Steve Casino became the "Painter of Nuts" on a snack-time whim. He sketched a quick self-portrait on a shelled peanut that he thought matched his shape, and his legume likeness cracked up his coworkers.
Casino, a former New Yorker, then hurried to enshrine hometown heroes The Ramones, adding paint and limbs to peanut bodies. After a minor social-media explosion, Casino set about cashing in on the attention.
"I want to be able to sell them as art pieces," Casino says. "They're very durable when I'm done."
Very durable, and very entertaining. Casino uses peanuts and other material to create remarkably accurate caricatures of celebrities and pop cultural icons. From Willie Nelson to Wolverine, Dali to Dr. Who, his wee sculptures never fail to make you smile.
The peanut project began in July, 2012 with the off-handed casualness of hashing out a song or invention on a napkin, but realizing the vision has created serious challenges. Arriving at the right materials, for example, took a lot of trial and error. Learning the right resins and swapping pipe cleaners for bamboo helped, but Casino still struggles with the peanut-specific difficulties of his craft.
"Freddy Mercury was my first profile, so a lot of [his features] were added on. I had the basic shape of his body--the arch and everything--and it conveys the body language, but for the face I had to violate the shape of the peanut and pop on a nose and pompadour."
Casino spends hours getting each one just right; the painting alone can take upward of 10 hours. And he starts each project with three potential peanut canvases, because he assumes two will break.
Casino now receives commissions from celebrities and others eager to be immortalized on a nutshell. Trent Reznor, after seeing Casino's (remarkably spot-on) peanut version of himself, requested a family portrait. "I was very nervous because it was Trent Reznor and I had to use the tiniest peanut in the world for his two year-old," says Casino.
Even the best photography doesn't capture how small and intricate these portraits are, and the in-person experience has proved popular. Casino's work has enjoyed successful shows in Shanghai and Hong Kong, and the peanut figurines are soon to appear in Chicago.
There isn't a high school guidance counselor on the planet with a flowchart that leads to Painter of Nuts, but the career track Casino, 47, followed seemed to lead him right there. It started with his first job after graduating from the Rochester Institute of Technology. "I spent four years making fake food for TV commercials," Casino says. This modeling experience left him with small-scale skills and a sense for what materials -- putty, foam, bamboo -- would convey the right look and feel to the camera.
Next came his freelance gig as a festival caricature artist, where he found his line drawing skills could produce potent portraits. "One time this couple came up and they were giggling the whole time I was drawing. I couldn't figure out why they were laughing, and when I was done they asked, 'Do you remember us?' I didn't, and they said, 'Maybe this will help,' and they held up a caricature from the year before, but they had huge noses. I'd actually drawn their noses so big that they got nose jobs, and came back the next year to get their portraits done with their small noses."
And finally there is Casino's career as a toy inventor. For years he has worked for a Cincinnati based firm that has contributed to high-profile designs ranging from Elmo to Barbie.
Casino maintains a sense of humor about the work even as he explores new platforms -- like a tentatively planned coffee table book: "Celebrity Nut Shots," he says.
Is that the title?
"Well, we're talking."
