Maternity Leave

Sarah will be taking a year-long maternity leave after the arrival of her daughter, Srushti, from India. Srushti was born June, 2007 and will be adopted in the United States by Erik and Sarah Irani. You can follow our adoption journey at our family blog, Cafe Irani.

Rejection

"Your request for a grant was considered at a recent meeting of the Trustees and we regret to advise you that you are not a recipient of an award. You may re-apply on or after June 11, 2011."

Oh well. I was rejected in 2001 as well. Keep trying.

Moving Joe... Again

A pattern has been emerging at Hempel Studios: moving stuff. I have numerous blog posts about moving Joe, especially the momentous day we installed St. Joseph at Our Lady of Mercy in May, 2007.

St. Joseph's carver's model has been on quite an adventure around the world. On a crisp day in February, 2005, Erik and I crated up St. Joseph, put him in the back of a truck and sent him off to Italy. It was the same day that I closed the studio on Fifth Street.

He traveled to Pietrasanta where Studio Antognazzi copied the sculpture in marble. When the plaster came back to the US, the big question on every one's mind was "where do you put a giant sculpture of St. Joseph?" He went into storage at Canal Street Studios in Buck's County, PA. Andrew Logan, proprietor at CSS, runs a sculpture installation operation, as well as a bronze foundry and a sculpture studio where he creates his own work.

Finally, this weekend, he came home. The first challenge what to load him up.



Then we drove the six or so hours back across the great state of Pennsylvania and had to back the truck down the long, narrow driveway. In the crate, St. Joseph was too heavy to move, so we had to get him out.

We ended up sawing him out.

He is light enough that we were able to scoot him onto a dolly.

And push him to the hydraulic lift, which not-terribly-gently lowered him to the ground.

Once he was on the ground, we wheeled him into the garage. The next challenge was to get the crate out. We weren't as careful not to drop the crate and we did, in fact, drop it. We're going to turn the crate into a fun tool shed or a playhouse!

Road Trip

Way back when St. Joseph was installed, I had the plaster carver's model sent back to the US from Italy with the marble sculpture. The marble went into Our Lady of Mercy Catholic Church and the plaster went into storage. Well, his time in storage has run out so we're going on a 725 mile road trip across the great state of Pennsylvania. One wonders what to do with a giant statue of St. Joseph and a small cottage in the Pennsylvanian countryside. Anyone want to "borrow" a big statue?

Sarah in Exile

My on-line persona is "Sarah in Exile." God brought me out of a beautiful and thriving city and plunked me down in the middle of the Pennsylvanian countryside. My husband and I both agree that we see the hand of God at work and that it was His Spirit who led us into exile, but it is exile nonetheless. I've been here nearly six months; it is a place where no one knows me.

God has stripped me down and crushed me ego. I went from being somebody to being nobody. I liked to fancy myself a big-shot artist who felt very proud of her accomplishments at such a young age. I was in the local paper so many times that I stopped saving clippings. I made local television appearances more than once. People knew who I was. Let me be honest, I loved it. I don't care much about money, but give me popularity, acclaim, even fame. It is delicious to me. I can eat it and never get full.

I can never get full because fame and popularity do not satisfy the longings of our spirits. God has so dearly loved me that he has crushed me. He is a jealous God. He has taken me into exile. Here I am nothing more than a middle-class, suburban housewife. My social status has been taken from me and it hurts to die.

But I see the hand of God. God has not given me this talent, this training and these opportunities so that I may be great, but so that I may be an extravagant lover of God. He gave me these gifts so that I can praise Him. In yesterday's post I poured out the misery I have felt as an artist over the years. "I DON'T WANT TO DO THIS ANYMORE!" I scream at God. "You have made a mistake in making me with this personality and these gifts. They don't work together. I cannot be an extrovert and work alone. I will die."

Exactly. Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. (Matt 10:39)

If I know anything about God it is that He does not make mistakes. For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. (Psalm 139:13-14) God created me exactly as He intended to. I am His design, extrovert, distracted, fanciful, whimsical, artist and all.

But here in exile I have come to know that my calling is first to be a lover of God. "The most important [commandment]," answered Jesus, "is this: 'Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.' (Mark 12:28-30) In his letter to Christian artists, Michael O'Brien tells us that the "essential task remains the same... to seek the will of the Father and the guidance of the Holy Spirit with your whole hearts. A life of prayer and sacraments—of union with our living savior Jesus—is absolutely essential, if we hope to bear good fruit in the world.

So, here I am in exile, learning to love God because he first loved me. I cannot seek the art, only Him. The irony is that the less I seek art and the more I seek Him, the greater the art will flow to my fingertips and the more Beautiful it will be. Only this time I won't be in my own personal hell like I have been in the past, but I will be nourished with a food that does not leave me hungry.

A Beautiful Letter to Artists

A Letter to Artists by Michael O'Brien

" They must understand that their first vocation is always the sacrament of marriage, and the call to art a subsidiary vocation.

"Many of you who have written to me are not married, and yet the essential task remains the same for you: to seek the will of the Father and the guidance of the Holy Spirit with your whole hearts. A life of prayer and sacraments—of union with our living savior Jesus—is absolutely essential, if we hope to bear good fruit in the world."

Art Woes and Her Story

I'm a very burnt-out artist and I think I've been burnt-out for a long, long time. I shot out of college, eager to make this dream happen. I worked as an apprentice for a year and then started on a big commission. I worked with another artist and as our relationship became tangled in life and in the work, I became unraveled. We finished the commission just in time, but that year I had hardly slept and I had cried more than any other time in my life. I was spent. When things dissolved I was broke, applying for and being rejected by grants and awards. I did win one award, though. It sent me to Lyme, Connecticut for a sculpture competition and one of the worst weeks of my life. When I returned to my home in Maryland, I was severely depressed. For seven months I had no work, and hardly any friends. I lost weight. I could barely get out of bed every day. The only thing that brought me to the studio every day was the responsibility of feeding Ivan the studio cat, who was my only friend at that time.

During this time of severe depression, I was competing for a big commission to sculpt Joseph and Mary in marble for a church in Potomac. It took months and months for the church to determine the winner. It was the summer before my twenty-fifth birthday.

Just after my birthday, I was awarded the job and life seemed to be looking up. I worked on small models of the sculptures in preparation for the large ones. That summer I found the studio of my dreams and spent a lot of time fixing it up, painting it and making it mine. I thought that I had arrived in the Promised Land. I started work on the enlarged sculptures. I was lonely. Painfully lonely. Months would pass without touching another person. My mother would visit. I just wanted a hug. I'd go out dancing, just for the joy of human contact. I was an extrovert; I couldn't do this.

Finally, I got a part-time job at the local college down the street. It was my lifeline. Not only did I now have some supplemental income and health insurance, but I could eat at the dining hall for only a few dollars and be there with other people. I had students who worked in my office who I would grow to dearly love. Many of these students are grown now and getting married or off to graduate school. I feel like a proud mother hen.

Completing those two giant sculptures was agonizing. Every time I heard about someone who'd wake up every day excited about his job, I'd want to throw my shoe at him. I was living the dream and yet I dreaded every day. How could it be possible?

While I was working on this insurmountable project, I was asked to do things that were beyond my maturity level. I was importing marble, working with a broker, working with different sub-contractors- enlarging, casting, carving, models, installation, the client. I had a hundred problems that I had to solve. I had to find a customs broker. I had a crew of Italian carvers working in Italy. I was not yet thirty years old.

Somehow the project was completed. It was only by the grace of God, for I was incapable on my own. I got married in 2005, closed my dream studio, left my job at the college and got really really lost artistically. I moved the studio into our basement, but I could not work in isolation. So, I got a group studio in Kemp Hall, downtown Frederick. In many ways, I accomplished a lot of personal work there. Unfortunately, the studio was in the hole and I had to take out of loan to pay my rent and cast some pieces. we had to leave Kemp Hall, so I moved my studio back to fifth street, but in a different location. Then it happened. The Move. The Big Transition. I closed that studio in December 2008 and haven't had one since. That loan still haunts me and keeps my studio from moving forward. I cannot afford one more thing. This means no models, no studio, no new materials.

My whole life I've wanted nothing more than to be an artist. I went to college with the intention of being a working artist; I was an apprentice to a very successful sculptor; I took on big commissions and ran my own studio for seven years. Here I am, on the eve of thirty-two totally burnt out on art. I think about art all of the time; it haunts me. Yet, however I've been doing it has not worked for me. The isolation, the business of it, the deadlines and clients. It has nearly killed my spirit.

I am an extrovert. I am a visionary. God made me this way. I cannot work in isolation. I do not flourish. I whither and die. Many artists work alone, but there are those of us who are cannot.

My next creative task is raising a child. There is no person on earth more creative than the human child. I haven't forgotten about making art and about my calling, but I refuse to let it destroy me like it nearly did.

Christian Artists' Bookshelf

I forgot to mention the two books I am currently reading:

Refractions: A Journey of Faith, Art, and Culture by Makoto Fujimura and

Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art by Madeleine L'Engle

I haven't finished reading them, so I'll refrain from comment, but do any of you have any imput on these books?

A Christian Artist's Bookshelf

Being and artist in a Christian community is often as difficult as being a Christian in an arts community. This seems odd in light of Western history insofar as the Church has been largely responsible for commissioning some of the greatest pieces of art that has ever been created. Now, it is widely accepted that the Christian artistic community is largely irrelevant. There are so many changes on the horizon, however. Many Christian arts organizations are popping up, such as CIVA (Christians in the Visual Arts) and the Foundation for Sacred Art. Not to mention, Image Journal and the International Arts Movement. Sadly, only a few Christian colleges are really taking their visual art departments seriously. I think that this is changing for the better, though! A lot of culture-making Christians have seen the danger of eschewing the arts and have done a lot of culture work to change things. Beauty is not irrelevant for Christians, as much as our Manichean cultural poison would have us believe.

What books, essays or articles can we turn to to help shape the minds and practice of Christians in the visual arts today? A few of my favorites are:

Art And the Bible: Two Essays (Ivp Classics) by Francis A. Schaeffer and Michael Card

State of the Arts: From Bezalel to Maplethorpe, by Dr. Gene Veith

Rainbows for the Fallen World: Aesthetic Life and Artistic Task, by Calvin G. Seerveld

Body and Gift: Reflections on Creation / Pope John Paul II's Theology of the Body in Simple Language, Vol. 1, by Sam Torode and Christopher West

Purity of Heart: Reflections on Love and Lust / Pope John Paul II's Theology of the Body in Simple Language, Vol. 2 by Sam Torode and Christopher West

From the blog, Aesthetic Elevator: "The Nude Figure and Christianity"

"Religion and the Arts in America" by CAMILLE PAGLIA in Arion: A Journal of Humanities

What articles, books, essays, blog posts would you recommend?

The Critic

My studio is now in the foyer of my 1930s cottage. It isn't exactly the place to make big sculptures. So, I've been painting. I don't see myself as someone who is very skilled at mixing color and my paintings tend to be very monochromatic and more like drawings with paint than anything. Let me introduce you to my Critic. If you are an artist, writer, musician, runner, student, or any other type of person you probably have an inner Critic who is always cutting you down and trying to talk you out of living out your calling. In Christianity we call this voice the Devil, Satan, whatever. In the arts, he is the Critic. My Critic is cruel and relentless, but he is never creative. When I started this particular painting, the conversation went a little like this:

Critic: This painting sucks.
Sarah: I've only been working on it for three minutes.
Critic: Well, it probably will suck, then.
Sarah: I don't care, I'm having fun.
Critic: Don't you have better things to do than make a sucky painting?
Sarah: Shut up and let me paint.
Silence
Critic: Your painting sucks.
Sarah: Would you shut up. I'm having fun and it doesn't matter.
Critic: Sucks.
Sarah: Groan.

And so it goes and so I paint. The Critic doesn't leave me alone there. When I sit down to write my thesis, he says the same thing. "You'll never finish this thesis. It's terrible anyway." Or in sculpture, "Your best work is behind you, you might as well give up now." Or in my day-to-day "You are a lazy, good-for-nothing, Sarah." I try to show him my resume, which has many fine points and awards. He isn't impressed. "Well, so-and-so has a PhD and you don't." I can't win with him. So, I'm trying to silence him. Kill him. Off with his head!

Channeling Whistler

I just love this painting, The Lady in White by JM Whistler. Perhaps it is the sculptor in me who loves the white-on-white. She's a sculpture against a white backdrop, but her flesh is real. Sculpture come to life; it is all of our fantasies. She isn't alive because she is realistic, however. Hyper-realism doesn't make a painting or sculpture come alive! It is rather the presence of the work. Do you know how you can tell if another person is in the room, even if you cannot see him? This painting is that way. She's in the room with you, alive.

MA Thesis

This past year has been more writing than sculpting. That's because I've been working to finish up my degree before the baby arrives. Just to clarify, I'm working on an M.A. in Humanities with an emphasis in Medieval and Renaissance Studies. My thesis is on Piero della Francesca's Polyptych of the Misericordia.

I am sure that you are all wondering why a sculptor would be getting a degree in the Humanities and writing a paper about a panel painting. For one, I do not see the history of art and the making of art as two separate disciplines. It is very important for my work that I know quite a lot about the history of what it is that I'm doing, and not just what is being made now or even recently. Why have humans made art historically? We now see art as an expression of the self, as being therapeutic, as something we make because we want to and then we struggle to market it. As far as human history is concerned these ideas about art are very new. In the Renaissance, no one would think to make art just because. There was an intended purpose, a patron and a payroll. Most artists worked in groups as a part of a workshop under a master. The myth of the reclusive, anti-social artist who works obsessively alone on things that express the inner workings of his soul may describe a few contemporary artists, but it is not the norm. In fact, many of us contemporary artists who work better in groups, are generally clean and cheerful and who would like to earn a decent wage feel like we phonies because we do not live up to some invented stereotype based off a few eccentrics.

So at the end of all of this, I'll have a Master's degree, not in studio art, but the art history, culture, philosophy, theology and literature of a time when the West commonly sees as the pinnacle of art. Until then, my nose is pressesd firmly to the grindstone as I try to get this done. It feels like a monumental task, but the words of my uncle echo in my mind, "One shovel full at a time." Or, for me, "One sentence at a time."

Kudos

A nice little mention by First Things!

Nine Tons of Marble

My uncle tells this beautiful parable about achieving a monumental task. Many years ago, he and his young son had to lay a sewer line in the back yard. They had to dig a forty-foot trench by hand, too poor to afford any machinery. His small son asked, "Dad, how will we ever dig such a long trench?" And he replied, "One shovel full at a time." Some time later, the father and son team were finished. When the men came to deliver the pipe, they asked, "Where is all of your equipment?" My uncle told him that they didn't use any. "But how did you possibly dig all of this?" And my young cousin piped in "One shovel full at a time."

While I was working on the Virgin Mary sculpture, I had literally imported nine tons of marble from the Cararra Mountains in Italy. How were we ever going to get an image of the Virgin out of that enormous block of mountain? It seemed like forever that we worked on this sculpture and the only way that it was going to get done was one bit at a time. In fact, this is the only way that art is ever finished, one brush stroke at a time, one note at a time, one blow to the chisel at a time.

And so this blog offers a glimpse into the shovels full of creativity that I dig up along my journey. Some days I don't work and lately those days seem more and more, but the ache to create grows more and more intense. I hope that I will have more to report in the coming days.

To Make Way for Advertising...

This morning in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette I read about a large-scale sculpture that is being removed to make way for advertising.

"The airport authority notified artist Peter Calaboyias in a Feb. 3 letter that his sculpture, 78 feet long and 8 feet high, was being removed to clear the way for advertising. It had begun taking down the work yesterday."

Ouch! As if art isn't underappreciated enough already. This had to have hurt. Upon closer investigation, this artist turns out to be a professor at Grove City College. Perhaps I ought to send him a condolences letter.

Art vs. Advertising. Let's see who wins.

Hempel Studios News- Winter 2009

Dear Friends of Hempel Studios,

As many of you may already know, Hempel Studios has pulled up stakes from the studio beneath the Blue Elephant in Frederick. I have not yet established a new physical studio space, so there are sculptures in process in the foyer of our new little 1930s cottage. We have yet to sell our fabulous little bungalow in Frederick. Please send real-estate well-wishes in our direction!

For the next few months, I will be working on the final capstone project for my Master's degree at Hood College. I've been taking classes part-time for the past four years and now I am nearly complete! My course of study has been a chance for me to delve into the history and tradition of Medieval and Renaissance art. The final paper will focus on a fifteenth-century Italian altarpiece by Piero della Francesca. Bruce Cole says of Piero della Fransceca that “while basing his art firmly on time-honored traditions, principles, and types, he was able to create a highly original style and interpretation.” This is my goal as well and I hope that I am able to take away from this paper some valuable things that I can incorporate into my studio work.

If you would like to receive e-mail newsletters from Hempel Studios, please go to the Contact section of http://www.hempelstudios.com/. In the case that you would like to be a part of the mailing list, please include your mailing address in your request. Otherwise, you can always find the latest updates here on the Hempel Studios blog. My New Year's Resolution is to update this blog more regularly.

Many Blessings,

Sarah