NEWS - DUPONT CRAFTSMAN CREATES ART BY MOUNTING SPIDER WEBS ON GLASS

Dumont craftsman creates art by mounting spider webs on glass

July 27, 2011,

By Julia Terruso/The Star-Ledger 

 

It’s a muggy morning and Emil "Rocky" Fiore is hiking deep and high into the woods, surveying nature’s nooks for hanging treasures. Suddenly he stops and points to what, at first, appears to be nothing. But strewn between a jagged tree branch and a dew-dampened boulder, a silvery spider web is taking shape.
"She’s about halfway done," Fiore says, reaching for his glasses to take a closer look. Now the glistening web comes into focus. "What a beauty."
Fiore carefully leans into the web and exhales onto the black spider in the center of the orb until she flees, seeking refuge on a neighboring silky strand.
"The trick is to get her to leave in a fluid motion so she doesn’t destroy the work of art she’s made," Fiore explains.
Fiore is a webmaster. He’s been seeking out spider webs in Palisades Interstate Park in Alpine for 35 years and turning nature’s art into his own strangely captivating craft. Fiore mounts the webs, of varying sizes, on glass and sells them in stores around the United States. He estimates he has 15,000 webs in circulation, which makes him the most prolific craftsman of his kind, though a handful of similar artists exist across the country.
"The web is a thing of beauty. It’s all about what they do, but there is an art or sophisticated craft to what I do," the 59-year-old Dumont resident says. He first got the idea from a craft book he owned when he was 10 and living in Englewood.
Armed with a plastic box filled with glass plates, a bottle of varnish and silver spray paint, he’ll spend about four hours a day climbing in the woods he has frequented for more than 50 years.
"I know where they live," he says of the spiders. "It’s almost as if I have names for them."
Fiore’s so familiar with the weaving sites that the absence of a spined micrathena spider last week puzzles him.
"Maybe a wasp or a bird got to her," he says, disappointed.
When he spots a web he likes — not too damaged or with an interesting story behind it — Fiore breathes onto the spider. The carbon dioxide he exhales scares the arachnid away because it perceives a predator. Then in slow spurts he sprays the web with the silver paint before carefully aligning a piece of glass with it. He then sprays an even coating of the varnish on the web. Once home he paints the reverse side black to provide contrast.
"People don’t know that there’s a difference at all from one web to another," Fiore says. "They have no idea the diversity."
Emil "Rocky" Fiore has been exploring the woods and caves along the eastern slopes of the Palisades in search of spider webs for more than 30 years. Fiore has perfected a process of mounting the orb weaver webs using spray paint, varnish and glass. His work is marketed through more than a dozen retailers in the United States including Evolution in New York City and the Bone Room in Berkeley California. Fiore estimates that he has captured and preserved more than 15,000 webs. (Video by Andre Malok / The Star-Ledger) Watch video

The webmaster’s self-imposed rules include never disturbing a feeding spider. He also tries not to overharvest any spider’s webs.
"I consider them my friends, so I don’t want to mess with them," he says.
While more than 20 stores sell Fiore’s webs in the U.S. and overseas, not everyone has supported his craft.
Fiore was spray-painting a large web in a Florida state park last year, when he heard the disapproving voice of a woman calling "Stop that! You’re ruining their home."
But Fiore says webs only last for two to three hours before spiders consume them for protein to create more webs. On average, he says, a spider will cast five webs a day.
"I’m preserving what they do," Fiore says. "I am their ambassador to humans."
While the spiders themselves are not dangerous — web weavers don’t rely on venom to catch prey — Fiore has had scares of other sorts.
On "a webbing trip" in Florida, Fiore was methodically spraying a web with silver paint when he heard a hissing sound respond.
"It sounded like a threatening exhale, and then I saw her," he says. Beneath the debris hid an alligator and her young. "She was telling me I was getting too close. I was shaking, I never knew terror like that."
Fiore’s wife, Cynda, has been supportive of his work, mostly. Once Fiore’s brother sent him a pregnant black widow spider that laid hundreds of eggs in a glass milk jug.
"All these tiny, extremely dangerous spiders started hatching," Cynda Fiore says. "I said ‘Absolutely not. She goes or I go.’ "
To some it might seem dull to hike the same stretch of woods every morning, but Fiore is always making fresh discoveries. As he climbs upward toward a web he’s caught almost daily for the past three decades, he trips on a root, looks down and sees a tiny teal and silver spider who has just woven a near-perfect orb close to the forest floor.
"I must have stepped on her web dozens of times on my way up to that one," Fiore says, pointing upward. He’s mesmerized. "Will you look at how it shimmers in the sun."