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| My bronze sculpture. |
Years ago one of my part-time jobs was "pizza-maker" at a small place in Providence. It was boomin' when I applied for a job that first summer in town, but it went down quickly from the owner's neglect. He was all about money, which pretty much guarantees that you lose the soul you have for your food like <snaps fingers> this!
It was actually the perfect lesson for master "Artists-in-Training", and there were three of us who worked there: Crystal, a beautiful girl with perfectly straight, long brown hair with a sweet attitude, Greg Van Zandt, a disturbingly talented sculptor in love with Crystal the photographer, in a relationship that didn't quite work because it felt forced, and then there was me, awkwardly stuck into their love triangle at the restaurant. The other worker was an Italian-American lady from East Providence, working class like our boss, and friends with all the native-born security guys who worked at the school.
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| Close-up of the casts' cutting. |
Gradually we quit the joint, one by one, leaving us with less people, and then less customers, as he took the heart out of the business and walked away. People could feel it, and his longer-term staff tried to talk to him about it, but at that point, he was all about the "Benjamins", which culminated in me working the counter and the ovens one night solo, and you all knew what happened to me from that scenario.
We were fleeing a sinking ship, and we knew it. The food had no more soul, which is a major shame because we served a deep dish, Chicago-style pizza that's still rather unique for the East Coast, and a Providence version of a subway sandwich that they call "grindah's" which is "a grinder" in English. Oh. Yeah, I never heard of it either.
It's a food word that exists only in Rhode Island.
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| The details of the shoots that grew out of the potato. |
Anyway, one night when the work was slow, Greg was in the back with me talking about, well, work. It was pretty much all we thought about, because that's the way they want it, "they" being the Master Educators/Artists who trained us. But crossover was always there, as our worlds collided between the kitchen and the studio. Greg was a handsome boy with brown curls and light eyes who reminded me of my Irish twin brother, driven mad with work.
He started having "hauntings" at the old house he lived in, that he said he captured in his black and white photos (or so he told me about his crit, but you couldn't really trust a fellow students' word because competition starts to eat at them badly, making them do rotten things to one another), so I took his mental degrading with a grain of salt, thinking it would ease with time upon his graduation, not knowing then that our teachers' built into us a type of post-RISD "PTSD" that's part of our artistic journey home.
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| Such intricacies in nature captured in metal that has cooled. |
He was walking, eating, breathing stress. As he stood in the back, chain smoking and leaning against a stainless steel kitchen fridge, he told me about some of his background, none of which I can verify to you today; that he was related to the musician/actor Little Stevie, and that he got into Cooper Union by crumpling up his cigarette package into art (the only object he had on him) to complete the 3D portion of the exam in the prof's office, which immediately got him in and which he turned down, even though it was a free ride. That's how exalted our school was then, as it is now, and as it will be forever.
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| A bronze patina over time. |
He began a series of castings in the same way, taking an old potato growing in the fridge and dipping it expensively into liquid bronze.
It was experimental, extremely hard to do with unstable materials that made it completely risky, and also very brilliant. It was beautiful.
He had one in his backpack that he tossed to me. Whoa... It had the heft and surprising weight of a much denser object, and it was art. He told me diffidently that I could have it, which astonished me. We were so broke, we depended on the food we made for our customers because we ate it at home, too.
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| A sweeping motion captured in its' curved lines. |
I fed my housemates with the stuff we made, as well. He shrugged his shoulders, and explained to me that the first castings were practice. See how he cut it here after it cooled? It didn't stand right, and at RISD we study "The Art of Perfection". It just didn't make the cut for a class critique. I understood, but I also realized that I would never get an objet d'art like this again. After each and every wandering gypsy move I have ever made, I have kept it with me, and here it is, photographed in my kitchen: with objects both precious and plastic, light-hearted and serious, expensive and expansive. Thanks, Greg.
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| Atop the kitchen fridge: it doesn't sit right, so it topples over. I love it! |
