Matt Lerch and Brian Hochstrat collaboration - The Vargas Girls

[Buddy Thomason]

Note: I reviewed the forum FAQ before posting this image and I don't believe it violates any rule.

This is a mighty fine collaboration, a potential award-winning collaboration, by two outstanding artists - Matthew Lerch and Brian Hochstrat.

The beautiful knife is a button-release (as opposed to a spring-loaded auto) and liner-lock configuration by Matt Lerch - a first class folding knife with space for Brian to just engrave the heck out of it! And he did an amazing job with "The Vargas Girls" and all the fancy gold loops and swoops.

Main elements of the gold patterns are engraved in a trompe l'oeil manner. The end result is that the gold actually looks sculpted but that is the trompe l'oeil illusion. It totally fooled me at first - I really thought it was sculpted in deep relief style until I looked closely.

Vargas is well known as one of the best ever female nude illustrators and his work appeared for many years in PLAYBOY magazine. Brian worked from two of Vargas' illustrations for this project - call them "Hat Girl" and "Wedding Girl" if you like. They are done in meticulous Italian bulino style engraving. I don't understand how Brian makes them look so real. I know it has to do with the extensive and at times subtle shadows and highlights Brian engraves into the gold but beyond that it's magic as far as I'm concerned.

I really hope this knife gets campaigned in Atlanta at BLADE Show. In the world of art knives it simply doesn't get any better than this. "As good as" maybe but "better" - I don't think so. The human figure is so difficult to render, whereas animals, landscapes, patterns etc. are far easier. Brian excels at rendering the human form in an attractive and natural way - the mark of a substantially talented artist.

I received very good input from Matt, Brian and the knife's lucky/smart owner while making this image. We went back and forth with draft images addressing various concerns. They helped me better "see" what's going on with the knife and the engraving. "Seeing" is the hardest part of photography and I didn't have a lot of time to get to know this knife in order to see in my mind the best way to depict it. The knife is a collaborative effort by design, but the image was a collaborative effort too.

 

[D.Douglas]

Wow!

 

[Buddy Thomason]

There's some more I should post about this.

From Brian:
All the colors are inlayed metals. The yellow is obviously yellow gold, but the rest of the colors are not as self explanatory. the gray fluff on hat girls dress is palladium, the rest of the colors are all gold alloys, pink and green are standard alloy colors, but the skin tone gold is a custom alloy that I came up with for that specific use. Also the girls hair is a japanese alloy that I mixed called shakudo, which is a low karat mix of copper and gold, which creates a patina that is richer than what standard copper will produce. The scroll work is art nouveau, aka liberty scroll. The girls as you know are reproductions of Alberto Vargas, but are adapted to better fit the area provided on the knife. If you compare the engraving to the original artwork you can see the elongation of the girls in the engraving, which ads to their feminine quality and makes better use of the space the knife had to offer.

Also from Brian come the original illustrations. Not sure of the time period but they are from before the 1960s when I became familiar with Vargas' illustrations.

 

[HHH Knives]

Words escape me at the moment. Thanks for sharing and the info about the process and art.