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10/16/2006: "A Sculpture, A Show"
The piece is ‘Amarilli and Corisca’, and I need a reason to finish it. My expanding family gives me one. I’d always planned on making my next big piece in the other building and converting the studio downstairs into living space. We are now four, and we live in a single room. No one can sleep in the kitchen because it floods every time it rains.
The downstairs is huge by comparison, 18 x 25 feet, except there’s this seven foot round base in the center with these two statues on it. They have to go. Irena is friend of mine who has always liked my work. She’s Croatian, but speaks perfect Italian, and has just gotten a job with an art gallery in Forte dei Marmi. It’s near by, and it’s the Italian Riviera.
She tells me to finish the piece and she’ll bring the gallerist by.
“It’s about the most important gallery down there,” she says.
I go to work slimming down the fingers, and on filling in the few areas missing mosaic tiles; as well on honing down areas to a final finish that I’d forgotten about. I started this piece five years ago. Half way, I see I’m not going to make it, so I hire a few artist friends to help. I have a month to make a June 15th deadline, and I do it.
The gallerist comes, and her first words are,
“You’re crazy. That’s clear. But how can I say no to a piece like this?”
The next step is to get the statues down off the base, and into crates. They must be transported vertically, because both have an arm going straight up, which would break off by its own weight on the first pothole if it traveled horizontally. To move them, each must be slid to the edge of the 2 ½ foot high base, and down a ramp to a mid stage platform, then off that to the floor. As I start, by myself, I realize I’d forgotten how heavy they were. 1650 lbs. each. I use a box I’ve made to support one ton as a midstage platform, and will use it again to get the pieces back up onto the base at the gallery.
Once down, they each go in a crate already placed on planks with rollers (broom handles) under them. By keeping the crate at one end of two two by twelve planks, I gain the advantage of leverage if I need it, and can change direction if I have to. One crate falls a little going out the door, and I continue using a winch to hold it vertical as I proceed. I make a roadway across my lawn with other planks, all the way to the edge where there’s a four foot drop, and a stone retaining wall made of three ton blocks. This is my loading dock.
The crates sit there for four weeks. The gallery had to have a well drilled right in the courtyard where the statues would go, and they can’t seem to find water. Finally, on the tenth of July, I get the go ahead, but can’t find a trucker until the thirteenth. We get the crates out of the truck and into the gallery using the same system as I used to protect my lawn. All is going smoothly until the gallerist shows up. I’m a diabetic, and have gone way down with blood sugar, and am sitting there wondering what to do next when she arrives. She asks,
“Can you get this done by eight tonight? There are some important clients coming.”
“I don’t know,” I murmur dazedly. The sculptures are too tall for the doorway to the courtyard, and after a sandwich I realize the answer is to take them out of the crates. Once in the courtyard, I am told the well drillers have to come back, and therefore the sculptures have to be repacked. I do this, and wait. Later I get a new go ahead, and hire three Polish construction workers, and with brute force we push the statues up the ramps onto the base on rollers. Nothing in the courtyard strong enough for a safety cable, but fortunately, no one makes any mistakes. Piece of cake, the piece is set up in a flash.
The Vera Docci gallery is tops. Cesars, Warhols, DiChiricos, Chias, and Palladinos. I’m the only artist in there that no one has ever heard of. And with a spotlight on it, at night, the piece glows surreally, and looks like a brightly colored painting when you first see it from the street. When you walk toward it, you realize it’s a sculpture, and it just keeps getting bigger the closer you get. People come in off the street walking past all the other work just to get to it, and every time I’m there, someone is telling the gallerist they know who I am from other pieces. The biggest day of my life, Irena calls me to tell me to get dressed to be photographed and come on down. Andrea Bocelli is coming to ‘see’ the piece. I go, and amidst the flashes we talk about how the mosaics going from smaller to larger are like musical scales. He is intrigued, and I take him to the block I had cut the tiles from, still with glass thick slabs all in a row on top, and as I guide the blind singer’s hand over it he says,
“This by itself is a sculpture!” I run with that.
A week later, I have a musical instrument made from a block, of the marble type that rings the most. It’s a gift, but I insist that I receive an autographed album in return. I have cut the slabs into varying thicknesses to get different notes. First I tried a chopstick from a Chinese restaurant as a hammer, and then the central screw from a broken pepper grinder, with that little ball at the end you use to adjust the tightness. I leave this stuff at the gallery. Days later I’m having dinner with friends at my house, and Bocelli calls from the gallery to tell me he’s playing the ‘block’.
“But to really play this instrument I need two hammers,” he says.
I run out and try to find the same kind of pepper grinder. In vain. I get two partially threaded rods, and four lock nuts, and file them down into balls after locking them together on the threaded part. But they’re heavy. I go down to the gallery and try them out, worrying they might not sound as good. They don’t. They sound better!
We meet, and he gives me two autographed albums, and an autobiography with a note and some kind words about me as an artist, signed ‘with esteem’. He hints at having me make a few more of these, calibrated to perfect sound, for use on a future album. “We can correct electronically,” he says. He insists on carrying the 30 lb instrument to a waiting car by himself. 
All of this was a lot of effort. In the end, I didn’t sell ‘Amarilli and Corisca’. I am however negotiating a 50k commission that this show brought me, and did sell a 10k piece from my home when a show visitor came up to see other work. I got to meet Andrea Bocelli, and talked with him longer than most people he meets get to. tThe show is over. What next?
Against the advice of Irena, Vera, and a marble magnate who wants to display the piece at his showroom and is building a palace for the Queen of Spain, I decide to get the piece out of Italy. The Tharroe Hotel of Mykonos has offered to let me display the piece there indefinitely if I didn’t sell it at this show. I don’t want a piece that hasn’t sold at an exhibit being exhibited again anywhere nearby. So I take it down, load it into a rented truck, and with my 22 month old son Leon beside me, I drive and sail from Italy to Mykonos, with Paul Dorrell’s book ‘Living the Artist’s Life’ by my side. And set it up again.
