Bizarre Lucille Ball Statue Outrages Fans
A statue supposedly intended to honor the late Lucille Ball has many of her fans in an uproar:
Locals from Lucille Ball’s hometown are not happy with a public statue that was erected to honor the actress’ legacy, complaining that it’s “frightening” and looks nothing like her, and are now looking into fundraising options to fix it.
The Celoron, NY, residents have been clamoring to refurbish the statue on a Facebook group called “We Love Lucy! Get Rid of this Statue.” One user suggested starting a GoFundMe page to raise money to replace it; another suggested a Kickstarter.
The 400-pound life-size bronze statue was erected in 2009 after being privately commissioned. The artist Dave Poulin has not responded to the media, including a request for comment by The Hollywood Reporter.
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But replacing the statue is no small feat. ”It would be a lot of money,” Celoron mayorScott Schrecengost told the local Post-Journal. “Over the past couple of years, I’ve reached out to Dave Pouli and have had at least four conversations with him about redoing the statue. He finally came back and said he wanted $8,000 to $10,000 to do it. I’ve also reached out to several other sculptors in the region, and some said they would do it, but we’re still looking at about $5,000. We’d like to work with the original sculptor and wish he would stand behind his work enough to step up and fix it for free.”
While one must leave some room for artistic interpretation, a statue like this should at least bear some resemblance to the person it’s supposed to honor. That’s obviously not the case here.
This artist has some `spalinin’ to do
It’s like the love child of The Joker and J. Jonah Jameson…
I may never sleep again.
Lucille Ball in addition to being a great talent was also a beautiful woman. This statue is offensive and should be just melted down. No statue is better than this one.
Wow, that’s terrifying. It’s difficult to put one’s finger on what’s wrong with it…wait, I know: “everything.”
WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!
It would have been nice if the artist had crafted a statue that was of Lucille Ball.
What the hell is that? Wow.
Ummm, could we maybe stop referring to this hack as an artist?
How much would it cost to have it removed?
Just dig it up and send it back to the artist, how hard could that be?
Who agreed to have this monstrosity put in public anyway? I’m not convinced this is even a statue of Lucille – more likely somebody got conned.
I’m running a quick poll of some friends using a cropped image of just the face. I asked them to guess which famous person this is a statue of. Guesses so far include “Young Barack Obama”, “Amelia Earhardt”, and “I have no idea.”
C’mon, Doug, not *every* post has to be about your least favorite politician!
Hmm. That statue looks closer to Desi Arnaz (shape of the jaw/chin and, uh, mouth size?) than it does Lucy. And it doesn’t really look like Desi Arnaz.
That mouth…it’s not human.
We all agree the face is, um, not very accurate. But after Googling pictures of her for a few minutes, I couldn’t find one case where she wore her hair like that. Pulled back on the sides, yes, but where are the curls on top if we’re going for an iconic Lucy look?
“Aging Drag Queen with Unexplainable Pompadour #6”
@Franklin:
It’s worse than that, because the statue depicts her in perhaps her most famous single scene, the Vitameatavegamin TV ad. We know exactly what her hair should look like for this statue.
…which, now that I think about it, explains some of the horrible statue. This is a statue of Lucille Ball making a face, having just tasted the noxious brew. It’s still not even close to an accurate likeness, but you can tell which photo the sculptor seems to have been working from.
@DrDaveT:
Good catch on the body but (as noted earlier) the hair is completely wrong.
I think the “artist” had a finished head from a work that got cancelled and he just slapped it on the body of his Lucille project.
Ah, I just realized what the face reminds me of.
@DrDaveT: Yes, of course! Nice job hunting down the exact reference.
Holy Elizabeth Warren! Look’s like somebody else has some `spalinin’ to do…
@Stormy Dragon: Was that your best impersonation of Hank Hill?
@MikeSJ: I was thinking the same thing. The head’s not just all wrong in appearance, it’s too big. It’s like evil inhuman bobblehead Lucille Ball.
C’mon now. Give the artist a break. He was given just a week to make one, so he elected to go buy one instead and this was the closest resemblance to Lucy.