#27: the accidental pilgrim

When I was 23, I was pretty much lost, like lots of young men. Being lost, though, was not my forté. A Plan could keep me safe, somehow. I'd quit physics, quit music. I had to make a living. I'm not sure how long it took for the light to come on, weeks, perhaps?

I had a cousin Karen, my age, a potter, working nearby. I'd been a busy student so I had sort of lost touch. A visit to her studio near Beamsville, Ontario was revelatory. A person could make something with his hands and sell it for money! Amazing! I suppose, being the son of a civil servant, I was not well set up for self-employment, but it seemed perfect, a way to control aspects of my life that seemed to need controlling.

I guess I'd been carving something all my life: figures in firewood, faces in clay, people in chalk (French class), a lute player in soapstone. Where is that little thing now?

I spent a lot of time in the library in St. Catharines, Onario. I had found a beautiful book dedicated to the Croation artist Ivan Meštrović, born in the late 1800's, a sculptor who was quite famous in his time, but seems to be rather obscure now. I spent hours poring over his work.

I was captivated by those Slavic profiles, the simple lines, the intensity and compactness of the poses. I'm also a huge fan of natural materials. It speaks of our place here on the earth, of the earth.

... and I've had this ongoing fascination with bas relief. No explaining that. The warmth of the wood soothes some hollow place, too, calms something that begs nurturing. I'm not schooled in art history, but I see elements of Gothic figures here, a taste of Egyptian, some art deco, a bit of post-impressionism. I see a bit of Kathe Kollvitz.

For the first few years, I made my living carving gnomes into old pine roots. I could bash a bunch into that fragrant wood, put them into a cloth bag, and cart them off to a mall and sell them. My first day I made $55, a fortune, given that I was doing casual labour, working a moving van, wielding a jackhammer for less than $2 an hour.

Still, whenever I could, I carved larger reliefs. They all sold, probably for a lot less than they were worth? Certainly, as some of that wood was solid teak and Honduras mahogany, the materials alone would be worth many times the original selling price.

Mother and Child in cherry, about 24" high, by Stewart Smith. I did quite a number of pieces on this theme, both in bas relief and in the round. It just feels good. I made this circa 1978.

Seated Figure, 48" high, teak. The studio smelled wonderful when I carved teak. It's the coffee of woods, or something. It's hard, yet brittle, working well under a carving chisel. I think I see some desire here to pay homage to Mestrovic.

So, in 2007, when my son Graeme had a holiday from his job as foreign correspondent for the Globe and Mail, posted in Kandahar, Afghanistan, we decided to meet in Croatia for a bike holiday. The idea of cycling down the islands of Dalmatia from Split to Dubrovnik seemed terrific.

It was lovely to spend two really active weeks with Graeme, eating gelato, wandering among Roman ruins, riding endlessly up steep hills, and talking, talking in a way we hadn't in a decade.

Graeme looking over the Aegean on a high hill overlooking Split. There was an ancient shrine cut into the bluff behind us. It was hard to take in 3000 years of human work, scattered about these dry hills.

I made a great discovery for me, a kind of revelation, stumbling over a huge collection of Meštrović work, almost everything I'd been dreaming over 30 years earlier.

I'll rave about that in the next post.