

Pipe-sucking artist, raconteur, sartorial gentleman about town and all-round stand-up guy Bryan Moore has sculpted everything from life-sized bronze busts of Edgar Allan Poe and props for the TV show Tales from the Darkside to collectible statuettes of sports figures for Upper Deck and Barbie shoes for Mattel, but in January 2019, he announced he would be tackling an ambitious new project: a quartet of bronze busts of iconic crime fiction authors in what he’s calling his Noir Series. Here’s a few shots from May 2019 of the first in the series, Raymond Chandler, still in clay but just about ready to be bronzed.

You can follow the process on Moore’s own Raymond Chandler Bronze Bust Project Facebook page, which charts the project through a series of intriguing posts and plenty of geeky, arty photographs of character studies, research shots, Moore’s actual studio, personal asides and digressions (getting the glasses right was a pain in the butt), and of course the work itself, in various stages of completion, from  a bunch of raw clay (recycled from his bust of Mary Shelley) to the almost-final version (above) before it’s cast in bronze and sent out to grace an unnamed library.

Other works by Moore include H.P. Lovecraft, currently on display at the Providence Athenaeum in Providence, Rhode Island; Edgar Allan Poe in the Boston Public Library in Boston, Massachusetts; Bram Stoker in the Dublin Writers Museum in Dublin, Ireland and in Seattle, Washington at the Museum of Pop Culture in 2017, and Mary Shelley in Seattle, Washington at the Museum of Pop Culture in 2018.

You can check out and even buy some of his art on his web site, The Art of Bryan Moore, if you want to add a touch of class to your library.

HEAR, HEAR!

• According to his Facebook page, Moore always include a financial donation to the local children’s literacy program in the city where he places an original author bust.

FURTHER INVESTIGATION

• The Art of Bryan Moore
  The artist’s official web site.
• The Raymond Chandler Bronze Bust Project
  The Facebook page for the project.
• Bryan Moore
  The Instagram page.
• My Scrapbook
  A Cornucopia of Tear Sheets, Illustrations, Photos, Cartoons, Scribbles & Other Crap That I Think is Cool

Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith. All photographs were nicked from Bryan Moore’s Raymond Chandler Bronze Bust Project Facebook Page. Please don’t sue me.