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180 6 Ars Brevis The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows. My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make. —Robert Frost, “Mowing” My short life in art began with small-scale models made of clay inspired by religious, historical, and literary scenes. I had begun fooling about with this stuff around the age of four. On Sunday mornings, when my mother would go downtown to church on her own, leaving my father, my two-year-old brother Geoffrey, and me, making things out of clay was one of our favorite activities. I recall that we began with whales, my father’s idea and inspiration , though I don’t know why. Shaping hefty chunks of gray or brown clay, smoothing the flanks, sculpting out the mouth and tail, drilling the blowhole with a pencil as finishing flourish: it just felt great to do, and so I began to move on to more ambitious modeling projects of my own. Strictly speaking, we were working not with real clay but with “plasticine ,” an artificial substitute that had been developed in the 1890s and used in schools because it remained plastic and didn’t dry out so fast. Beyond the generic grays and browns, I discovered at the Five-and-Ten packets of plasticine in bright primary colors, which could be kneaded into a variety of hues just like mixing paints. Equipped with what I soon found was a formidably versatile palette, I began to make miniature tables, beds, appliances, and chairs, and to set them up in shoebox rooms. These were a lot more like the front windows of Callahan’s Furniture than the rooms in which we lived, and creating such middle-class domestic dreamscapes became my first self-sustaining hobby. When I went off to first grade at age five in September 1948, clay modeling became my ticket to extra notice and praise. This was an unexpected development but not unsought, for once in school, I wanted to be marked out as uniquely talented. I wanted very much to be good at something. I’m not sure why, but there it was. There was an additional impetus in that I Ars Brevis 181 had trouble seeing the blackboard, even when moved from my alphabetical seat to the front row. This was a kind of attention I didn’t want. In second grade I was diagnosed as seriously myopic, and I’ve worn glasses ever since. I didn’t appreciate this distinguishing feature either. However, at Christmastime in first grade, I brought in a freshly minted manger scene, with Mary, Joseph, and the Christ child surrounded by animals in a shoebox 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 . From then on, I created a host of clay models of buildings, rooms, scenes from history and literature. These got more and more elaborate. Most I brought to school for display and kudos. The irony here was that my flat-out worst subject was penmanship. I was incapable of mastering the Palmer Method. Once in fifth grade, Dan Callahan correctly predicted my grade of “C” in that subject, and I reacted by shoving him into a hedge. To this day, I cannot join more than two letters together. (Without a doubt, this trait is genetic. The handwriting of my brother and sister looks the same.) In the summers, I continued to make models based on my own ideas and pleasure reading. One of the earliest was a raised relief rendering of Treasure Island based on the book’s frontispiece map, which had been drawn by Robert Louis Stevenson himself. The skull-and-crossbones flew from Spyglass Hill, and beneath it was a stockade of popsicle sticks. Overlooking an inlet, Ben Gunn’s cave was camouflaged but visible. Up through ninth grade, my last model-making year, the highlights of my plasticine career included the Parthenon to scale with Phidias’s lost statue of Athena recovered and reinstalled inside; the Egyptian temple of Karnak, nine feet long and supported by columns decorated with hieroglyphics; and a two-story medieval castle with twelve rooms—including an armory, a throne room, a chapel, and a banquet hall with food on the table—and exterior walls molded stone by stone. Created in the summer between sixth and seventh grade, my pièce de r...

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