Working in the 3rd Dimension: Matei Apostolescu

Monday, February 22, 2010

Matei Apostolescu

Meet Matei Apostolescu, an artist in Romania working dimensionally. Born in 1983 in Bucharest Romania, Matei is a self taught freelance illustrator and proud member of the DepthCore collective. He has worked for various clients and had exhibitions in London, Berlin, Bucharest, Istanbul.

How or why did you start working dimensionally?
I started as a kid, when i was about 6 i was making fleets of planes out of dirt because there was a terrible lack of toys in communist times. We had lots of fun with them because, unlike real toys, if you broke one it could easily be modeled into something new. I rediscovered modeling when a friend showed me polymer clay and what people were doing with it and since then i've been having lots of fun with this stuff.

What or who has influenced the way you work?
At the moment i try to translate characters from my illustrations to real life objects so my influences come mostly from illustrators, H.R Giger remains one of my favorite. He is an incredible painter/illustrator but an awesome sculptor too.

Please describe your working process.

I use polymer clay and it's pretty much about experimentation, right now i'm working on larger and more complex models. I use pressed aluminum sheets to created the skeleton and cover them in polymer clay, the rest is pretty much usual modeling :)

What do you enjoy most / least about working dimensionally?

Well, the fact that it really changes the way you draw and perceive illustration. I started working recently but I can feel it has a major impact in my drawn stuff, I draw more easy in a way. Perhaps an inconvenience is the fact that I now need to find a much larger space but apart from that I'm looking forward to creating more polymer clay toys.