Mariota is a Natural Pitch Man
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Marcus Mariota became a Subway "famous fan" on Wednesday,
complete with a bust made of bread and vegetables.
(Photo by Denis Oda, oda @staradvertiser.com) |
By Ferd Lewis
Star Advertiser
April 23.2015
Forget what the ESPN analysts say about Marcus Mariota's inexperience taking the snap from center, on this day it was the Swiss cheese that was baffling.
"The (cheese) pieces are sticking together," Mariota sighed as he grappled with trying to separate them.
Less than a minute into his first shift as a celebrity sandwich artist for his latest national sponsor, Subway, Mariota was struggling.
One more reason that next week's NFL Draft can't come soon enough for the Heisman Trophy winner from Saint Louis School.
Realizing that a $20 million-$25 million contract from some team awaits Mariota
after his April 30 selection, it was a regular Subway employee, Lelean Sigrah, who adroitly wielded the knife for him at the chain's Beachwalk restaurant Wednesday.
When it comes to sandwich artistry, "I've made peanut butter and jelly for myself, but that's about it," Mariota acknowledged.
Nevertheless he persisted to make a sandwich for two youngsters from the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation and one for his grandmother, Alice Deppe, but declined to say if he could whip up one of crab for Jameis Winston, if asked.
That a noon-time crowd, sometimes three and four deep, pressed their faces and Mariota jerseys to the glass front window or stood on outdoor chairs to watch him fold Black Forest ham slices and slather avocado and tuna on bread underlined his attractiveness for endorsement deals.
Before he launches an NFL pass, Mariota is already big league in endorsements, call it Market Mariota.
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He has a Nike deal, is said to be on the way to several more, and is setting up a charitable foundation.
Mariota has two sets of agents, one California-based firm, Rep1 Sports, to handle football-related matters such as his player contract, and another in New York, Excel Sports Management, to direct endorsements.
Mariota's New York agent, Alan Zucker, has a client roster that includes the Mannings (Peyton, Eli and Archie), Danica Patrick and Taylor Swift.
So there is probably little chance Mariota will take up owner Angus McKibbin on his offer to come pull a night shift or two until the draft starts.
"We've had a laser focus on Marcus," said Paul J. Bamundo, Global Director of Sports Marketing and Strategic Partnerships for Subway, citing Mariota's football potential, wholesomeness and the fact he regularly ate their product as a student at the University of Oregon.
So intent was Subway on adding Mariota to its "famous fan" roster that includes Robert Griffin III, Russell Westbrook and Mike Trout, Bamundo said, "I told Alan, 'I want to figure this out with you and Marcus and we want to be first out of the gate (as a non-industry sponsor).'"
Bamundo said, "Once we found out Marcus wasn't going to Chicago (for the draft) or New York and was going to stay home to be with family, we told them, 'don't worry about it, we'll come to you there in Hawaii."'
So, Wednesday morning the company was at the Mariota family's doorstep, breakfast sandwiches in hand, before the commercial shoot and press conference.
In honor of the occasion, Subway commissioned and flew in two Philadelphia based food artists, Jim Victor and Marie Pelton, to craft a 3foot high sculpture of Mariota in the company's food items, complete with flatbread head.
"I never imagined I'd see myself in avocado (skins) for hair and bell peppers for ears," Mariota marveled.
Yes, it is definitely a new world that Mariota has entered. |
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He plays with his food: Middletown native went from struggling artist
to edible art guru |
Published Date Tuesday, 22 January 2013 14:24
By Daniel Walmer
Press and Journal staff
Middletown Press and Journal
Nationally known artist and Middletown native Jim Victor's sculptures provide a lot of food for thought.
Cuisine is Victor's artistic medium—from the Pennsylvania
Farm Show butter sculptures to chocolate portraits and fruit
and veggie creations—and in the world of edible art, he's a
big deal.
In addition to creating the Farm Show's annual thousand-pound display of Pennsylvania produce in butter form, Victor sculpts for companies like Subway. He recently completed a national media tour in New York City with Washington Redskins quarterback Robert Griffin III showcasing a portrait
of the football star made from Subway ingredients—including chicken salad, a particularly difficult challenge.
"It's popular, for one thing," he said. "It's nice to work on something where people actually want to see it."
Lisa Perrin Dubravec, senior industry image and relations man-ager for the Mid-Atlantic Dairy Association—the organization that commissions the Farm Show butter
sculpture—is glad to hire an artist that is both local and nationally famous.
"He does wonderful work," Dubravec said. "He really takes
our vision and manifests it into this beautiful sculpture each year."
Despite his buffet of successes, Victor still cherishes his Middletown memories.
His family moved to Middletown during World War II when his dad began working at the Olmsted Air Force Base, and he lived
in several different parts of Middletown during his childhood: Pineford Acres, a house on State Street near the Susquehanna River, and a Victorian house on Water Street.
"I loved Middletown," he said. "I thought Middletown was a
great place to live. I really enjoyed it."
Though his family moved away from Middletown when he was 11, Victor remembers the local haunts that facilitated his childhood adventures in exploration – places like the Army surplus junkyard on Union Street, a brickyard in Royalton,
and Roundtop
Mountain —and watching planes land at the
Air Force base.
An artist looking for jobs in the 1980s, Victor was commissioned to create a portrait of Andy Rooney from chocolate—and the rest
is very tasty history.
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Victor first got involved in butter sculpting in the 1990s.
"It's actually a pretty good medium," he said. "It models pretty well and sticks to everything. You put it on somewhere and it stays there."
While butter's temperature sensitivity can be a challenge, it allows an artist to control its consistency more than other foods, and "you kind of get that sweet spot where it's like soft clay," he said.
Still, his favorite sculpting mediums are food and cheese, for a very sensible reason—they're "fun to eat," he said.
Years of experience have trained Victor to pay particular attention to the physical qualities of food. When most people see a kiwi, they just see a fruit, perhaps one they enjoy to eat—but Victor sees something different.
"When I cut a kiwi, I always look at that and think, it looks so beautiful, it looks like the iris of an eye," he said.
And don't be fooled by their savory charm—Victor's sculptures aren't just cheap entertainment.
For Victor, they can be an opportunity to "kind of make an aesthetic statement" about the foods.
the Mid-Atlantic Dairy Association, which commissions the Farm Show sculpture each year, "it opens the door to a conversation" between attendees and the local dairy industry about the "delicious product they produce," Dubravec said.
Victor puts in the time—about 10-12 hours per day for about 12 days – to make the best possible butter sculpture for the farm show each year, down to the smallest detail, she said. He even adds a surprise to the sculpture most years, such as a honeybee on the Pennsylvania keystone logo.
Even Victor's wife and son get in on the act—Victor's wife Marie designed the 2013 Farm Show butter sculpture.
"I thought Marie did a really excellent job," he said. "There's certainly a lot
in it."
"I think it's really interesting that he's taken something so unique and passed it along to family members," Dubravec said.
They say all good things must come to an end, a sad adage that is certainly true of butter sculptures. But the fact that his art only lasts temporarily does not bother Victor.
"Time is fleeting, and it's very quick," he said. "People say, 'Well, none of it lasts,' and that's true, but the photographs of it last. |
Top NFL draft prospect Robert Griffin lll, left, reacts as food sculptor
Jim Victor describes his food statue celebrating Griffin's induction as "Famous Fan of Subway" on Tuesday, April 24, 2012, in New York. Subway unveiled the life size creation, which join a roster of famous athletes including Michael Phelps and Blake Griffin, to announce its
new Smokehouse BBQ Chicken sub made for Griffin. The statue
contains over 300 pieces of chicken with garlic for teeth and dried
chili peppers for hair. Photo: Bebeto Matthews/AP
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COMMERCIAL IMAGE—In this photograph taken by AP images
for SUBWAY, newest SUBWAY Famous Fan Robert Griffin lll, top
prospect in the 2012 NFL Draft, poses with his life-size statue made
of SUBWAY Smokehouse BBQ chicken, Tuesday April 24, 2012, in
New York. The sculpture, made by artist James Victor of
Conshohocken, PA, is an
artistic representation of the football star
from the chest up and stands approximately three feet tall.
(Diane Bondareff/AP Images for SUBWAY) Photo: AP.AP |
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Click on the thumbnail to see the article in the paper.
From the New York Daily News:
"Why keep the bizarre in just two dimensions? Here are some of the strangest sculptures from around the globe.
Ever seen a sculpture made from nearly 1,000 pounds of butter? Well now you have! This representation of a dairy farmer pouring a glass of milk at the breakfast table with his family pays tribute to dairy farm families in a very literal way. Created by sculpture Jim Victor of Conshokocken, Pa. was crafted from butter donated by Land O' Lakes in Carlisle, Pa. and can be seen at the Pennsylvania Farm Show in Harrisburg from Jan. 9-16, 2010."
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All
aflutter over butter
By Sandy Bauers
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
HARRISBURG -
Spending a week in a large refrigerator carving 900 pounds of butter
into two lifesize cows and the late chocolate magnate Milton Hershey
is challenge enough.
But then Hershey wound up too tall. And he was facing the wrong direction.
And the chocolate to coat him was two days late. What now?
No sweat for a pro such as veteran butter sculptor Jim Victor.
He was still smiling last week as he scrunched himself cowside, putting
a few final pats into place on the annual butter sculpture at the Pennsylvania
Farm Show, which openedSaturday.
He’d lopped two inches off Hershey’s shins and turned him
around, and now all that remained was snagging the tardy chocolate.
With the unveiling less than 24 hours away, “it’s a comedy
of errors that’s turned into a tragedy at this point,” he
said.
But as logic would suggest, tossing your lot in with butter can be a
slippery business.
Victor didn’t start out to be a butter sculptor. But the
demand for fine-arts sculpture being what it is (or, more precisely,
isn’t) he took a different tack.
In the 1970s, he started making sculptural portraits of notables —
Henry Kissinger, Jimmy Carter, South Philadelphia pol and felon Buddy
Cianfrani (made to look like provolone and titled The Big Cheese) —
for magazine illustrations.
In 1982, he received a commission to sculpt chocolate heads of Mickey
Rooney and Ann Miller to celebrate their 1,000th Sugar Babies performance.
It was an inauspicious start. At the unveiling, Miller bent to
look, her foot bumped a table leg, and off went the heads.
Luckily, the chocolatier happened to have some liquid chocolate and
Victor had a Swiss army knife. Hours later, the repaired heads made
their encore.
By now, Victor, of Conshohocken, has produced a smorgasbord of sculptures.
He’s made pigs, a tractor, a train, a 1957 Harley-Davidson Sportster
— all out of chocolate.
He carved Terry LaBonte’s Chevy from 3,500 pounds of Cheddar for
a NASCAR event. A “Cheeseasaurus Rex” from 250 pounds of
Kraft for a Texas festival. A Christopher Columbus
from wheels of Parmesan for a New York parade. A Santa from cream cheese
and mascarpone.
Out of butter have emerged milkmaids, horses, chickens, an old milk
wagon, a woman in a bikini (for Ripley’s Believe It or Not) and
all manner of cows.
He’s heard all the puns: how he’s got the technique down
pat; how he’s buttering up the clientele; how there’s little
margarine for error; how he’s really churning it out. He’s
been called a cheese whiz and a guy who can cut the cheese.
As much as he wants to do his own wood sculptures, this is the
work that pays the bills— oh, OK, it’s his bread and butter.
He does have his limits, however. He insists he’ll never sculpt
Spam. He has to live with the smell the whole time he’s sculpting
and “I don’t want to do meat puppets or anything like that,”
he said.
With Hershey, Victor was trying something new, sculpting from both butter
and chocolate. He started making the steel and mesh frame before Christmas
at Rosemont College. He teaches sculpture there and at the Fleisher
Art Memorial in Philadelphia.
By New Year’s week, he was at the Farm Show complex, where boxes
of Grade AA Land O’Lakes—55 pounds each—were piled
outside the official butter trailer.
“It’s like traditional sculpture, really,” Victor
said as he sliced the butter into workable chunks and began smooshing.
“It just happens that it’s butter, not clay.”
On the floor nearby were cow photos, a book of cow anatomy, and a small
cow model.
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Victor coats butter
on one of two cow figures for the Farm Show/ Behind him stood
the frame for the sculpture of the late chocolate magnate
Milton Hershey, which would eventually bear both butter and
chocolate.
Photo by Barbara
L. Johnston, Inquirer Suburban Staff.
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“You’re
working with dairy farmers,” he explained. Experts in the bovine
form, they can be frank. Once, an old-timer in Massachusetts just shook
his head and said, “That’s no prize winner.”
Butter sculptures have been dairy promotional fixtures at state fairs
nationwide since the 1920s. Although no one seems to know why—"good
question," said a Land 0’ Lakes spokeswoman—one thing
is sure: They’re popular.
Last August, Victor was working on the fair sculpture in Syracuse, N.Y,
when the big Northeast blackout occurred. A frontpage headline in the
next day’s newspaper noted, “but the butter sculpture is
saved.”
By this past Wednesday, Victor had been sculpting for nearly 100 hours
in the butter trailer. His wife, Marie Pelton, an artist herself who
married into food sculpting, had joined him and they were tending to
final details while they waited for the chocolate.
Nearby stood a jug of Hershey’s syrup. If all else failed, maybe
Victor could try that.
He didn’t need to. That afternoon, Hershey’s Jim Bew showed
up, exuding cheer and, best of all, lugging 100 pounds of chocolate.
It looked like gold from Fort Knox, each 10-pound brick stamped with
“Hershey’s—the chocolate that is pure.”
“We’ll be off and running in no time,” Bew said, promising
to stay “until the butter end.”
He well knew the pressure that Victor was under. Last year, he was on
the team that built the world’s largest Hershey’s Kiss —nearly
seven feet tall and 6,754 pounds in New York.
Never mind that no one was sure at that point whether the paint technique
for coating Hershey would actually work.
Bew plugged in a contraption to keep the chocolate at a liquid 100 degrees
Fahrenheit, and Victor began to paint cow spots with a brush.
Late that night, with only about 12 hours to go before the unveiling,
they filled the sprayer, held their breaths and aimed the nozzle at
Hershey.
It worked.
They finished shortly before midnight headed for bed.
The next morning, Thursday, Victor was back, along with pooh-bahs from
the dairy and agriculture industries, Hershey Foods Corp., and more.
They all made speeches— even Victor, who couldn’t stop grinning.
When the sculpture was unveiled, they applauded and called it the best
ever.
And so, the butter forms will reign over an entrance corridor until
the show closes next Saturday.
After that?
It turns out the butter can’t be recycled or even fed to farm
animals. With all the handling, it’s considered contaminated.
Workers will destroy it.
Victor opts for a Zen acceptance. “It’s here today, gone
tomorrow,” he said with a shrug. “That’s just the
way those things are.”
Contact staff writer Sandy Bauers at sbauers@phillynews.com
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