Copyright © 2012 Alan Nayes
All rights reserved — a Samhain Publishing, Ltd. publication
I am where I am because of my shortcomings. I am what I am because of my blessings, though the word implies the bestowing of a Supreme Being’s favor, which I don’t place much stock in. Not that I haven’t been favored. Quite the contrary. I have received my share of fortunes—more than my share, some would argue—in one lifetime. Most would label me talented. Others would even say I am gifted, though not many in the last several months, especially if they’d seen my two most recent endeavors.
My mother’s minister preaches I have fewer than fourteen months to “accept God”. He even sent a pretty acolyte to my studio to personally invite me over to a series of prayer meetings organized at my mother’s earnest behest. I wasn’t aware acolytes in the Protestant church could be females. And this young. Sarah couldn’t have been a year out of seminary school. Perhaps if I’d seen many more acolytes of Sarah’s quality, I might have attended a few more Christmas and Easter services. This girl was extraordinary—eyes and mouth in perfect proportion to her nose, lips with just enough fullness to demonstrate their sensuality, and the manner in which her nasal bridge was set under her brow all synergized to give her expression an undeniable beauty. I politely declined the prayer sessions and instead showed her to my drawing room where I offered to sketch her in charcoal, already silently debating how much shadow to shade under her shapely and well-formed breasts. You see, one of the most important foundations to becoming a good sculptor is the ability to draw. If you can’t draw, don’t take up sculpting. Drawing is the sine qua non. And as it so happens, one of my blessings is my ability to draw well. Very well.
“Without my clothes on, Jeremy?” she asked, obviously flustered, though not as flustered as I might have anticipated.
“Of course, Sarah,” I replied amiably. “I only draw in the nude. My subjects, that is,” I quickly added as if this last revelation would make everything kosher.
Sarah wasn’t Jewish and it didn’t.
After her polite declination, which I must admit was not unexpected, we shared some coffee—it was still morning—shared some thoughts on a few of my projects, and discussed a few political issues—I don’t recall which—all the while tacitly circumlocuting the very subject that had brought her to my studio in the first place. The fact that within fourteen months, I, Jeremy Copper, would be dead.
I am where I am because of my shortcomings. More now than at any time in my life, I’ve begun to understand the subtle validity of what my seventh grade football coach harked upon just prior to cutting me from the team. Too small, too slow, can’t catch—all shortcomings that would preclude me forever from living my father’s dream. In the almost fanatical realm of sports, I was doomed to fail, which I soon came to realize didn’t bother me in the least, but which would create a rift between a son who would never know the exaltation of scoring the winning touchdown and a father who had scored over thirty touchdowns over a prestigious three-year college career culminating in varsity All-America honors. But what I couldn’t do with a football—or baseball, or basketball, or hockey puck for that matter—I could accomplish with only an amorphous slab of stone. I could achieve the equivalent of winning the Super Bowl. And I did, some twenty years later. Because of my athletic shortcomings, I became an artist—a sculptor. How much I was blessed would eventually dictate how good a craftsman I would become.
I always knew I wanted to sculpt. Some of my earliest memories are from the times when my father, the avid outdoorsman, would take my younger brother and me deer hunting on a thousand acres his company leased in the Texas hill country. I was six, two years older than my kid brother Brian, and though I, unlike Brian, had no interest in placing a 150-grain hollow point bullet through the heart of an unsuspecting buck, I did love to collect pine burls and quietly whittle small innocuous creations while Brian and Dad searched the woods for venison. As I grew and matured, I steadily lost interest in sculpting animals so that by the time I reached the end of my second decade I was exclusively into modeling Homo sapiens, with the vast majority of my efforts concentrated solely on recreating the female half of our illustrious race.
With time and practice, and an innate and insatiable desire to perfect my craft, I became quite good. I was blessed. Twice in the preceding year, two genuine Jeremy Copper works sold to private collectors for mid-six-figure sums—not an insignificant stipend for a pair of stone carvings that will never walk, talk or make love. Yet no matter what new benchmark I set for my income, which it might be noted, has increased steadily since I received my art degree, I have never quite reached, or perhaps a more accurate term might be accomplished, that apotheosis, that perfect creation where every line, every shadow, every curve, every highlight transcends not only the substrate—be it marble, clay, granite—but even the very fingers of the artist himself.
I want to be able to shout to all who’ll listen, “There is life there, I have created an eternal life!” And if I truly ever achieve that level of perfection, I will not have to shout, nor even whisper; for gazing upon a living statue is not so markedly different than feasting your visual senses on a beautiful woman—no one need dictate to you what loveliness stands before your eyes. You simply experience it, and bask in your enjoyment.
Francois du Quesnoy accomplished it with Susanna, Auguste Rodin did it with The Eternal Idol, William Zorach did it with Dancing Girl.
And I, Jeremy Copper, came ever so close with Glories for Silva.
My residence is in Newport Beach, California, less than two miles from the emerald marine swells of the Pacific Ocean. The house is sprawling, over five thousand square feet, old, constructed during the Eisenhower administration, and, if statistics are a prognostic indicator, will be the last house I ever own. My current studio is an add-on, I was only able to afford the building costs after a particular subcontractor out of Las Vegas developed an architectural taste for some of my nudes and contributed an additional fifteen hundred square feet to the living space. These days, much of my living is confined to the studio. Time has become a precious commodity.
From my kitchen, a large bay window, which once overlooked a backyard of Bermuda grass, clover and dandelions, affords a view into the studio’s main work area. Just after noon till past sunset, two large west-facing tilted skylights allow the sun’s saffron rays to percolate down through the stone dust and bathe any ongoing projects with the natural illumination of daylight. It was on this exact spot in my kitchen just under one month ago that Sarah, the comely acolyte had stood transfixed and gazed upon the massive chunk of azul pegaso granite. Nearly one and a half metric tons of blue ice, the rectangular block was larger than my refrigerator and had been mined from the Azul Bahia Works quarry located in the Bahian state of Brazil. Set upright, its height reached a full seven feet and the granite’s approximate one square meter base had required the construction of a special “fifth wheel” wood-and-stone pedestal, allowing the stone’s weight to be evenly distributed on a circular ball-bearing track.
That particular visit, Sarah had been suitably impressed, though not suitably impressed enough to remove her clothing; but mesmerized all the same, actually calling the block “one of God’s beautiful creations”. Though I’ve never fully accepted the notion of a Supreme Being, I didn’t refute her, and each additional day I spend with the rock, I discover myself questioning if maybe another entity is connected to the block’s existence—other than magma consolidation, volcanic eruption and fractional crystallization at extreme temperatures and pressures. Months later would find me reconsidering my secular beliefs.
“What will the rock become?” Sarah had asked.
I still recall a certain wistfulness in her tone and understood it to imply this stone specimen was so majestic in its natural beauty, why alter it?
“Girl Blue,” I’d answered with my customary flair. “That piece of the Earth’s crust you’re looking at will give birth to Girl Blue.”
“Girl Blue,” Sarah had murmured. “I think I like it.”
At that precise moment, I was certainly tempted to invite her back to my studio that same afternoon so she could observe the block’s full radiance under the golden rays of the waning sun; but then I detected this strange, almost alarmed look in her eyes, not unlike a frightened animal, and I realized Sarah had been lying.
She didn’t like it. And I myself would fail to comprehend what Sarah didn’t like about the stone, or why, until my project rested on the doorsteps of completion.
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