I grew up in the shadow of Wheaton College, a Christian liberal "out on the prairie"--or what had been prairie when Jonathan Blanchard broke ground back before the Civil War--but is now "suburbia," 30 miles west of Chicago. My father was a professor of English at Wheaton. By the rules of the college at the time, neither he nor his family could smoke, dance, go to movies, play cards, or belong to "secret societies." Sound awful, or ridiculous? Well, it wasn't. It held back a lot of cultural "white noise," which we get too much of. Besides, we had "The Swamp," a sort of (to us) ravaged wilderness, an unfenced kingdom of rank Nature on the tattered edge of town. A place of cattails and Leopard Frogs, and wrecked cars, and beer cans in the bushes. A long bikeride from home. A place to explore. Why am I telling you this? Because The Swamp was, in some indefinable way, one of the "influences" that shaped me as an artist.
And there were books, of course. Our house was heavy with books, a weird assemblage of books, books about Christianity and proper belief, but with lots of other stuff mixed in. I plucked out Camus' The Stranger one Sunday afternoon when I was about thirteen and was immersed for the next hours in a world outside all my learned references to Divine Order. There was another book, The Heretics, which positively glowed with the power of the lives of first and second-century spiritual zealots excommunicated and often tortured, who yet went singing to the stake. I didn't see that power where I went to church. And above all, there were the books of J.R.R. Tolkien. Thanks, mom, for introducing me to his books!! Alongside best friend and true artist David Bellinger I began reading "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy in sixth grade, and I don't think I have ever fully recovered, thankfully. Oh Lord! Gollum rose from those pages and settled in my imagination for good. Just check out some of my freaky little forest figures if you don't believe me.
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Grampie was a mighty influence! Smelling of tobacco smoke and a by-gone era, he led my brother and I-who trailed him like puppies--"down on the flat," as locals called the floodplain of the Susquehanna, outside Oneonta, in upstate New York. Sometimes we would pick berries. Once he took out the D&H tracks to shoot the .22. Most oftern we'd walk along the old New York Central tracks to the rusty trestle bridge. We found a dead mink in a barrel of water there once. He kept a glass jar upside down on the end of a branch, for a cold draught of water from "The Slang," a little feeder stream.. And when the day was over, he told us stories. We sat on either arm of an old green Adirondack chair as he smoked his pipe and told us his stories of hunting deer, tracking big bucks over the snow-blown ridge. We thrilled to these stories, with their aura of loneliness and adventure and bloodshed, and which always ended, it seems to me now, with words whose exact inflection I still savor: "and then I LAID the gun on 'im and touched eet off."
So many influences, more than I can name! The Church of the Good Shepherd at Elk Grove. What an experience! When "the Word became Flesh" in truth. What longing, what camaraderie! Peggy Jo Warrick took me there the first time. And took me to E.E. Cummings! What a springtime we enjoyed, at the Lagoon, with Cummings! And Carmen. Oh Lord, may I never forget Carmen Gaudio, Lord of Chaos, godfather of Leavitt Street, auto mechanic and zen master, who reveled in the hot, gritty, dangerous world of an urban ghetto, who flashed a gold earring and could beam the world's biggest smile and exclaim like Zorba the Greek, "I love life!" And backpacking with Ron and Brian in Denali National Park, in Alaska. Staring down into Refuge Valley, uninterrupted wilderness to the very edges of sight, was a vision of the Body of God.
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And Richard MacDonald, my first formal sculpture teacher. Choose well your first teacher, for their lessons will go deep! Richard's Masters Series Workshop gave me the "Golden Key" to sculptural technique--and advice to match: "Leap, and the net will appear," he told us, quoting from ancient wisdom. "What would you do if you knew you couldn't fail?" he asked. His example--his speed, his fluency, his passion for the human figure will stay with me to my dying day!
And now family, so much revolves around family. My wife and soulmate, Ann Morris Shawhan, who took hold of me when I was starving, physically and emotionally, laid before me a prince's picnic, and pronounced, with deliberate pleasure, "Everything I eat turns to Health and Beauty." She brought me back to life. She endorsed my initiatives. She chuckled over my sculpted figures and faces. "Everything you do is phallic," she said, with a sly smile. And my children: all changes with children! My fine son, Teague, now a musician, and Haley Jayne, dear Haley, and Rose, launching into the wide world. The world, indeed! For the meaning of family grows larger as the years pass, encompassing "The Shawhan Clan," and the families of my siblings, Stefan, Sue, and Pam, outwards to the life of this community, Blacksburg, Va, and on further, to become The Family of Man. 'Member that book?
Eighteen years of my working life have been spent at Virginia Tech, and it's been a love-hate relationship. But my heart and mind respond deeply to the university's motto, UT PROSIM, That I May Serve, the old evangelical zeal for mission morphing into service as Virginia Tech's first Recycling Coordinator, after being an Instructor of English.
Forgive my omissions; this is not biography, but jottings. From all that I am, what I know of myself and what I do not, I wish to become sometimes a bird and sometimes a mule. E.B. White said it best: "I awake each morning torn between a desire to save the world and a desire to savour the world. This makes it hard to plan my day." A Bodacious Amen to that!
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