Venetian artist Livio De Marchi is like a real-life Gepetto. Except, he doesn’t need a fairy god mother for his works to come alive. De Marchi’s works of art are so life-like, sometimes it’s hard to tell they’re made of wood.
The tools that De Marchi works with are fairly simple – a hundred varieties of chisel dated back to 1964, an old hammer and a steady hand – but the stuff he produces is nothing short of spectacular. A wooden replica of a leather jacket he made looks so real, you’d actually reach out to try it on if you didn’t know better. The only distinguishing factor between real and wood is that he doesn’t paint any of his creations, because he believes that the grain and knots of the plain wood are very intriguing. He spends hours at his workbench every single day, producing masterpiece after masterpiece.
