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Tarpon Springs artist focuses on big pictureBy JUDY MORRIS © St. Petersburg Times, published May 9, 2001 TARPON SPRINGS -- What would you get if you crossed the Italian Renaissance with an underwater circus? That, or something a lot like it, was the vision that emerged when Tarpon Springs artist Mitch Kolbe took on a commission in 1999 for a large painting at a new restaurant, the Trattoria del Porto, at Universal Studios in Orlando. But that was just the start. Before he was finished, Universal had tapped him to do a second mural project, and someone wanting him for a third at Disney's Celebration was knocking on his door. The result was three very different projects painted during one prolonged burst of creativity. Kolbe, 46, has been painting for most of his life. Born in Charlotte, N.C., into a family of artists, he moved to New York in 1973 to study at the famous Art Student's League. In 1977, he had his first exhibition there and also made his first visit to Tarpon Springs. In 1983, he moved to Tarpon Springs for good. Ten years later, he was commissioned by St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Cathedral to create a life-size statue of an Epiphany cross diver. The 6-foot bronze statue stands in the church courtyard and has become an attraction for Tarpon Springs. Throughout his career, Kolbe, whose gallery is at 123 E Court St., has worked as a commercial artist, muralist, sculptor, Florida landscape artist and portrait painter. So it was not surprising that a California art broker, sent in the fall of 1997 to check out the artsy community of Tarpon Springs, found him. The project she had in mind was for the Westin Innisbrook Resort. The resort was undergoing renovations, and the owners were thinking about using the work of local artists. Eventually they decided to use photographs rather than paintings, but the broker didn't forget Kolbe. When the Universal project came up, she gave him a call. Negotiations took about six months, and by early 1999 the first project was under way. Universal had begun construction on a replica of the Italian town of Portofino, including a family-style restaurant called Trattoria del Porto, which had six massive white columns, 10 feet high and 10 feet wide. Kolbe was hired to paint these columns. As a starting point, Universal's art director showed Kolbe illustrations from James Christensen's science-fiction fantasy, A Journey of the Imagination. The only other guidelines he got had to do with infringement. There could be no Little Mermaid or Dr. Seuss look-alikes, and he had to maintain a sense of family decorum -- in other words, no cleavage. As a result, the fairies ended up with flowers covering their decolletage. Throughout initial brainstorming sessions, words like playful, fanciful, Italian Renaissance, circus, fantasy and harlequins kept coming up. Armed with these images, Kolbe headed to his studio. He began by doing research into all aspects of the Italian Renaissance, its history, art, fashions and hairstyles. At the time, he found, big hair, a la Marge Simpson, apparently was all the rage. In addition, he researched circuses, Mediterranean sea life (both plants and creatures), and the way bodies move under water. Everything was fodder for Kolbe's imagination: toy Vatican Swiss guards he remembered from childhood, a pink Hula Hoop that stood in the corner of his studio, even his breakfast. "One morning I ordered bacon at the cafe next door," he said. "When it arrived, I noticed that one of the pieces looked exactly like a sea horse with a saddle. I took it home, polyurethaned it and hung it up to dry. Several days later, I noticed the sea horse was gone and my cocker spaniel, Gabby, was sick, but it proved to be the perfect model for all of the sea horses that appear on the columns." He also used Gabby's face for the seals, and in place of mermaids he used genies. One of his favorite characters is the "catfish": half-cat, half-fish. There are seashell carriages pulled by sea horses, underwater jousters, an octopus parade, acrobats, jugglers and clowns. One column features musicians, 16th century artists, singers and painters. And it's all underwater. Nothing is static; everything flows. The result is that diners feel like they are looking up from the bottom of the sea. Before he began the final paintings, Kolbe created a scale model of the entire restaurant, complete with windows, doors and perfectly painted columns. Anyone involved in the project came to see it and give the okay. They came and they saw. Not one thing was changed. Work then began on the final phase. The finished columns are a mix of old and new, reality and fantasy. They're filled with symbols and details, yet executed simply. There are hundreds of images in fantastic colors and so many things going on that if a family ate there three times a day, for several days, they would never have to see the same thing twice. This project took almost a year to complete. But as Kolbe was putting the finishing touches on the columns, Universal executives asked him to decorate another of their new restaurants, the Delfino Riviera, a romantic dinner spot. The mural they had in mind was a landscape 147 feet long that would wrap around the whole top of the restaurant. Kolbe wrapped the top 3 feet of the restaurant walls with a landscape of northern Italy, the verdant hills and fields of Tuscany, with the sun setting in the west. Kolbe had never been to Italy, so he studied maps, travel books and photographs. Again, he built a model. Then he ordered a special seamless canvas from New York and recruited his brother and fellow artist, Scott Kolbe. The brothers built a frame where individual, 4-foot sections could be rolled out, like paper towels, worked on, and rolled back up. Mitch Kolbe explained the process this way: "I sectioned off 4-inch parcels (each representing 4 feet of canvas) from the model. Scott then reproduced each section in pen and ink, projected it onto the actual canvas, charcoaled off the basic outline and painted it in, using my scale model and all of my colors. Because each 4-foot section was completed separately, and then rolled up, we never got to see the project as a whole until it was finished. Scott was very dubious, but I knew precisely what it would look like. When the completed mural was installed, we were only off by 3 inches in one corner; I had planned for that, and painted a tree there. We were able to fix it on the spot."
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