The Loud Chugging
The loud chugging noise of the compressor was sometimes a welcome drug. You couldn�t hear a thing while it was running. The world �on the other side� of it was hissed away. You could go into your own world and there were no interruptions, except from time to time a tap on the shoulder from Angel or Pepe offering you a cigarette�company and a break.
Another drug was the work itself�the hammering. There is nothing like swinging a hammer. Just as while running, once you relax, you feel you could go on forever: hammering leads you on with its rhythm. Hammering is really drumming; but there is also something wonderful about the way hard rock cedes to your chisel. You pick up that hammer and make the first libation strokes to call down Rhythm. Soon She has come from nowhere and makes a happy machine of you.
This work-stupor produced apparitions. Deaf with the compressor engine, blind to everything around you except your work, you would suddenly realize that before your eyes was someone not Pepe, not Jacinto, not Angel. Depending on the strength of your stupor you may or may not find them worth the trouble to look at. Sometimes you brought them into mental focus and came to understand that you were seeing a woman with a hat at the gate talking to Fernando; or find yourself wondering what that man in the suit�a politician?�who is examining Montserrat�s figure is after. Or is that maybe a banker?
Don Jos�
I had already met and talked to a �real� sculptor several times. That was Don Jos�. He was getting old but coming into a workshop was still a treat for him, he had never lost his enthusiasm for sculpture. He would park his expensive BMW in the mud outside the gate just any old way as if it were a jeep and hurry through the big metal door, all eyes, all excitement. The hell with his tailor-made suit and fine shoes. He�d scoot right by the dirty blocks and kick his way through the dunes of marble chips to have a look at all the good things cooking. Jacinto�s Virgin was coming right along; Angel�s horse was�yes, that was by Montserrat, he had seen one of those before. This one looked nice in red Alicantino, very nice. He made Angel hold off with the air-hammer while he stooped down to get an eye-level look. And still crouching, he craned his head around for a side-view. �Nice,� he said, and moved on to Pepe�s angel, which he patted on the head like a dog. �And what�s that over there? Isn�t that the old monument to Pardo Bazan? I had no idea it was in such bad shape. I�ve never seen Colmenar stone deteriorate so much in, what? 50 years. It must be the pollution from the traffic that ruined it so fast.�
�Did you see Molina�s Quijote?� Fernando shouted, calling him over. Don Jos� smiled as he came toward it. �The guy�s crazier all the time,� said Fernando; but Don Jos� didn�t show if he agreed. He looked at it thoughtfully.
He was the old master, the famous sculptor, though people often confused him with his father, who had made monuments like the Don Quijote in the Plaza de Espa�a of Madrid. �My dad was the real thing,� he�d say. �I�m just an imitator.�
�Don Jos� is of the old school,� Fernando told me. �A real gentleman. And of all the sculptors who come in here, he�s the one with the most oficio and the most love for his profession. I like to get one of his things because I know it will be well-made, solid, true to nature. Unlike about every other one of these geniuses here (he pointed to the sagging shelves with the plaster figures), Don Jos� really knows his anatomy and the anatomy of all the animals. What I know, I�ve learned from copying his figures. He�s my teacher.�
Don Jos� looked at the bull I was carving in black marble. �This part��he passed his hand over the back and hind quarters��is very nice. Keep studying. I remember when I got my first commission for a monument to a bullfighter. I had no choice but to go to the slaughterhouse. I�d started out with a couple dozen photographs but got nowhere. A photo doesn�t tell you what is hard and soft, what moves and what things are connected and how.
�I draw live bulls in the Bat�n corrals,� I said.
�That�s maybe fine for drawings; but how close can you get to the darn bulls�twenty feet? Could you make a believable hoof after an hour�s drawing there? Or a leg? I know I couldn�t. There was only one way�the hard way.
�I know everyone tries to do without close study now. They think they can simply suggest something and we will see what they mean and play along. But they never quite bring it off. You see they didn�t know how the animal was built and were too lazy to go look. They seem to think that sculpture is like a speech or something, where they can lead the listener with colorful images and the force of words right to where they want him to go. He won�t look back and examine how you led him there. But in sculpture the argument is all there permanently in stone and bronze�it�s all on exhibit, the parts as well as the whole. The eye doesn�t like to be disappointed. It looks to learn�it wants to be educated, delighted. If your figure is an animal, the viewer looks at it as if it were that animal�there�s no way around that. Maybe in your conception of the figure it�s only the horns that matter, or the head; but if your statue includes the rest of the bull, the rest of the bull has to be right too.�
A Peek at Genius
Don Jos� had been inside some of the greatest talleres of the twentieth century. �You should have seen Benlliure�s workshop,� he told me, still amazed as he had been as a boy in Malaga 50 years before. �The guy was a real genius. He could model anything in creation with absolute accuracy, from memory. He just seemed to know how everything was made and how it worked.
�You and I have to study something in order to model it but Don Mariano just knew it. He could model everything by heart. If you told him to model a giraffe, say, or a zebra, he would take the handful of clay and begin to think with his fingers��How was it?� they would ask, but never stop working. It is as if he were God and creating the first zebra. He assembled the bones and muscle machine and made it work.
�How did he know that? When did he look so closely at that animal? I don�t know about you, but when I look I don�t yet see. I must first create a problem for myself and then go to the animal to find out the solution. Seeing isn�t enough; even looking isn�t sure. I have to investigate, hypothesize like a scientist and then go and test. Maybe Don Mariano did that as a boy�he must have done it all his life. But when I knew him, he already knew everything, knew every animal, every bone of every animal, how every animal differed from the rest, and how they were the same.
�In a way he knew too much. It was too easy for him to put unnecessary facts and facile realism into his figures; and often he gave into that temptation and spoiled his works. The little crap he stuck onto his great figures and all around them and beside them ruined them for the critics and disqualified him as one of the greatest artists of all times. What a shame!
�But I�ll tell you this: as a modeller he didn�t have a rival anywhere in any age�he couldn�t have had.�
�I grew up watching my dad in his workshop but I never thought I�d be a sculptor,� Don Jos� told me. �Dad died in our civil war and when I came home from the front in 1939, I didn�t have a job or any means to make a living. Yet there was the shop with everything just as dad had left it, and orders�as many orders for statuary as you could want. The whole country needed to replace its saints and monuments that had been destroyed in the war. Dad�s old helper told me, �Jos�, let�s get this business going again.�
�But I�m not a sculptor,� I whined.
�Nadie nace ense�ado,� He said. �Nodody is born already taught. I�ll show you what to do. Animo.�
And so I started working and haven�t stopped since. I learned while making the statues and I every day I loved sculpture more.�
I told Don Jos� of my surprise and disappointment at learning about all the copying of marble statues. He smiled. �Don�t worry too much about it. Just keep working and trying to make as good sculpture as you can. And if you get a chance to sell something, sell it. It�s not as though you�re going to set up a factory, I suppose. Legally, you are all right. I�ve seen at least two cases of this which the artist won easily. In the first place, the difference between any marble statues, especially colored ones, is great even if you don�t want it to be. The streaks in the stone see to that. And then in the carving there are always little differences which add up, finally, to quite a different figure. And ethically, you can satisfy yourself by declaring to the buyer that you reserve the right to make more versions of his figure unless he is willing to pay you not to. Really there�s no problem. And why not number your marble figures, the same as you do your bronze ones?�
There was a liveliness, a straightforwardness, an honesty about Don Jos� that made everyone like him and listen to him. It was as if he were still a young man and told you excitedly about all he was learning. He�d done every kind of sculpture, large and small, and his knowledge of the professional�s world was immense, going back to almost the nineteenth century. And yet......
I sadly had to admit to myself that his statues, examples of which I often saw in Fernando�s stoneyard, but also in photos in magazines, left me cold. They were plain, robust, figures without life�accurately modelled�true�but as lifeless as.....statues. The saint knelt and prayed; the soldier stood his guard; the dog lay sphinx-like on the ground with a stony stare. There was no charm to them, no grace, no surprise. The �eye� learned nothing and what is more, was not invited to look for anything. The simpatico, enthusiastic Don Jos� was unable to show his love for sculpture in his sculpture. Nowhere did you see signs of the fun he had while creating; nowhere was there any wit, any wide-eyed wonder, any favorite part. Evidently mere anatomical �correctness� was not enough to bring about lifelikeness�that divine grace of Benlliure. Where was the soul in Don Jos�s figures? He seemed to believe that the habit made the monk and folded hands and upturned eyes made the saint. His statues were symbols, conventions, not art.
