Stories of Symposia Past

by Lee Gass

I promised Arliss I would write the Deb Wilson story I told at Pilgrim Firs this summer and have dragged my heels on it ever since.  I told it once in an early issue of the newsletter, told it again last summer, and don’t want to do it again here.  Instead, I’ll take a broader view to express some ways I think the NWSSA is a superb educational institution and has been from its very beginning.  After many decades teaching and learning at all levels and thinking and writing about those experiences, NWSSA symposia stand out to me as unusually successful in terms of learning. 

In exploring that phenomenon, which is rare but not unique among institutions, I’ll tell a few stories from PF2024.  Just as easily, I could tell similar stories from Camp Brotherhood and other events I’ve attended.  I won’t comment here on workshops, scheduled demonstrations, or talks, which are great opportunities to learn from each other in groups.  Rather, I’ll point to several examples of world-class teaching that I observed there and reflect on some things.

First, I’ll fulfill my promise to Arliss with a 2-minute version of my Deb Wilson story.  It was at a critical time in my development, back in the olden days when I was her first real student and paying customer.  While I worked for a week in her studio, she did something that woke me up and radically changed the course of my development as a sculptor.  I was working on my first female form, Torso With Gloves in thulite, at a stage when I was too scared to tackle the hands and was avoiding them.  At one point, Deb asked “What are you going to do with the hands, Lee?”  After my evasive and cowardly reply, she said only one word as she turned away:  “Chickenshit!” and she said it quietly.  That was absolutely spot-on, both of us knew it, and it is no exaggeration to say that that one word changed my life.  It showed me that I could do things I had never done before.  My story Work on the Ugliest Part applies that lesson to sculpting, to science, and to other activities, and other stories on my website do the same. 

That is not to say that teachers should insult their students.  But they need to “read the room,” sense what their students are ready to hear, and tell them the truth in ways they will accept, even if they don’t want to hear it.  Georg Schmerholz did a similar favor for me, when I was taking a long time to carve my 1-ton Girlchild Reflected in Her Mother’s Eye in basalt and bronze in his outside studio.  As he walked past me one day, he said “It wouldn’t take you so long to do things if you knew what you were doing before you did them.”  Again, it was the perfect thing to say to me and the perfect time and way to say it.  It still takes me forever to produce sculptures and I still don’t know what I’m doing before I do it, but at least I’m mindful of that problem and do what I can to avoid it.  Those two incidents influenced my development as a sculptor as powerfully as anything else I remember. 

In the hand carving tent, where I worked at PF for 3 days last summer, novices learned at the speed of light.  That was Tamara Buchannan’s fault, and she’s always been very good at making it happen.  Sometimes she just said, “Have you considered XYZ?” when someone didn’t know what to do.  Not always when she spoke, but often enough to make a huge difference, sculptors suddenly got what they needed to get, and their development accelerated.  Sometimes a private tour of the tool table opened up whole new dimensions and that was all it took. 

For me, carving on the same thulite rock I had been carving on at Deb’s and keeping my ears open, it was absolutely fantastic for that kind of thing to be happening all around me in the hand carving tent!  

That’s what it’s all about.  On one stroll down the midway at PF, I watched Jeremy Kester working quietly with another sculptor, both kneeling over a work in progress.  I don’t remember the tool he had in his hands or whether he even held a tool, and it doesn’t matter.  What matters are what he said and how he said it, in his words and with his body.  “~Push throuugh the high places”, he said, slowly, doing what he said in the air as he said the words. “You can feeel them.”.  Jeremy didn’t have a way to know this, but I did feel them.   “Push throuugh them”, and I did that, and by then I was long gone on my stroll and couldn’t hear them anymore.

Experiences like that are powerful for me.  They strike home.  I’ve spent my whole life learning how humans and wild animals learn, and WOW!  There I was, right in the middle of a group of sculptors doing exactly that with each other! 

Once or twice or a few times more, a long time later carving other rocks at home, I chuckled to realize that while we push through high places using tools that grind or abrade, and while Amy chips high places of profiles away, we use bushing chisels to push high surfaces straight back into the stone.  Simple mimes, memes, and demonstrations of how it happens like Jeremy and Amy embodied help us experience it for ourselves, to get into it and get it and experience it in our studios.  That’s kind of magical when you stop and think about it.

Amy Brier literally embodied John Fisher’s technique of profile carving at PF.  She not only did it, but she acted it out for real as she did it. When she was profile carving, or even talking about profile carving, everything about her epitomized it. Amy was like the hero in Strangers in a Strange Land – – when Valentine Michael Smith was kissing, he wasn’t doing anything else!  And that’s as important a lesson as any of us can learn about sculpting or anything else.  Pay attention to what we are doing.  Her body language said it, only minimally exaggerated for our benefit and only minimally peppered with words but very, very clear.   She was doing profile carving, and we could do it with her.  Amy’s gentle tap,tap tapping on limestone and a little talking made it happen.  How could I ever forget what profile carving is and how it feels to do it? 

Amy even bit her tongue between her teeth in concentration, grunted erotically as she stretched to chase a profile, breathing audibly with her tapping.  The soundtrack alone could carry the messages she gave to us!  Thanks to Amy for making her work so real for each of us.  Like everyone else at PF, she communicated a lot more than what she said.

I realized something profound about those events.  Amy’s objective was not so much to carve a human head but to show that profile carving is a good way to do it.  For every instant she was carving the profile, Amy could see only that one profile and nobody else could see it.  We saw as many other profiles of the same stone as there were pairs of eyes around, but never the ones she saw.  All the same, Amy’s pantomime helped us project ourselves into her work.  We imagined doing it ourselves, and we felt it.  All those profiles tap-tap-tapped themselves into a complete 3D map of an evolving stone in our minds.  As she made her way down the profiles she was carving, she did the same thing Jeremy did with his imaginary rock.  She wasn’t pushing throuugh the high places.  She was knocking them off with a hammer and chisel.

That idea itself is gold and a big contribution.  On a deeper level than I had before, I saw that changing a stone’s shape by changing its profiles is an important way to think about and do things.   At least as importantly, profiles help us imagine works in progress as 3D movies, seen from every perspective at once, developing over time.  Profile carvers carve those movies.

Central, significant, growth-promoting interactions like those are what every NWSSA symposium is about. On the field.  In the carving tents.  Under the trees.  Not so much at dinner, but in the lineup before dinner, with sweat still drying and carvers debriefing their day.  In the chairs outside. Walking back and forth, strolling around the place.   Carvers snooping on other carvers’ carving, within range of peripheral vision but not intruding, asking their questions later, both learning.  Everywhere, there are deep, meaningful conversations about what it is to carve a stone.

Everyone comes to learn.  From first day beginner to life-long professional, everyone’s a beginner, eager to learn, open and willing to share.  Celebrating each other’s successes.

I don’t want to go out on a limb too far on this, but as far as I’ve been able to tell in all these years, the only place growth-promoting conversations don’t happen at symposia is the outhouse!  I even heard one side of a long conversation like that one night at Camp Brotherhood, when some guy, instead of snoring loudly like most of the other guys in the room were doing, was talking in his sleep.  And, true to what seems to be universal at NWSSA symposia, I could tell from his half of the conversation that he was learning a lot from it.