Some Of My Things Part 5

The Sculpture

     I feel so fortunate to own a sculpture my father made of me. The hair has long waves in layers just like my haircut while I was in college. I think he has captured my smile and my eyes.

   I often run my hands over the face and head noticing it’s coolness to the touch. She, my sculpture, has moved with me from Salt Lake City, Utah to Seattle, Washington and has resided on a stone pedestal in five houses with five kids. One of those rascal kids took a marker, thank goodness it was water-based, and colored in a couple of my teeth. There was quite a kerfuffle over that mistake. She was restored to her off white coloring and regained her dignity.

    My father, Kurt, was an artist with rough edges. By rough edges I mean that he was largely self taught and perhaps did not have the refinement of a trained artist. He grew up poor, in a little village in Silesia, a province of Germany, now Poland. It was expected that he would use his hands to make a living and his father thought he should be a blacksmith, as he was, and his father before him. But Kurt liked drawing and he was always sketching something, especially people. He made the unpopular decision to go to Dresden and attend art school. His family was concerned that this would not help him make a living. In their opinion there was no money in being an artist. While in Dresden he apprenticed as a stone mason and that allowed him to go back home and establish a business before the war.

   When we emigrated to Utah after World War II my father looked for work and was hired to carve huge stones that would be used along the top of a building next to the Salt Lake Temple. 

He carved some of the  suns, moons and stars which were symbols on the temple itself, built in 1860. These symbols represented the three degrees of glory, Heavenly Father residing in the highest glory represented by the sun.

      This annex was to have the same architecture and motifs. I remember going with him to the granite stone quarry in the mountains of Salt Lake City. He showed me the large sun he was carving in granite. The stone stood ten feet tall and three feet wide. I watched as his chisel and hammer flaked pieces of rock off the surface. The tiny shards flew off in my direction and I breathed in the dust. My father’s hands were big and his fingers griped the chisel like roots of a gnarled tree. When he placed his hands over mine they were rough like wire and deep grooves made permanent pathways in his palms. I didn’t think of him as an artist but more of a craftsman because to me an artist didn’t work so hard physically. I changed my opinion as I matured and developed my own desires to be artistic.

       In his later years, just before he retired, he began sculpting in clay. He would buy a block of clay and carve an image, sometimes it was an image of my mother and this one of me at about age 20. After the clay sculpture was finished he would mix plaster and coat the outside of the clay, creating a seam where the plaster and clay could be pried in half. When the plaster was dry the sculpture was opened and the clay removed. Then he would secure the plaster halves together and fill the middle with wet plaster. After all that was dry the sculpture was sanded and refined and would be just like the original clay creation. It is quite possible that he would have created more sculptures had he not developed lung cancer at age sixty-six. Years of breathing in the fine dust from the stones he carved left his lungs damaged beyond repair. He should have, could have, been wearing a face mask while he worked. 

  While digging through his studio drawers after his death in 1978, I found his brushes, pastels, special drawing pencils and easel. I didn’t know then that I would have desire to be an artist. Now his sketches, paintings, sculptures, and stonework feel more refined to me as I treasure them. I no longer flippantly call him a craftsman. My artist heart is reaching towards his even though he is gone. I understand more of the fear of creating what the mind sees and feeling that the actual creation is elusive.  I wish I could talk with him about my artist fears and receive his wisdom. I would like to tell him how precious his creations are to me now.