Lodestone: Following the Emly Shrine

Abstract

On Sunday mornings, my mother would go to Mass at St. Catherine's in down town Norwood on her own, leaving my father, my two-year-old brother Geof frey, and me; I was four. Making things out of clay was one of our favorite activ ities. I recall that we began with whales, my father's inspiration: shaping hefty chunks of gray or brown clay, smoothing the flanks, sculpting out the mouth and tail, drilling the blowhole with a pencil as a finishing flourish: it just felt great. I began to move on to more ambitious modeling projects of my own, using packets of in bright primary colors from the five-and-ten store. When I went off to first grade at age five in September 1948, clay model ing became my ticket to extra notice and praise. At Christmastime, I brought in a freshly minted manger scene, with Mary, Joseph, and the Christ Child sur rounded by animals in a shoe box tableau. My classmates were intrigued. More important, the teacher, Miss Cataldo?on whom all the boys had a crush?was impressed. She invited the second graders in to look, and my reputation as an artist was established. My clay models of buildings, rooms, scenes from history and literature grew more and more elaborate as I got older. The highlights of my plasticine career included the Parthenon to scale with Phidias' lost statue of Athena recovered and reinstalled inside, the Egyptian temple of Karnak, nine feet long and sup ported by columns decorated with hieroglyphics, and a two-storey medieval castle with twelve rooms, including an armory, throne room, and chapel, a banquet hall with food on the table, and exterior walls molded stone by stone. In sixth grade came my piece de resistance: the Coliseum at Rome, which ended up on display in the children's room of the public library in Norwood. Mount ed on a square of plywood, my coliseum was nearly a foot high and three feet in diameter. In a photograph I still have, I count twenty statue-crowned columns and more than three hundred separate figures. In the end, these early art projects would dramatically expand my world. Recognizing artistic potential in my clay models, my sixth-grade teacher and first mentor, Mr. Francis Lambert, had gone out of his way to find me a schol arship to the weekly community classes for children at the Museum of Fine Arts