The red brick house on the corner of a quiet suburban street in Fair Lawn, New Jersey looks unassuming, but step gingerly down the narrow staircase to the basement and you’ll enter a world created entirely by Etsy shop owner Michael Locascio. Bookshelves bow under the weight of large anatomy and photography tomes while a skeleton keeps watch. Michael’s macabre creations come to life at a workstation covered in tools and in-progress pieces. His Etsy shop, Dellamorte & Co., is a curiosity cabinet filled with creepy creations he sculpts and finishes by hand.
Michael has sculpted since he was a child and began to take art seriously in high school thanks to the encouragement of a supportive teacher. He apprenticed in a program run by the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City during high school and for a year after graduation. There, he studied human anatomy and learned how to make bronze monuments — working with live models, visiting museums for inspiration and even participating in cadaver dissections. He also spent a summer studying sculpture in Florence, Italy through the Newington-Cropsey Foundation.
Michael focused on fine art and art history while attending college at New York University. When he graduated in 1998, he had artistic chops, but no idea what to do next. “I got out and I was a pretty good artist, but I didn’t know how to market my work or get into galleries,” he says. To avoid becoming a “starving artist,” he took a job sculpting for an action figure and collectibles company, which allowed him to earn a salary and benefits while still being able to sculpt. “The company I worked for did very detailed and realistic stuff that pushed my skill in a different direction,” he says.
He opened Dellamorte & Co. on Etsy in 2011 to combine his classical training with the finely detailed work he’d been doing on collectibles. Running his own business also gave him an opportunity to explore the darker mythological and folkloric themes that have long captured his attention. “With my Etsy shop, I’m able to do things exactly the way I want to,” he says. His first sale, an automaton wall plaque, came within 30 minutes after he opened his shop. Since then, he’s had more than 5,000 sales. When developing his products, Michael draws inspiration from art history and literature, the mysterious and macabre — skulls, bats and tombstone imagery — and from folklore and mythology. His shop's top sellers include folkloric characters such as Baba Yaga, a fearsome witch with Slavic origins, and Krampus, St. Nick’s evil sidekick.
Michael is surrounded by inspiration in his basement studio. He keeps anatomy reference books within reach of the desk where he sculpts. He works best when it’s dark and quiet, often sculpting and refining his creations from 8 p.m. to 3 a.m. This flexible schedule also means he can spend time with his six-year-old son, Griffin, when he gets home from school. He listens to podcasts or music when he is packing orders or using loud tools, like a drill press or grinder for refining seams and putting together parts of a cast. When he’s deep into sculpting, listening to an audiobook helps him stay focused.
Michael displays his personal collection of curiosities, which serve as inspiration, along the back wall of his studio. Specimen jars and skulls line the shelves alongside one-of-a-kind sculptures. One of his favorite pieces is a taxidermy Griffin, a mythological creature with the head and wings of an eagle and the body of a lion, which he commissioned. When he needs reference for a sculpture, such as the skull planter he recently added to his shop, Michael often turns to his own collection.
Michael sculpts using Castilene, a light green, wax-like modeling compound. He starts by molding the basic proportions of the sculpture, tweaking and refining the shape until it’s just right and adding finer details. Michael uses heat from a desk lamp to make the Castilene more malleable and a small gas flame to heat metal tools for adding small details. He likes to work with dental picks, sometimes using them more often than his steel sculpting implements from Italy. “I can take a cheap metal tool and put it on my grinder and customize it a little bit,” he explains. He also incorporates found objects, such as bits of jewelry and cloth, into his sculptures to create texture and detail, or when the sculpture calls for something with particularly sharp edges, like the gears in the Automaton plaque.
When Michael is happy with the finished sculpture, he hands it off to Jeremy Monz, a mold maker based in nearby Bloomingdale, New Jersey. Jeremy makes a silicon mold of the sculpture and creates resin casts from the mold based on the specifications of orders Michael needs to fulfill. For top selling products, Jeremy makes multiple molds to keep up with demand. He then sends the cast resin pieces back to Michael to be smoothed out, finished and painted. Some casts, including Dellamorte's creature-topped canes, are infused with iron or bronze powder and just need to be buffed, while other resin pieces are painted to a monochromatic finish. “I like the monochromatic patinas because it puts the focus on the sculpture,” Michael says. “I also try to give a lot of my pieces an antiqued, weathered vibe, which probably harkens to my studies in art history.” Heather Jean Skalwold helps Michael with painting and provides general shop assistance, including posting to the shop's social media accounts.
Features on blogs and shopping sites, such as Uncrate, have helped fuel Dellamorte’s success and drive sales of popular items, including a vase in the shape of an anatomically correct heart and spiraling tentacle candlesticks. Michael originally assumed his aesthetic would appeal only to a niche market, but he has had some welcome surprises. His tentacle candlesticks, which evoke H.P. Lovecraft’s horror fiction, have been purchased by marine biologists. The heart vase, which Michael describes as “a little gothy,” has proven popular with some cardiologists and heart patients.
Rather than try to predict what his fans will like, Michael trusts what he thinks is cool and puts new items in his shop regularly to see what sticks. If a particular design proves popular, he’ll riff on the theme and create complementary products. “If I do a bat wine stopper, then the challenge is to make a bat that’s going to feel good as a corkscrew,” Michael says. “I’ll make the bats wings raised so it gives you a grip.” Although sculpting is his passion, designing for a product’s function is a unique challenge for Michael and allows him to diversify his product line.
Where do you find inspiration for your work? Share in the comments below.
All photos by Char Alfonzo.