An Artful Life

   I became aware of art when I was very young. My father was a soccer fan and he helped organize a soccer team. They joined a league and met together in a club house out in the back yard. The club house was built onto our garage.

 The walls of the club house were covered with pastel drawings of scenes from "die Heimat", our German homeland. There were mountains, valleys, skiers, gnomes, and beautiful, voluptuous women. My father was a ladies man. The distant place called Deutschland became familiar to me because of the art of my father.

 Papa was always drawing in his spare time. With charcoal, oil, watercolors and of course the medium he was trained in, carving stone. I tried my hand at drawing but I wasn't patient enough to learn. When he died we gathered together the artwork and we were all surprised how much he had done.

This oil was one he did of me when I was four. We were one heart and soul for a while and I feel the love he had for his only little girl. He painted it from a picture which was a favorite of his.

   Most of his work was done in stone and plaster. He studied fine art for a while in Dresden, Germany but due to his lack of funds he came back home to apprentice as a stone mason. He owned two businesses carving gravestones while in Germany. There were slabs of stone everywhere around our yard. Granite, marble, limestone; our station wagon was ruined because of hauling stones.

Here is a newspaper clipping of his work on the Salt Lake Temple. He carved the suns, moons, and stars on the annex to the temple in the sixties. His hands were always rough but he could carve the finest detail.

   This is a marble nude which I have. I was the only one of my friends who had a water fountain nude statue in the front yard. I know his art embarrassed me. I didn't understand his desire to create perfection, whether the human body or the form of a bird. He was a complex man who I loved differently as I matured. He died when I was 24, I did not have many years with him.

   This is a bust of me at 20. I have carried this around with me for 38 years. My children colored in the teeth with marker when they were young. She had to be cleaned up and restored. These pieces have taught me to value art. I live with beautiful pieces of art. They greet me in the morning and they sustain me through teaching at the piano. They are often the last things I see before I go to bed. 

Art is the only way to run away without leaving home.  ~Twyla Tharp