‘Nobody ever expects a narwhal on your wall,” said Patrick Flynn, one half of the art and design duo behind Great and Small. Flynn and Mike Langlois create odd, whimsical and strange trophy wall mounts featuring narwhals, sloths, hippopotamus and manatees.
“People think its massed produced, but its just two guys shucking and jiving, trying to get it all done in respective garages,” said Flynn.
The idea for these artistic, esoteric animals came about pretty serendipitously two years ago, according to Flynn. Both work for the Vancouver company Instructional Technologies Inc., Langlois as a 3-D designer and Flynn as an illustrator and painter. The company creates educational software training programs for a variety of industries.
“I was walking by Mike’s desk, where he was trying out some new 3-D software for work, and he had done a 3-D model of a walrus,” said Flynn. Flynn, who draws intricate marker illustrations on his kid’s lunch napkins for school, had drawn a walrus for his daughter the day before. Then began the “wouldn’t it be funny if Langlois made a 3-D print of the walrus and Flynn painted it?”
“The first one we actually did was of a narwhal,” said Flynn. “You literally start with a blob, and figuratively sculpt this out of nothing. It’s pretty close to actual sculpture.”
He then painted the 3-D model, created a wooden mount — and had a weird eureka moment. Now they’re up to 20 different figures, including an anatomical heart and brain, an idea that sprung up last Valentine’s Day.
“Wouldn’t it be funny to have a heart mounted?” Flynn said. “It’s a slippery slope, you never know where you end up.”
They’ve refined the process: creating a 3-D print of an animal to create a silicon model, which they then use to make a resin cast. The resin cast gets smoothed, polished, painted and mounted as a finished product. “Neither of us could do this without the other, we both have our set skills, compliment each other,” said Flynn.
“I’m 49, he’s 26, we just kind of hit it off, we don’t even think about it,” he said.
The wall mounts range from 2.5 inches at the smallest to about 6 inches on average for the larger sculptures. They do also offer a narwhal that is 16 inches from horn tip to mount. “It’s one of those things where a computer is used in the initial design,” said Flynn, but the resulting work makes it a handmade product.
“It’s like trying to balance on the back of two legs of a chair at the kitchen table, between creepy and cute,” said Flynn. His 12-year old daughter once said of their designs: “It’s horrifying. It’s beautiful.”
“We’ve had the opportunity to make it wacky,” said Flynn. The line of gold-painted animals has been really popular, while the list of requests and suggestions grow.
“Very high on the list are unicorns, dragons and dinosaurs,” he said. “We’ve got someone who wants a vertebrae. You gain a new appreciation for these things when you have to look at it, and the process of creating it, you see the inherent design of organic things that you don’t think about.”
The pair have taken their sculptures to Crafty Wonderland in Portland and Urban Craft Uprising in Seattle. They’ve met with a pretty excited reaction, said Flynn. More recently, they’ve appeared in a couple of shops in Portland. He hopes to also see the animals popping up in Vancouver coffee shops. They’ve sold about 500 wall mounts between Esty, Facebook and craft shows.
The wall mounts can be found on www.great-small.com. They will also be on display at Albina Press Coffeehouse, 5012 S.E. Hawthorne Blvd., Portland, through March 1.
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