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Mark Fuller was at Bequest Abode in Palm Beach Gardens one day aback he addled up a chat with a stranger.
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Henry Company Homes Design Center - Backsplash - YouTube | Henry Homes Design Center“The actuality said, ‘What do you do?’
“I said, ‘I do accessible art.’
“‘Where?’” the drifter asked.
“‘That one appropriate there,’” Fuller said, pointing to his behemothic carve of a almanac amateur turntable at the arcade circuitous off PGA Boulevard.
Even if you don’t apperceive who Mark Fuller is, you’ve absolutely apparent his portfolio. His alfresco art has become an assured allotment of Palm Beach County’s cultural landscape.
RELATED PHOTOS: A portfolio of Mark Fuller’s art pieces in Palm Beach County
PGA Commons’ blatant butterfly sculpture? That’s Fuller.
The cadger and angle designs on I-95’s complete barrier walls? That’s Fuller.
Shimmering close leaves at Okeechobee and Royal Palm Beach boulevards. Those solar-powered caliginosity on the South Canton Civic Center in Delray Beach. A walking arch at Mounts Botanical Gardens. A heart-shaped 9/11 canonizing in Juno Beach. That funky-colored angle on Flagler Drive abreast Good Samaritan Hospital. Horses agriculture at a “waterhole” at a Boynton Beach arcade complex. An abstruse bread carve alfresco a coffer by The Gardens mall.
All Fuller.
“I appearance them as toys for the environment,” Fuller said of his accessible sculptures and art work. “I actualize what I like to see. You get to be affectionate of an inventor.”
A storyteller, too. Behind abounding of his all-embracing sculptures are tributes to bounded history, sly jokes and, in his best claimed work, a canonizing to a best acquaintance whose activity was cut tragically short.
***
On a backward October afternoon, Fuller is continuing on a sidewalk forth Donald Ross Road, agilely watching four workers altercation a ample allotment of arced metal. Then, he notices article amiss. “I don’t appetite the bond on this side,” he instructs them.
Dangling from a crane, the workers are arresting attenuate stainless animate bedding about Fuller’s latest — and better — accessible art project. Called “C2H6,” it’s a four-ton, 22 1/2-foot-tall representation of a hydrocarbon actinic formula.
Nestled in a bracken of trees, the huge, agleam carve is accessible to atom alfresco the $115 actor United Technologies architectonics activity up on Palm Beach Gardens’ science and analysis corridor.
It’s been a year-and-a-half aback Fuller anticipation of the formula’s accustomed affiliation to the biotech hub. On his appointment computer, he advised the carve of eight cogitating orbs, apery two genitalia carbon and six genitalia hydrogen. He active a aggregation of metal workers to appearance sections central a Riviera Beach barn and assuredly had it alien to its new home appropriate off the eastbound access of Interstate 95.
“When you go and angle abutting to it, the admeasurement of it. Wow,” he said, awestruck at the calibration of the $300,000 piece, anchored in 10 anxiety of underground concrete, and congenital to bear 170 mph winds. “I didn’t apprehend it was this big.”
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Henry Company Homes New Home Design Center | Henry Homes Design CenterFuller, 64, is a man who thinks big. It ability explain that ample painting of King Kong’s face assertive the dining allowance of his neatly appointed home and appointment in West Palm’s Bear Island community.
Trim and athletic, Fuller looks added like a acknowledged administrator than boho artiste. And he is. He refers to himself as an ecology bright and automated designer. He drives a dark, low-slung Porsche. He calmly speaks the “interfacing” argot of accumulated developers who apply him to accomplish art requirements for multimillion-dollar bartering projects.
“It’s a passion,” he noted, “but it’s additionally a business.”
Still, those four baby circles tattooed on his larboard bottom adumbration at a freer spirit.
And to do his affectionate of all-embracing assignment (“It’s not ‘plop art’ that you can stick anywhere”), he’s had to adept abounding skills: computer graphics, architecture, engineering, construction, mathematics and landscaping.
“I don’t sit there and bang and exhausted my stuff,” he said. “It’s apparatus cut. My assignment is not congenital by me personally. I absorb time creating it and conceptualizing it. It’s a altered affectionate of craft.”
***
Born and aloft in Basin Placid, N.Y., Fuller knew he was visually artistic from an aboriginal age. Afterwards brief to West Palm Beach in the backward ’70s, he formed as administrator of cartoon for Urban Design Studios, and eventually ran his own eight-person appointment specializing in signage for hotels and arcade centers.
But he never admired actuality pigeonholed, so on a whim he entered a antagonism to actualize a accessible carve for the angle of Palm Beach Lakes Boulevard and Flagler Drive. His angel of a checkered aerial fish, based partly on the history of a adjacent wartime seaplane base, won.
“I did it for fun,” he said. “But as time went on, I begin I admired accomplishing that affectionate of affair more.”
And he admired how art could acquaint a story, if you looked carefully enough.
Take Fuller’s “The Last Pasture” and “Waterhole No. 3,” a carve activity of horses agriculture about a counterfeit basin at the Boynton Town Center. It ability be aloof appealing animals and authentic nostalgia. Or it ability be a acicular nod to a absent time afore bartering development swallowed up every bit of affirmation acreage in Palm Beach County.
And again there’s “Magician’s Birthday,” alfresco the Wells Fargo coffer abreast The Gardens mall. The vertical abstruse carve is topped by a row of seven coin-like argent discs. The abstraction came aback “I was accepting adversity with a bank,” Fuller recalled. “My annual consistently seemed to accept a lot beneath in it than I thought.”
So, he fabricated abiding the bill all accept a aperture in them. “It was like a claimed antic I could accelerate in there,” he said.
Hired to actualize a assignment for a new dining and arcade circuitous on west PGA Boulevard, he started by walking about the abandoned grass field.
“There were autocrat collywobbles everywhere,” he said. “That ashore in my mind.”
When PGA Commons was built, his cogitating carve of nine triangular frames that actualize the aftereffect of a metamorphosing butterfly became added than an art work. It has been featured in civic magazines and newspapers.
“Some of the pieces he’s done are iconic now,” said above Gardens ambassador Eric Jablin. “People accredit to them. It’s like, ‘I’ll accommodated you at the butterfly.’”
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“Every time I sit outside, I see bodies demography pictures of it,” added Joel Channing, the administrator of Channing Corp., which developed PGA Commons. “We took the butterfly (idea), and fabricated it the figure in our advertisements.”
Channing said Fuller is the best artisan he’s anytime formed with, and he knows his stuff: One of his advisers was the German abstruse master Josef Albers.
“He can see things that added bodies can’t,” said Channing of Fuller. “He aloof has a adroitness of advancing up with the appropriate affair for the appropriate place.”
***
There’s one allotment that Fuller wishes he hadn’t bare to appear up with.
The one for Hank.
To this day, he gets afraid up talking about Henry Skokowski.
Fuller’s ancient bang-up at Urban Design Studios, Skokowski congenital a appalling acceptability as a acreage artisan for communities such as PGA National, Breakers West and BallenIsles.
Hank and Mark were added than co-workers. They were bound pals. Dive buddies. They affirmed over an attraction with ’60s and ’70s bedrock — Pink Floyd, the Stones, The Clash. Skokowski had a tag on his email that read: “Let the music set you free.”
“It was a huge affiliation amid us,” Fuller said.
Skokowski was additionally a crammer assuredly accepting some antithesis in his life. Afterwards commutual affairs for Bequest Place, he took a dream vacation to Australia, area he motorcycled, dived the Great Barrier Reef and, as always, bought lots of music. He’d accelerate emails to friends, calling himself “Crocodile Hank.”
It all came to a abhorrent end on Valentine’s Day in 2004, aback Skokowski was dead afterwards his motorcycle was hit bang by a car forth the Great Ocean Road in Melbourne. He was 55 years old.
A addled Fuller was asked to actualize a bequest to his acquaintance at Bequest Place. Remembering that aggregate affection for music, abnormally the vinyl 45 rpm singles of their youth, he anticipation of a almanac turntable.
And that’s how “Stack 45” became Palm Beach County’s alone bedrock and cycle memorial. The arced atramentous “record” curve about a arbor of 45 rpm artificial inserts accord the carve a kinetic, volume-rattling quality. Actuality in a cartage amphitheater adds to the spinning jukebox effect.
As always, Fuller larboard clues. The rows of bristles atramentous curve and bristles inserts denote Skokowski’s age of 55. The allotment appears to angle aback and arc skyward, as if Fuller is sending admired tunes to his old pal up in heaven.
“I capital to put so abundant of him” in the work, Fuller said. “He and I were the best of friends. That was an affecting allotment for me.”
Of course, some don’t get it.
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Henry company homes design center - Home design | Henry Homes Design Center“I’ve heard bodies say they anticipate it’s a big rib cage of an animal,” Fuller said. “It doesn’t amount if bodies see the basal messages. The capital affair is they acquisition article adorable in it.”
Fuller additionally accustomed Skokowski by agreement benches about Bequest Abode with Skokowski’s shoes molded on them. It was Fuller’s way of acquisitive that his absent acquaintance would “be appropriate back.” He did a agnate bank at Gardens Burghal Hall, with pieces including a briefcase, half-eaten doughnut, a cup of coffee and a Rolling Stones key chain.
It was the absolute tribute, said ex-mayor Jablin. “Hank acclimated to sit alfresco there in advanced of Burghal Hall with a briefcase, coffee and a doughnut.”
In some ways, Fuller’s assignment has become alike with Palm Beach Gardens, area he additionally created a bouncing carve of red and white claret beef at the Gardens Medical Center and an brace apparent by 89,996 bright marbles at Bequest Place. For free, he crafted a children’s canonizing carve at a Burns Road esplanade and advised the armpit of the aerial 9/11 canonizing forth Northlake Boulevard. “He’s accustomed a lot aback to the city,” said Jablin.
But that beyond has acquired problems.
In 2009, there was an uproar aback Fuller was called to actualize bus shelters for the burghal and association anticipation accessible money was advantageous for “this art stuff,” as Fuller recalled it. The burghal board eventually alone the plan, and Fuller charcoal sensitive. For best of his work, Fuller is paid anon by developers. In Palm Beach Gardens, a burghal authorization requires that at atomic 1 percent of any bartering activity over a actor dollars be appropriate for accessible art. “These projects are not adjourned with tax dollars,” he emphasized.
And to this day, he keeps models of those proposed bus shelters acutely displayed on shelves in his active room. It’s the one that got away, and it still stings.
***
What’s abutting for Fuller? He’s not slowing down, with several projects planned in Seattle, California and New Jersey.
He’s in that best enviable of positions: actuality approved by clients, and accepting the abandon to actualize after a lot of disproportionate interference. Good thing, aback he usually knows absolutely what he wants.
“I’m told I’m difficult to assignment for,” he admitted. “I’m accurate and demanding.”
For an artisan whose signature is splashed all over the county, Fuller keeps a almost low profile. The ancestor of two developed accouchement gets a bang out of active about and assuming his assignment to his grandchild. But he’d rather break anonymous, and let the assignment allege for itself. Or let bodies acquaint him what they think.
Fuller remembers aback they were putting up the “Magician’s Birthday” carve and a eyewitness stopped.
“‘What’s that?’, the eyewitness asked.
“‘It’s art.’
“‘You alarm that art?’
“We absurd up,” Fuller said. “Everybody’s activity to accept an opinion.”
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