(p) (b)

I first worked in stone, doing a couple of abstract pieces in the style of Henry Moore.

Then I worked in clay. I remember a life-like life-sized head, a self-portrait, the oval head resting on its slender neck just like mine, the eyes looking straight at me for the long hours I spent working on the features. It was like looking into a mirror to begin with, but then less so as I shaped the clay more finely and misplaced the initial mimetic charge.

Later on, I worked in plaster, making about a dozen pieces after the style of Giacometti. At the end of my final year, I had a solo show at the university’s art gallery. I remember my nights in the studio, kept company by a small radio. Working shirtless, I’d get flecks of plaster all over my body and face.

The sculpture was officially for a class, but by this time—it was my third sculpture class—I didn’t care about the grade, and only worked in order to find myself in the work. The studio was big, and lit by a single bulb, though that is probably a misremembering, and the bulb was bare, and that too is probably misremembered.

In any case, the studio had the feel of a cave, and I would stay there alone all night, surrounded by finished and half-finished pieces. The elongated figures, most of them about three feet tall, loomed around me on their pedestals. Each was built on a wire armature, and working the wire gave me blisters and tiny cuts.

The plaster dried quickly, but when wet it had a chalky smell I liked. My figures were all of walking men, falling men, men falling backwards, figures as silent as I was in the hours in which I made them.

The dials and switches of the little black radio were encrusted with plaster and clay, and it’s a wonder it worked at all. I usually listened to the local classical station, the programming of which got more adventurous with the deepening of night. One night, after a piece of music ended, the next one was an avant-garde piece consisting entirely of a rain shower, which went from a small patter, to a full downpour that came down like pulsing drumbeats, and then trailed off. After came a thick silence, and then the initially tentative then gradually bolder whistles and calls of birds emerging from the rain.

To that aural rain I worked in my own wordless rhythm. I poured water into a bowl, some of it inevitably spilling on the floor and the mixing counter, scooped powdered plaster from its polypropylene bag (I remember the crinkly sound of the bag) into the water, and stirred it with a stick until it was thick enough to shape, but not so thick that it dried too fast.

The initial shaping I sometimes did with a small flat stick, a popsicle stick, but most often just with my fingers. Then to sharpen the planes and lines, I used a blunt knife. Because the plaster dried fast, the gap between an idea and its execution was small. Thought extended into form easily, and as the weeks went by I developed a facility.

It was a personal rain, that rain that fell invisibly around me in the studio at 3 am while I shaped falling men in plaster.

I don’t remember any of the other rains from those years. This imaginary one, which left me washed clean as bird voices, has stayed with me. I still listen to radio a great deal now, the more far-fetched the better, and I’m often up working in solitude in the middle of the night. It is work in which I find myself in a different way.

But work that doesn’t involve words is something I sometimes forget I miss.