Knotts Berry Farm Original 1968 Vintage and 48 similar items

CLAUDE BELL'S ARTIST SHACK Original Vintage 1968 Pastel Portrait From Knotts Berry Farm's Famous Portrait Caricature Studio Excellent Condition SIZE 22" x 17" Original Wood Glass Frame Inscribed and Dated on Verso Unsigned - Artist unknown Email any questions you may have....thank you. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ CLAUDE BELL (1897–1988) Located inside Southern California's Knotts Berry Farm theme park, Claude Bell's Artist Shack developed a reputation of employing fine up and coming young artists from the 1950s all the way through the 1980s. Claude employed both his wife and daughter Wendy as artists, painting portraits of park guests. Claude wasn't just a portrait artist. he was a sculpture and theme park designer who worked on a number of projects at Knotts. After seeing a huge wooden elephant in Atlantic city as a child. Claude embarked on to a happy lifelong journey of constructing enormous sculptures. He started his career making figures of gold miners and a minuteman at Knott's Berry Farm in Buena Park, California. Later, he bought 76 acres of desert to create larger and more grand masterpieces. Bell spent more than two decades of his life and $300,000 in creating a 150-ton, 150-foot-long concrete "brontosaurus" named "Dinney" and a 65-foot-tall, 100-ton Tyrannosaurus Rex named "Rex.". These became known as the "Cabazon Dinosaurs". The creation of the Cabazon dinosaurs began in the 1960s by Bell to attract customers to his Wheel Inn Restaurant, which opened in 1958 and closed in 2013. Dinny, the first of the Cabazon dinosaurs, was started in 1964 and created over a span of eleven years. Bell created Dinny out of spare material salvaged from the construction of nearby Interstate 10 at a cost of $300,000. The biomorphic building that was to become Dinny was first erected as steel framework over which an expanded metal grid was formed in the shape of a dinosaur. All of it was then covered with coats of shotcrete (spray concrete). Bell was quoted in 1970 as saying the 45-foot-high (14 m), 150-foot-long (46 m) Dinny was "the first dinosaur in history, so far as I know, to be used as a building." His original vision for Dinny was for the dinosaur's eyes to glow and mouth to spit fire at night, predicting, "It'll scare the dickens out of a lot of people driving up over the pass." These two features, however, were not added. A second dinosaur, Mr. Rex, was constructed near Dinny in 1981. Originally, a giant slide was installed in Rex's tail; it was later filled in with concrete, making the slide unusable. A third woolly mammoth sculpture and a prehistoric garden were drafted but never completed due to Bell's death in 1988. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Due to special packing necessities for framed art items, shipping times may take a few days longer depending on the item and shipping destination location. Email through for more information. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------