President Barack Obama, Chi-Meister

Life Cast

The “casting from life” that almost killed Thomas Jefferson

In doing research for my bronze portrait sculpture of Thomas Jefferson as he might have appeared in 1819, at age 76, I naturally searched for contemporary portrait paintings or sculptures depicting him during this period of his life. I ran across references to a life casting by John H.I. Browere, done in 1825, when Jefferson was 82, and was therefore eager to find photographs of this casting. Eventually, I did, in a book from the New York State Historical Society, where the portrait sculpture made from this life casting is permanently housed. Brief text accompanying the photograph described the casting process itself as a painful one for Jefferson: Browere had to break off the hardened life cast from Jefferson’s face with mallet and chisel!

I had no idea, however, just how painful, until I read the vivid account of the process in Alan Pell Crawford’s excellent book Twilight at Monticello: The Final Years of Thomas Jefferson. Browere, having oiled Jefferson’s face, applied his “plastier,” or grout, in layers. About an hour later, the sculptor tried to remove the hardened grout, “without discomfort” to Jefferson.

But the grout was stuck to Jefferson’s face and would not come off.  “Evidently,” according to Crawford, “ Browere miscalculated, for when the hour had elapsed, the grout was harder and drier than anticipated. He had also failed to put enough oil in the concoction ‘to prevent its adherence to the skin,’ Virginia [Randolph, Jefferson’s granddaughter] said, and as a result, removing the plaster proved so ‘excessively painful’ and so slow that ‘we expected Grand-papa to faint from exhaustion.’

“To remove the plaster, Browere produced a mallet and chisel, and began ‘to break it into pieces and cut off a piece at a time,’ Jefferson told [James] Madison. ‘Those thumps of the mallet would have been sensible almost to a loggerhead.’ Horrified by the spectacle, the family fled the room, leaving only the artist, his subject, and Burwell [Colbert] the butler.

“Increasingly frustrated, Browere hammered away with increasing force and frequency until Jefferson was exhausted, ‘and there became real danger,’ he said ‘that the ears would separate from the head sooner than from the plaister.’ By now, ‘patient [though] he always is in suffering,’ Virginia said, Jefferson could be heard sobbing.

“He was also gasping for breath. Because of some defect in the arrangements made to permit the subject to breathe, Randall wrote, Jefferson ‘came near suffocation.’ Eager to attract the preoccupied artist’s attention but unable to speak, Jefferson grabbed the chair on which his hand rested, lifted it as high as he could, and slammed it to the floor. The surprised sculptor’s work-in-progress also fell with a clatter, and Burwell ‘sprang furiously forward,’ catching his master as he collapsed.

“Hearing the commotion, the family rushed back into the room to find Jefferson in the arms of Burwell, ‘the fierce glare of [whose] African eye boded danger.’ Permitted to ‘pick up his fragments of plaster and carry them off,’ Browere remained at Monticello as his long-suffering subject’s guest for at least that night, if not more.” (pages 214-215)

If it had been me in that room, and not Browere, with the aging Jefferson propped in a chair with pillows, I would have applied petroleum jelly to Jefferson’s face, and I don’t think there would have been “a lick of trouble,”  getting the plaster off. The oil which Browere applied probably just soaked into Jefferson’s skin, accelerated by the warming temperature of the drying grout. Actually, I would never have had the temerity to ask Thomas Jefferson, especially in his frail condition, to submit to a life casting. I would have sat knee-to-knee with him, touching his face lightly now and then to take a caliper measurement, and modeled him from life, in clay, talking with him as I worked. Imagine that!

In any event, Browere managed to produce, from the broken pieces of plaster, a casting of Jefferson’s face, which he used to create a rather grim-faced portrait bust in a “classical” style, complete with toga-like cloth folded over Jefferson’s thin chest. What was most disconcerting for me, however, was my sense that Browere’s portrait, though “cast from life,” and surely, therefore, an accurate and unmistakeable rendering of “the man himself,” didn’t look like the Jefferson I would recognize. I feared that if I were to use Browere’s portrait as the basis for my own portrait of Jefferson, I might end up with a cluster of viewers whispering to each other, “who’s that?” Or worse: “that doesn’t look anything like Thomas Jefferson!” Of course, an prominent nameplate, in bold-face type, could dispel such comments, but that would hardly be much satisfaction to me. Naturally, I wanted to achieve a “speaking likeness,” not some puzzling visage requiring an identification tag!

I had similar reservations about using Thomas Sully’s 1821 oil portrait (when Jefferson was 78), and even Gilbert Stuart’s 1805 oil portrait (when Jefferson was 62), though this latter portrait was used as the basis of the Jefferson image on the two-dollar bill (as though this could be much help).

In fact, I had begun modeling a portrait of Jefferson on the basis of these two paintings. But one afternoon, as the portrait was beginning to take shape, I stepped back to evaluate my progress, and was indeed struck with the discomfiting realization that absent a name, I don’t think I know who this guy is!

It was at that point that I fully realized my dilemma: I was attempting a portrait of Thomas Jefferson which was both historically accurate, and immediately recognizable. I felt that my mistake was in beginning with historical accuracy, in starting with Jefferson as he may really have appeared, when he was “an old man,” a “senior citizen.” But we don’t know him as an old man! In our “national memory,” Thomas Jefferson is, and will forever be, above all else, the youthful, idealistic, and splendidly handsome author of the Declaration of Independence. If you don’t believe me, search his name in Google Images.

I understood that I must begin not from the actual Jefferson of factual history, registered in contemporary likenesses, but from the iconic images of a mythic Jefferson enshrined in the American Mind. What iconic images? Take a look at Jefferson’s profile on his nickel. That’s the Jefferson we know, daily passing his image through our millions of fingers, like a talisman. Think of Mount Rushmore, our holy shrine of Great Presidents, Jefferson’s chiseled visage, hundreds of feet high, with its far-seeing gaze looking grandly out across a continent. This.

Fortunately, myth can have its basis in fact. I felt certain that the iconic Thomas Jefferson image which is stamped on our nickels, cast in our bronzes, and chiseled out of a sacred Native American mountain, was derived in part, at least from the 1789 marble portrait sculpture by Jean Antoine Houdon.

We know this portrait of Thomas Jefferson—or rather the derivations from it--though we probably don’t know Houdon.  He was an eighteenth century French sculptor famous in his own day for his marble portrait busts of “nobility,” including King XVI and the Emperor Napoleon. (There were many other very accomplished portraitists at this time, too.) When I first began doing portrait sculptures, I studied, at length, excellent photographs of his portraits busts, in an oversized book borrowed from the Virginia Tech Art & Architecture Library. I marveled at Houdon’s technique, the vitality and life-life effects he was able to achieve. The eyes of his marble portrait busts appeared so astonishingly real that I was almost persuaded that he must have inserted glass eyes. I decided from my study that sculpture for Houdon was all about light and shadow, rather than about mass and volume. It was therefore a huge pleasure for me, several years later, to visit the National Portrait Gallery, and view a special exhibit of Houdon’s great works, and come face-to-face with his “speaking likenesses.”

But I digress. Having decided that my starting point for a portrait of Thomas Jefferson would need to be the young Jefferson of the American Mind, rather than the old Jefferson of historical reality, I stopped sculpting the clay model which I had already begun, based upon the Gilbert and Sully oil portraits, when Jefferson was 61 and 78, respectively. I began again, this time working from a reproduction of the Houdon bust which I had purchased at Monticello. Satisfied that I now had a Jefferson we would recognize, I turned to a police text, Forensic Art and Illustration, by Karen Taylor, and gave Mr. Jefferson the evidence of his years: jowls, wrinkles, headache lines in his forehead, a sunkenness in his cheeks--all the painfully earned marks of growing physical, financial, and familial troubles. For while 1819 was the year his beloved University of Virginia was formally chartered, it was also the year of a shocking event: Jefferson’s grandson, Jeff Randolph was stabbed in a fight, and nearly died from the wound; worse, the assailant was Charles Bankhead, the husband of Jeff Randolph’s sister, Ann. These troubles, and more, are recounted in vivid and intimate detail, in Twilight at Monticello.

One more thing: Houdon, like Browere, would make a lifemask, as well as compiling extensive tables of measurements, in preparation for a portrait. So, also like Browere, he visited Jefferson at Monticello, sat him down, and covered his face with plaster. But there’s no record of him having to use mallet and chisel to get it off!

Lost

 

On the morning of January 23^rd, overwhelmed by a complex brew of feelings and desperate, on an uncommonly warm and sunny day,  to escape from laboring in the studio on projects which had “stalled,” I got in my car and drove up to Mountain Lake for a hike.

            Though warm in Blacksburg, it was chilly on this mountain top. In a “normal” winter, there would have been snow on the ground. The resort was closed for the season. Nobody was around. I hiked without stopping straight up to the magnificent overlook behind the picturesque stone hotel, pausing long enough to see the New River, far down in the valley, snaking its way past bright cliffs. I hadn’t dressed for the wind though, so I kept going, down along the ledge rocks, through a copse of small trees, to the wide corridor of tall grasses under the powerline towers. Turning onto a gravel service road which led back into the woods, I soon came to a rustic stone bench, nicely made, and turned onto the 1.9 mile Bear Cliffs Trail.

I walked quickly, noting the new trail blazes—bright yellow patches on tree trunks, spaced every 25 yards or so. About halfway to the cliffs, I stopped to take pictures, of mossy outcrops and bent trees, brown leaves gleaming on the ground. A few minutes later, stair-stepping up and over a pile of slab rocks, moss and lichen covered, I lost the trail. I “scouted,”  then backed down the way I had come. I saw a trail leading left, skirting the rocks. I followed this—a faint track—stopping every few feet and turning around, to be sure I would recognize my way back. I found a trail blaze—whitish, this time, an old one. Walking forward, and turning back every few steps, I came suddenly upon a deep, rocky crevice, with a screen of trees on the opposite side, and beyond, another vista. I bent over, looking down into the crevice. There were strewn boulders at the bottom, and cave-like hollows: a good place for bears. Had I arrived already at Bear Cliffs?  This was to be the climax of the hike, where I would explore, take pictures, exhilarate in the view, and in my own sense of adventure.  But these expectations were overridden now by anxiety. I lingered only briefly, and turned back, disappointed, but uneasy.

         Through the trees I saw the familiar pile of slab rocks, to my left. Good!  But when I arrived at the spot where I comfortably expected to turn right, and find the trail home, I could not discern my way. I took a few steps, this way, and that. Suddenly, I’d lost my bearings. I could see no trail; and then trails seemed to lead off everywhere. Bright light—like being in an over-exposed photograph, wind, small, twisted trees all around, silence. I thought: this is what it’s like to be lost. This is the state of mind people fall into. I imagined myself wandering, exhausted, at nightfall, shivering in the cold. I visualized the character in Jack London’s, To Build a Fire, clumping wildly through the woods on frozen feet.

           I struggled to maintain my composure—my god, imagine the embarrassment of calling 911, I thought, and having to be ‘rescued’! I walked slowly, searching for trail sign: flattened leaves, scuffed rocks. Then, yes! A marker I recognized. I turned around, and saw it plainly, a signboard hanging crookedly on a tree, to the right of the slab rocks: Bear Cliffs, in yellow letters, with an arrow. I had been lost. I had gotten off the trail. I turned toward home. As I came down the Bear Cliffs Connector Trail toward the lake, and my car, I thought of John Muir, with his little knapsack, tramping exuberantly, alone, for weeks at a time, through the vast Yosemite wilderness. What a great spirit he was!

         That night, my wife Ann, sensitive to my moods, as always, asked me what was wrong. I struggled to describe my feelings, and the reasons for my feelings. “I don’t know,” I said, over and over, between long pauses. “I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m doing.”  She waited for more. But I couldn’t seem to articulate anything more. Me! Who was so comfortable teaching American Literature, and leading discussions on novels, and analyzing the complex motivations of characters—and yet who at this moment, when it really counted, could produce no understanding of my own motivations!

        Finally, I described, haltingly, the hike, and getting lost—or at least, the feeling of being lost, which, though total, might actually have only lasted for a minute or two. At once, Ann climbed out of bed, saying, “I have a poem for you.” She returned a few minutes later with a scrap of paper in her hand, and read aloud the following poem, by David Wagoner (from Collected Poems 1956-1976):

Lost

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are  not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where  you are. You must let it find you.

Exit David

     Though the figure of David is small, I had expended a large amount of time on him—more than on Goliath, who was two or three times bigger. Why are Big Bad Guys more interesting than Small Good Persons?

     Size was a factor, for sure: at 14” or so, and with his heavily-muscled body, exaggerated posture, and extreme facial expression, Goliath was better suited to my fingers and tools, and simpler to characterize. David, on the other hand, being a mere 6” or so, and of slender build and serene expression, and built around such small armature wire, was a real challenge. I changed his position again and again; I improved, or tried to improve, the accuracy of his anatomy & musculature;  I browsed through Google Images and You Tube, for help depicting the “proper” techniques for sling throwing (discovering, of course, a world of sling throwing methods—Apache, Comanche, Greek, etc); I worked to give better definition to his facial expression, on a head hardly bigger than a peach pit.

     Finally, I felt satisfied: Ah! Now I have him! Then I stepped back, revolve the whole sculpture, evaluating David from every angle, and became dissatisfied all over again: I’d worked him over too much! He’d gotten older—no doubt because I’d been modeling from myself, in a mirror—and he looked vaguely like Clark Kent, mild-mannered and indisputably Western European. Hardly a shepherd boy from Biblical times. Michelango wasn’t troubled by the lack of historical veracity, in carving out his magnificent, Grecian David--GQ in marble; nor was Donatello, whose David is lightly poised, with girlish beauty, over the head of Goliath. But I was bothered.

     Finally, the Radical Edit, one of my favorite strategies, and voila! Exit David. Leaving Goliath to claim the field, in his agony of collapse.

    

     Brilliant! Hmm. Maybe. No, just unfinished. But now what?

David & Goliath

In early 2011, I saw on the front cover of the Christian Science Monitor magazine, a photograph of a group of Taliban fighters: a few men in turbans and sandals, holding an assortment of weapons, and with ammo pouches like small purses slung over the shoulders of their long turbans. The photograph begged the question: how was it possible that such men could effectively combat, for ten years, the United States of America, the greatest military power in the history of the world?

During the same period I had studied this picture of Taliban fighters, I was, along with millions of other Americans, hearing and reading a lot about the “Arab Spring” protest movements in Egypt, and the eventual overthrow of Hosni Mubarek, the strong-featured dictator who had been in power for decades. Who could have imagined that young people with cellphones and Facebook connections could have toppled such a autocrat, with his secret police, vast wealth, obsequious and corrupt political system?

Under the influence of such images and news reports, I began a sculpture based upon the Biblical story of David and Goliath: Goliath, the nuclear bomb of his age, from whom whole armies fled in panic; and David, a shepherd boy with a throwing sling and the power of God in his arm, who walked out calmly upon the field of battle, in sight of thousands of his trembling countrymen—and felled the giant with a stone to the head.

In my first version of this mythic encounter, I presented the two combatants just as David is launching his killing stone: Goliath stands like a monolith, arrayed in all his battle gear. David, slender and lightly muscled, clad in a simple, one-piece tunic, has just released the stone, with a pitcher’s accuracy. There is a moment, or so I imagined, just before the stone strikes, when giant and boy make eye-contact, and recognize their kinship: Goliath had once been such a shepherd boy; and David will become a king, capable in his own right of cruelty and abuse of power.

I liked this first presentation, which was completed in August of 2011. However, over a span of three months or so, my enthusiasm began to wane. I’d stop and look at the sculpture, and see problems: David’s sling, and thin arms, would be hard to mold, and harder to cast. Worse, I felt  the absence of evident and dynamic relationship between giant and boy, as forms. And finally, regrettably, I had to concede that I’d gotten engrossed in Goliath’s “war decorations”: the breastplate and bucklers, straps and spikes; the feather in his wild hair. I love that stuff! But too much detail clutters.

So I went back to work, and over a period of about three months, as you can see from this succession of images, began a process of  extreme deconstruction, and then rebuilding and readjustment, searching for fundamentals. These fundamentals involve both “narrative content,” and “formalistic elements”—the size, placement, and relationship of the physical forms.

I stripped off most of Goliath’s war gear: the huge shield and broadsword, his breastplate and leather strap hung with scalps, the feather in his hair. I replaced these extraneous items with more muscle and massiveness. He’s powerful enough in his physical arrogance alone. I also made him uglier in the face, almost monstrous—difficult to do, when I realized that I had given him strong, handsome features, because in some way he had been charismatic to me!

The really important change with Goliath was to push him backwards, off balance.  I became more conscious of this after talking with Robert Smith, a friend and Tai-Chi instructor, who noted that it just takes a little upward lift to upset the balance of even a large, strong person. So I even lifted one of Goliath’s feet off the ground: a giant, teetering. Also, with his leg up, and arms splayed out, he’s become a “multi-planar” form, rather than, as he was at first, “uni-planar”—a wall—which heightens the sense of precarious moment, and impending disaster.

In thinking of David, I thought of Tiger Woods, with his long, slender form, extended even further by the shank of his golf club, winding up like a corkscrew—and then unwinding, to strike a ball about the size of the stone which David had loaded in his sling. That stone, when it struck Goliath, must have been travelling at least as fast as a baseball: 90 or 100 mph! Goliath, equipped for “conventional warfare,” and mockingly impervious to spears, swords, and clubs, was utterly unprepared for David’s tiny weapon, which, launched from a distance, only needed 2” or so of impact area at the thin skull plate of Goliath’s forehead.

Yet while manipulating clay, tools, and my fingers around David’s figure (about 5” tall) was challenging enough, figuring out how to mold/cast his sling—a mere thread—left me with “no good solutions.” Thinking conceptually and technically of David himself as the essential weapon helped immeasurably.  If he is the real stone and sling, then the stone picked from a creek, and leather strap gripped in his fist are only mechanical devices, and could be dispensed with. Then my wife Ann suggested that I depict David in the instant after he has released the stone, or at the completion of his “follow-through.” This was a great suggestion, allowing me to try to convey that powerful, unwinding release of energy.  And maybe I could also leave out the sling, except as a remnant of strap.

Now, again, rest: set aside David and Goliath. Return later, stroke the chin, and consider . . . .

Wagner Witte3 Gallery

Where Word & Art meet and spark,
An arc across the sky ensues--or so it seems--
Until the cosmos intervenes.
Though 'writ on water' we may be,
What delights are here for thee!

And one of those delights, for me, has been the chance to exhibit a broad selection of my sculptural works in the Wagner Witte3 Gallery, in downtown Easton, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Thanks to gallery co-owners Jen Wagner (an awesome and energetic mosacis artist) and Kathleen Witte (a woman with a quick eye for "what works"), and longtime friends Steve Leocha and Renny Johnson, I have felt warmly welcomed. With Steve's excellent advice and ready assistance in arranging the sculptural works  (and with loan of tables and cloths from Sharon Stockley, a WWG glass & metal artist), I was able to stand back, in the late afternoon of December 15th, 2011 ("last year"--already), and say to myself: "Great!" "Best Ever!"

While in Easton, perhaps as prelude to its annual November "Waterfowlers' Festival," when a huge number of visitors converge on the town for an arts festival which features wildlife-related paintings and sculpture, I had two unusual "bird experiences": I supped on goose which I saw shot from the sky, and I watched a pair of bald eagles wheeling in the wind.

Transition for a new year

Twenty years and more ago, I began a log, called "Sculptor's Notes," written out by hand (imagine that!), in pen, on lined paper, in a 3-ring looseleaf binder. The log began with pages of quotes meticulously copied out from books, the first one from Henry Moore, as quoted in Henry Read's The Art of Sculpture: "This is what the sculptor must do. He must strive continually to think of, and use, form in its full spatial completeness. He gets the solid shape, as it were, inside his head--he thinks of it, whatever its size, as if he were holding it completely enclosed within the hollow of his hand. He mentally visualizes a complex form from all around itself; he knows while he looks at one side what the other side is like; he identifies himself with its center of gravity, its mass, its weight; he realizes its volume, as the space that the shape displaces in the air."

Following these pages of quotations, I began my "Miscellaneous Reflections." The first entry, which opens with the remark that D.H. Lawrence (the subject of my Master's Thesis at Virginia Tech in 1985) "rails against anthropomorphism." This entry is not dated. My first dated entry is from November 11th, 1990: "I am sketching from Dega (Dega by Himself); a wonderful experience! Visual quotation, I would call it. Not slavish imitation, however, but attentive analysis of Dega's interpretation of the world. His roughest sketches become treasures of revelation."

Over time, I filled that looseleaf binder with my reflections, commentary, and, much less often than earlier, quotations. I began a second loose-leaf binder; filled that one, too, with hand-written entries, regularly dated, now. The subject of these entries expanded, even as my handwriting grew larger, and I must say, "messier," to include personal matters, confessional at times, and, almost for historical purposes, mention of "topical" events, "the business of the day." I filled this second binder, as well, and began a third, by this time not only dating the entries, but noting the time of writing, and "elapsed time," even, if the entries required a couple of pages to complete.

My "Occasional Journal," as I came to refer to it, became a kind of refuge for me. The sitting down to it, in the early morning, with a hot cup of coffee beside me, and then beginning a new entry, enabled me to establish a feeling of order, of constructing, or carving out, from the flow of daily experience, a meaningful narrative, or at least a denotation of important episodes in that narrative. Was I simply being self-indulgent? This question troubled me from time to time. I wondered whether I was attempting to build up some kind of absurd archive, which, after my death, would be opened, and preserved, as the lasting tribute to my life on earth. Fine for Wittegenstein, maybe, or Winston Churchill, but for my small life? Oh, fool! I thought. Who cares! Ozymandias, in lower-case!

However, I have decided that, small or not, I am myself a"lens"--the only lens--available to me for observing, registering, comprehending, and taking joy in  "life," not in the abstract, and through the actuality of my unique experience of living, as a human being, on Planet Earth, at this time in history. Writing about my experiences is therefore, as I see it, a "bearing witness," from the perspective of that which is "me," to the life through which I move. If I don't write down what I have known, and experienced, no one else will do it for me; that small skein of woven color which is my life will be missing from the great, grand, terrible, and exquisite tapestry of the human experience.

Ah, well. Whatever. So now, on the first day of the new year, 2012, I begin, with trepidation and anticipation, the transition of Sculptor's Notes to this online blog, A Long Arc.

Like a folded boat, this wordy blog
I release upon the cybersea,
And wait to see who will write back to me.