Rizzo Wonderland Brooksville sculptor’s fanciful frog clock installed at Discovery Museum

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Alice would feel right at home in Joe Rizzo’s wonderland. His sculptures can make you feel larger and small. The otters talk to you. There’s the 16-foot catfish, the shark riding a surfboard, not to mention the chocolate bar as big as a double bed. You expect the White Rabbit to scurry by, late for a tea party down on the banks of the nearby Bagaduce River in Brooksville.

These works in exaggerated scale make the life-size bald eagle in Rizzo’s Riverwild Gallery seem diminutive. The majestic piece called “Falling Pride” is carved out of seasoned black walnut. It is poised, frozen in mid-flight, wings outstretched, clutching at a stone-tipped arrow.

The Mad Hatter to this collection of larger-than-life fiberglass sculptures and exquisite wildlife reproductions is himself a big guy.

“Sometimes big is better!” Rizzo jokes. “I’ve been saying that to people my whole life. When I did the shark, I wanted to do it small. But a friend of mine said, ‘Why?'”

In downtown Bangor Monday morning, passers-by found themselves in the Brooksville artist’s wonderland as his fanciful, giant clock shaped like a pocket watch, with a frog perched cross-legged on top, was installed on the fa?ade of the Maine Discovery Museum. The clock is the museum’s thematic marquee. The sculpture actually tells the time and the frog is designed to “croak” on the hour.

The piece, weighing between 600 and 800 pounds, was commissioned as part of the $1.24 million budgeted for the design and construction of the elaborate exhibits in the museum. It took a seven-man crew from Sign Services of Stetson and three cranes all morning to erect the 13-foot sculpture. Subsequent crews of electricians worked into the afternoon to get the clock working.

“The croak does sound like a frog. It has a throaty sound, but is not deep enough to be a bullfrog,” Natalie Whitehouse, the museum’s director of marketing, said Monday. She and other staffers got a kick watching the reaction of motorists and pedestrians during the installation. “It was fun to look out the window and watch people’s faces.”

For Rizzo, the clock is a signature piece and culmination of work for the museum. He and the Display Concepts crew burned the midnight oil installing 82 different interactive exhibits. They created the river flowing beneath a 14-foot rock wall inside the building. They made the stone entryway to the Maine Authors display. And the giant face on the third floor is modeled after Rizzo’s twin daughters. You can walk into the head through the ear and look out through a periscope. Tickle the inside of the nose and it’ll sneeze.

Rizzo sees the clock as a fixture of the Queen City.

“When this thing is up and croaking,” he says, “it’ll also be a wonderful icon for downtown Bangor. The frog’s volume is adjustable – something for the insomniacs.”

Rizzo’s concept for the clock won the unanimous approval of the museum’s board of directors.

“Joe Rizzo showed amazing heart, passion, and belief in doing something first rate and exciting,” says Sean Faircloth, the museum’s former executive director. “Joe got it. He believed in the dream of achieving the highest quality possible; taking it to the next level. Joe was not content with plywood displays, and it’s what makes the museum a landmark in New England.”

The Brooksville artist tried to think out of the box.

“I took the frog and created a character: Thaddeus Pole. He links the child to the exhibit. I took the integral aspects of the museum – reading, writing, art, science, music, geography – and put them in the sculpture as a cello, paintbrush, pencil, and pocket watch; stars, and the earth. And Thaddeus Pole is reading a book.”

Rizzo is a study in contrasts. A master of the realistic detail, carving wildfowl out of basswood or maple burl, he is also a master of illusions when airbrushing the features of his enormous fiberglass sculptures. He has mastered traditional methods and materials and now innovates with space-age composites, creating new techniques that will become future standards.

Maine wildlife sculptor Forest Hart calls Rizzo “multitalented in a variety of the traditional mediums … and he’s very good at design and composition.”

Ironic, since Rizzo did not intend to be an artist when he left his native Hartford, Conn., for Maine. He simply wanted a wilder environment.

“I used to read Maine Sportsman Journal as a kid,” he says. “But watching carp running up the Piper Brook in Hartford was not what I call angling! I figured, if I’m young I can pack up and go wherever I want to go.”

So at age 17, Rizzo folded his tent and hitchhiked to Bangor. He ended up in Bar Harbor, camping out in the woods.

“Going four or five days without eating is a great motivator,” he recalls of his early hand-to-mouth existence. “So I got hired to paint a giant lobster mural on the side of a building.”

Rizzo had painted murals before, as a high schooler, for the West Hartford Fire Department.

In Bar Harbor, Rizzo also met Wendell Gilley, the famous bird carver, borrowed the master’s air brushes and painted pig t-shirts to sell for the annual “Pignic” summer celebration on Mount Desert Island. Gilley saw the young man’s natural ability and mentored him.

Now Rizzo makes a living concocting monstrous 3-D lobsters and other creations that are shipped all over the country.

“Everything I do is custom, creative, meticulous work,” says the Brooksville artist who employs a crew of six to produce the giant sculptures that transform his rural studio into Toon Town.

Works in varying stages of completion fill the small barn in Brooksville and spill over into the driveway and adjacent field. A huge yellow fish tail, part of a 16-foot catfish destined for a children’s museum in Alabama, is 7 feet in length.

“When we finished that one, I bought everyone in the crew fishing licenses,” says Rizzo, figuring his crew had earned a day on the stream.

Rizzo dreams of connecting the artistic and the utilitarian in public spaces.

“You go to a pet store and it’s just a building. Why not be inside a giant fish? That may sound ridiculous,” he says, “but in Wisconsin the Department of Inland Fisheries is housed in a 160 foot-long muskellunge!”

Rizzo works with neon, metal and complex epoxies and resins. Anyone who has been to amusement parks may have seen some of his work. He has done commissions for Dollywood in Nashville, Six Flags, various supermarket chains in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire. He has made building-size sub sandwiches and even a giant cornucopia shipped to Texas, naturally, where everything is bigger. The huge chocolate bar, Peanut Butter Cup, and chocolate kiss in his front yard will go to Hershey’s in Pennsylvania.

The Hershey characters reflect his sculpting process.

“The candy has armatures and bases of steel and rebar. Then they’re foam-coated and carved; then top-coated with fiberglass for durability; then spray painted,” he explains. “I’ve been sculpting with foam for 12 years. Everyone thought I was insane for doing it, but now everyone is using it.”

There are further benefits to the new materials.

“These otters, for instance,” he says, patting a pair of life-size fiberglass critters made for the Discovery Museum. “They grunt and whistle at you. That allows a child to experience the animal’s actual behavior. I’m also working on puffins that will do the same.”

When he sells an otter sculpture, Rizzo adopts a real live otter in the customer’s name, doing his bit for conservation.

Rizzo is branching out into another popular application of his foam and fiberglass techniques – building climbing walls. He has installed a wall at a camp in Bar Harbor and is hoping to do more.

“Taking a fantasy and turning it into something tangible is a gift to share, whether it’s a real bald eagle, a fantasy frog, or an artificial cliff,” Rizzo reflects. “Art gives. If you have the ability to make someone smile, that’s grandeur, in my opinion.”