The Captain's Sculpture, parts 64 - 67

64. The shepherd was now dead, never again would he look longingly at the Shepherdess eighteen inches away. What she thought about this, and how she felt about becoming so suddenly a widow, I have on idea.

65. My mother was not at home when this disaster befell our home. Although I had never looked at or thought about the figurines on the staircase, nevertheless, in the back of my mind was a basic assumption; the objects in question were valuable and prized possessions of my family which I had stupidly half destroyed. 

66. But the remaining half was obviously less than useless. Suddenly a solution jumped into my head, a childish solution as you will see, but the only thing a ten year old in a dire predicament might hit upon.

 67. My solution did not include any attempt to put the figure back together, quite the contrary, I cleaned up all the pieces and threw them into the garbage can at the back of the house where they would not be discovered, even by an accident.

The Captain's Sculpture, parts 60 - 63

 60. I never gave those figures a thought, or even looked at them in passing, until one day I tripped as I was running down the stairs with my hands in my pockets. 

61. After I tripped, I began to fall head first down the stairs and I can remember even all these years later, how preoccupied I was with the problem of getting my two hands out of my two pockets.

62. The desire to get your hands out of your pockets when you are falling down stairs is apparently entirely instinctive, and requires no thought on your part. It happens all by itself.

63. I found myself on the floor at the bottom of the stairs, surrounded by shards of plaster. The plaster shards were the remains of the plaster shepherd figurine that, in my decent, I had knocked from its eternal perch on its windowsill.  

The Captain's Sculpture, parts 56 - 59

56. Often, in antique and second hand stores you will find old pieces of sculpture in either plaster or bronze. These things are usually about a foot or so high and often are of sentimental subject matter. 

57. I imagine these things are about fifty years old and probably graced some little table of some poor interior as an imagined touch of class.  As a matter of fact, there were two objects of this sort that my mother kept on the ledge of a window near the front door, at the foot of the stairs. 

58. There were two figures cast in plaster, one was a shepherd and the other was a shepherdess. The shepherd was on the left of the window-sill, and from that position he gazed longingly at the shepherdess who was two feet away, who looked at him coyly over her shoulder. 

59. They were poly-chrome sculpture, glazed in multiple colors, but mostly pastel tints. These two figures were the only sculpture I ever came across in my childhood excepting some full sized figures of Civil War heroes, and a life-sized bronze of General Lafayette, down on Lafayette Street.

The Captain's Sculpture, parts 52 - 55

52. I thought the device of arranging your sculpture in such a way that the forms combine to give it strength was very smart of the Captain, but soon I began to notice that all the little ceramic figurines you see in gift stores always use the same device.

53. I found myself gravitating to the gift sections department stores where I would examine the glossy casts of little ducks and frogs, unicorns and toads, and in every case it was plain to see that all the various forms of the figures were composed is such a way that the entire object resolved itself down to one simple shape.

54. “Obviously,” I thought to myself, “they do it this way so it will come out of the mold easily.” Just as I made this realization, I pictured trying to pull a more complicated shape out of a mold. A complicated shape consisting of many parts with interior voids would need to be cast in several pieces.

55. Although this is quite complicated to explain in words, it is very obvious if you just go and have a look at gift store figurines, if you could do that it would make my life a lot simpler, because you can see at a glance, what it is almost impossible to explain with words.

The Captain's Sculpture, parts 48 - 51

48. It now became an important part of class instruction for all of us to sit in a circle and listen to our teacher both praise and explain the Captain’s marvelous sculpture to us. 

49. I am not going to transcribe all the things she said for this reason, at the time I did not find it either interesting or enlightening, and so I think to myself, if I found it tedious, how much the worse for you, to hear my uninspired transcription of it.

50. Nevertheless, I need to point out certain observations. She pointed out how both of the front legs were touching. The reason for this was because merging the two forms into one added strength and stability.

51. Although the back legs did not touch, the Captain had cleverly added a tree trunk to his figure, and tree trunk managed to touch both of the back legs, and entirely fill the space between them.

The Captain's Sculpture, parts 45 -48

45. There was something very facile and skillful about these figure drawings, but what they all lacked was any possible indication of what the model might have been like.

 

46. I became critical of the entire concept and tried to keep my irritation to myself, but one time I came across a lovely drawing of a woman that Rubens did, and one thing was obvious to me, there was no indication of any blocks or bricks or spheres in the thing, and if their was it certainly would have ruined it.

 

47. But things were not hopeless for me, because I continued with my project of casting manhole covers and the like from the street, and except for the Captain, I was considered Mrs. Festini’s star sculpture pupil.

 

48. The Captain never varied from his goal, and as the weeks went by, we were astounded to see him create the figure of a deer, standing on top of a mountain ridge, with his head turned majestically to the side.

The Captain's Sculpture, parts 41 - 44

41. According to Mrs. Festini, my mistake was that I was trying to shape the individual parts, such as an arm or a leg, without ever being aware of the unseen, basic shape of the entire figure.

 

42. She explained the geometry of the figure to me in great detail, but I had to pretend to understand what it was she was saying, because I had no idea what the basic underlying shape of a shape could possibly be.

43. She showed me books of the paintings of Cezanne, and all the time she was gesturing and saying things about cubes and spheres, and how that was the basis of cubism, and how cubism is the basis of correct drawing, painting and sculptures.

44. She was not the only person obsessed with this odd concept, because I discovered numerous drawing instruction books in the library filled up with sketches in which you could see that the artist was trying to build up a figure drawing out of a pile of partly erased bricks and cinder-blocks.