Robert Coulson Dean, Portrait Sculpture: “A beautiful head!” (process
reflections)
In July of this past year (2012), I was asked by a
local pastor to do a portrait sculpture of her husband, Robert Dean. Great!
Then she told me that she would like the sculpture to be a
surprise. Hmm. That would mean no
modeling of Robert from life; no close-up camera shots or video; no catalogue
of facial and head measurements with calipers; and no getting to know him,
through this process. Yet the finished portrait sculpture would have to pass
muster with a woman who had know his face, intimately and attentively, for a
couple of decades or more!
So when I happened to see Robert in Kroger’s one
day, I found myself “tailing” him: ostensibly
checking over the vegetables, while trying to get a good look at his
profile, without being too obvious. A sculptor turned gumshoe. I did at least form
an “impression” of Robert: a man moving comfortably through the world, content
in himself, and distinterested in much that went on around him.
Just as his wife had told me, Robert had a
“beautiful head”—a nicely shaped cranium, clean of hair, with no odd bumps or
ridges (unlike my own). In short, a head fittingly suited to his profession:
psychiatry. His nose was fine, even small. And he wore glasses. With this
information, I roughed out a basic form, and coated it with clay (oil-based plastilina).
Then I learned that Robert would be co-teaching a
Sunday School class, beginning in September. Of course I resolved to attend! The
subject of the class was to be Karen
Armstrong’s, Twelve Steps to a
Compassionate Life, a book which, as she says in her Preface, addresses “one of the chief tasks of our
time,” namely “to build a global community in which all peoples can live
together in mutual respect.” If you are unacquainted with Karen Armstrong, but
interested in religion or spirituality, I highly recommend her work, especially
The Great Transformation: The Beginning
of our Religious Traditions. Her work, and this book in particular, have profoundly
shaped my own perspective on Christianity I add, with gratitude, that I was
first introduced to her work several years ago, in another Sunday School class
at this same church.
About twenty persons attended the class, for which
the tables and chairs had been arranged in a square, so that all of us were
able to face each other. It was a nice arrangement, and excellent conversations
ensued. Robert and his co-teacher took
turns, week to week, in leading the class. Usually, we would divide into small
groups, discuss elements in the “assigned” reading for that week, and then
reassemble near the end of the hour, for summary conversation, and closing
remarks by the teacher. Robert proved to
be, as I had expected, an excellent teacher: articulate, discerning, and confident
in his ability to guide discussion. (His co-teacher was also excellent.)
What I especially marveled at, in watching Robert,
was the range of his expressions: a pursing of the lips, and a knitting of the
brows, sometimes together, and sometimes separately. Sometimes one brow rose,
while the other fell; then he would smile, briefly but broadly. Some of these
facial movements seemed involuntary, yet they also seemed to be the quicksilver
evidence of the passage of thoughts through his mind. I could not retain a memory of the details of
his expressions for long, I found, so I would bicycle straight home after the
Sunday School class and go right into my studio and work on the clay model.
Sometime in late September, when I was getting to
the point where I felt like I was “just pushing clay around,” in the words of
the California sculptor Richard MacDonald, I got together with Robert’s wife
and went through some family photo albums, and took pictures of a few photos of
Robert, and tacked print copies of these photos to a bulletin board propped
near the clay model in my studio. The pictures covered a span of time of at
least twenty years, from when he was a young father, with a fringe of dark hair
above his ears, to pictures of him with a hat on when his daughter was perhaps
in college. Pictures can be tricky to
work from: a profile will give one “look,” and another picture, face-forward, can
present a remarkably different look. A lot has to do with differences of light
and shadow, from one picture-taking circumstance, to another. Which picture to
believe?
A successful portrait bust is more than an
anatomical rendering, of course; it’s meant to be a psychological rendering as
well. What lay “behind” Robert’s facial
expressions? What, within his mind, was rising to the surface and exhibiting
hints of itself in these expressions? I could see, or felt that I saw, a
certain meditative expression in his face, as he listened to discussion and
then prepared the studied articulation of his response, and then, when speaking,
stare into a “middle space,” as if visualizing his words, before finally surveying
his circle of listeners, and concluding with a humorous remark, his mouth
flashing into a smile, and his eyes searching his audience for their reaction.
He wore glasses—I worked the clay model with them
on, then off. His wife, musing a bit, said
finally, “well, I think you’d better put them back on. I’ve always known him
with glasses.” Taking a cue from the work of Charlotte NC sculptor Chaz Fagan,
I merely “suggested” the glasses’ frames: side bows, nose pads, frame arcs
above the eyes, and corresponding depression arcs in his cheeks.
At last, I was satisfied, and so was Robert’s wife.
From there, it was molding, a casting in hydrostone, and again in hydrocal, and
then a color finish of layered acrylics; a custom walnut base provided by Trev
Smith of Happy Hollow Woods; and name
plaque from New River Engraving. Christmas Eve—finito! Visible to me in the
finished work were the marks of every stage in the process, as important in
their way as my sculptor’s signature on the back.
The portrait
sculpture of Robert Coulson Dean was presented on Christmas Day, in the
presence of his wife, and children. His wife emailed me later with this report:
“Robert was quite taken aback by the
sculpture, which he feels very much captures essential things about himself. He was by turns
embarrassed and amazed that we had done this. He is a very unassuming person,
and thinks of busts as being made only for the prominent, but of course he is
also deeply flattered. So thank you many times over.” 
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