In the early '90's, (Just think — this dates from another century!) I spent many late nights hidden away in our dark basement, huddled over a work table with a small light, fashioning weird faces in clay, with help from a small mirror into which I grimaced, peered, winced, grinned, pouted, etc, and copying these expressions carefully into the clay. Friday nights were the best. Then I could listen to Music From the Hearts of Space, making faces to my heart's content until well after midnight.
 
These clay faces I finally brought up into the light of day — and into the marketplace, with financial help from my brother, Stefan--as Frig Freaks. Oh, I was sure that everybody on the planet would soon want to have at least one stuck to their refrigerator! I was wrong, as you have probably guessed. I soon realized that "snuggly" sells, not weird. But there are plenty of weird people in the country, I reasoned, if I could just find them. Marketing, that was the ticket! Except that I needed $100,000, or that at least was what I was told by the president of a reputable collectibles company. Plus they were too expensive: $10 a piece. Actually, that was cheap, considering that even at this price I was basically selling them at a loss--but expensive compared to refrigerator magnets flooding into the country from China and selling retail at $1 apiece. Globalization hits home.
 
Yes, I learned some hard lessons with Frig Freaks, but they were my schooling in facial expression: building up an accurate head shape first; bringing all of the features to finished accuracy simultaneously, rather than one at a time; and making sure that every part of the face contributed to coherent and unified expression.
 
So I shifted away from caricature to portraiture, starting with my grandfather, depicted as a young man in Adirondack Hunter.
 
Adirondack Hunter was my first portrait bust. It took me forever and I did everything wrong, it seems to me now, but nevertheless I kept at it, propelled by the earnest desire to pull into physical being my love for Grampie. I was working from a faded, fifty or sixty-year old B&W photo of he and a half-dozen other hunters with deer carcasses strung up behind them. The men are grizzled, dressed in high boots and woolens, rough and jaunty., It's a scene that looks straight out of Jack London. Grampie stands to one side, handsome as the dickens, clean shaven, his cap rakishly tilted, with an oddly quiet smile warming his face. This old photo is a veritible icon, and creating a portrait from it allowed me to give full voice to childhood's veneration of Grampie. This, plus the practical need for a clear side view of his face, summoned remarkably precise and specific mental snapshots from memory files dormant for 45 years: evenings, at 13 Chester St, and sweet, mingled aromas of his garden, my brother and I sitting on either side of Grampie in his Adirondack chair as he recalled hunting and fishing experiences. He had a certain way of stroking the ridge of his nose, and inspecting the poison ivy scars on the back of his hand.

The experience of this portrait encouraged me to try again--and to revise my methods. I audited a studio art class taught by Dean Carter, at Virginia Tech, and learned to make a "bust peg," a simple substitute for the complicated carpentry project inside Adirondack Hunter.

And I "copped out." Maybe. You be the judge. Anyway, I went to photography for data. I assumed that all the great sculptors of the past modeled portraits strictly from life, but I found out right away that Rose, who was about fourteen years old at the time, was hardly going to sit still for more than a few minutes, even if I had been Michelangelo. So I took Rose and Haley up to the awesome photography studio of my good friend Rex Hartson, and got from that session first-class, life-size photos of both girls, from different angles. Back in the studio, I rigged a little bulletin board for these photos, and was ready to go. Wow, what a difference! I could study their expressions and features, close up, all night, if I wanted.

And I went to books, which ever since childhood in a bookish family, I understood to be the source of all knowledge. What I found was a book of photos of the sculptures of Jean Antoine Houdon. Now, you might know all about Houdon, but I sure didn't--though in fact I and nearly every American has been exposed to his portraits of Jefferson, Washington, and Benjamin Franklin. From studying, with all the passion of a scholar, photos of Houdon's portrait busts, I learned a huge lesson: great sculpture is all about light. You think it's all about mass and volume, but a really artful sculptor like Houdon knows how to exploit light, and shadow, and thereby spark the physical presences of mass and volume with a beaming spiritual vitality. The real proof is in Houdon's treatment of eyes: nobody, and I mean nobody, has ever matched him for the ability to create the illusion, from "inanimate stone," of the true organs of sight, the delicate, watery orbs which convey "soul." And I also learned from Houdon that marble is the Queen of all sculpture materials, because it reflects light from below the surface, giving the sculptures a real feeling of inner life. Bronze is very fine, but nothing can match marble.

I also learned, and tried to apply, really specific techniques I saw demonstrated in Houdon's busts, including the gosh-darned clever little trick of leaving a tiny point of stone over the dark hole of the pupil, to catch that magical spark of light.

And hair. I went back to Houdon looking for how to sculpt a child's hair. Oh, I've got a good story on this subject! I was working on a portrait of my daughter Haley Jayne, using the gorgeous studio photos from Rex Hartson. I was pleased with the portrait--Haley's bright eyes, chubby cheeks, dear smile, and the exquisite accent of her flowered hat--these features I felt I had "captured." But I couldn't seem to manage her long, charming, curling tresses. Rather than being light and bouncy, the curls, in clay, looked like ten pounds of, well--clay. The problem was not just my abilities; light, thin, strands of hair really push the limits of what sculpture can do. So naturally, I went to Houdon, the Master. To the pages in the book where he had done his own children--there would be a pretty close parallel to what I was trying to do, I was sure. Well! The parallel was a lot closer than I expected! But I've got to back a minute so you get the full picture. For a couple of years, from the time Haley was about two years old, she had had an imaginary playmate she called "Sabine." For the life of us, Ann and I could not figure out where Haley had come up with such an unusual name for her playmate, yet her imaginary playmate persisted, as I say, and I frequently eavesdropped on little Haley in her room, surrounded by dolls and toys, engaged in some conversation with Sabine (who seemed usually to be in trouble for something). So anyway, I turn to the photo in the Houdon book showing the portrait of his daughter--and for the first time read the caption word-for-word. Stunned by what I read, I turned to Ann and ask, "How do you think "Sabine" is spelled?" And she answered, "S-A-B-I-N-E." I hold the book out to her and say, "Read this." Low and behold, the caption says that the portrait was of Houdon's daughter, named Sabine, and further, that he had done the photo when Sabine was four years old, and that was also Haley's age!!

Believe it or not, I've got another good story about sculpting hair. In 1997, I was commissioned to create a bronze portrait bust of C.S. Lewis for the Wade Center at Wheaton College. There were many reasons, personal and professional, why I was enthusiastic about this opportunity, so I plunged in, headlong. I got a chance to exercise the side-tracked academic in myself, reading two biographies and much of Lewis' fiction, poetry, apologetic works, and essays. In fact, I got to knowing so much (for awhile, anyway--most of it I've since forgotten, sad to say) that I was asked to co-teach a Sunday School class on Lewis. All of this went on for eleven months, and I was pretty well steeped in the life and lore of Clive Staples Lewis at that point. Near the end of the clay-sculpting phase of the project, I was working on his hair, which was very thin on top of his head by age fifty, wee strands combed across a widening bald spot. Again, I was up against the basic problem of using a massy material to realistically render something which has almost no mass. It's late at night, and I'm struggling with this problem. Yet otherwise, the face and head of Lewis are entirely complete. Suddenly, like a psychic shock, I get a sharp, sensory "hit": the smell of his scalp. Almost the instant I get this hit, it's gone, and I'm left with the certain knowledge that Lewis didn't wash his hair very often. And on the heels of this conviction various pieces of confirming information came to mind, for example that the Kilns, outside Oxford, where he and his brother lived for many years, never had good plumbing. Then I dug out some of the B&W pictures I'd been referencing: one in particular, where Lewis is seated at his desk with a big book, a smile just tucking into his cheeks. Sure as shootin' I see it: oily hair. He didn't wash his hair very often. That olfactory "hit" in the studio had been right on the money! Was it possible that some ghostly remainder of C.S.Lewis had drifted near his portrait, for an instant, drawn by the concentration of my energy upon the resurrection of his physical being?

In any event, let me wind up this ramble on portrait sculpture by saying that relationship is the hallmark of great sculpture, the relationship of the sculptor to his subject, what D.H. Lawrence would call, "at-one-ment." It is this relationship, this vital, intangible rapport, this investment of spiritual energy by the sculptor, this touching of the finger of Adam by the finger of the hand of God which imparts vitality to the subject, and which then jumps from subject to viewer, with a shock of recognition: We Are One.