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It won’t be easy to chisel a 40-year career down to 90 minutes, but he’ll have to try.
Admired well beyond his stature as Maine’s “most renowned living sculptor,” Clark Fitz-Gerald has placed pieces of his vision in public and private venues as near as his home community of Castine, and as far away as England’s Coventry Cathedral.
Locally, his gleaming aluminum “Continuity of Community” piece illumines downtown Bangor’s West Market Square, as it has for nearly 25 years. Likewise, his trademark chandelier remains a focal point of the Maine Center for the Arts at the University of Maine campus.
Other of his works are held by institutions and collectors in New York City, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and in a host of churches and synagogues here and abroad.
With his 80th birthday fast approaching, Fitz-Gerald will host a retrospective look at his work at 3:30 p.m. Sunday at Maine Maritime Academy’s BIW Technology Center in Castine. Sponsored by the Castine Arts Association, he will show slides and speak about his long career.
“It’ll be very informal, I’ll tell you that,” says the white-haired artist, whose mischievous demeanor and physical vigor simply belie the labels routinely affixed to men his age.
Cutting straight to it, Fitz-Gerald classifies his own work into three categories: that dealing with the Old Testament, that concerning myth; and that simply celebrating organic form.
“They are all universal idioms, a language people can understand very quickly. I’m not interested in abstractions for the sake of abstraction,” he says.
Fitz-Gerald warms noticeably when the subject turns to his kindred feeling for the fleshly characters of ancient Scripture. “The ideas and people in the Old Testament are my friends,” he says, grinning. “The New Testament doesn’t do much for me. I think it has something to do with being a very earthy person.”
With undisguised relish, Fitz-Gerald extols the forthrightness embodied in the story of King David, who sent Bathsheba’s husband off to war, all the better to have her for himself. The artist also delights in having sculpted the king as “five little hills of rock and a big sling.”
At his Dice Head home and studio, the artist’s fondness for his scriptural and mythic soul mates is evident.
One telling example beckons from a pedestal in the foyer. Raffishly waggling its tail, a sumptuously carved serpent grins knowingly, as a shiny golden apple dangles sidelong from its mouth.
“I must tell you that I’m a kind of ethical moralist,” Fitz-Gerald says, lowering his voice to an almost confiding whisper. “I don’t know what it is, it just keeps rearing its head.”
Preferring not to overanalyze, “I can’t tell you where my head is,” he says. “It’s part of the Victorian training of my parents, my early training, the Midwest, and all that kind of stuff.”
It’s no wonder that a specialist in “reinterpreting” Old Testament symbols displays a disarming irreverence any time discussion threatens to turn too serious or self-important.
The same goes for his art.
“I never take myself seriously, but the work is serious,” he says. Yet, “If you don’t smile when you see it, you’re missing the point. I just have the feeling that we’re awfully precious about ourselves, and we shouldn’t be.”
An indifferent student at best in his youth, Fitz-Gerald says he never studied sculpture “as such.” After graduating from high school in his native St. Louis, he went to the Philadelphia College of Art.
It was “an old, old school with very conservative attitudes,” he recalls. Disliking the directive to plan every project to death beforehand, Fitz-Gerald preferred to dive right in, carving out unexpected results that could be exciting, depressing, or both.
As a young man, Fitz-Gerald worked as a commercial artist for clients such as Coca-Cola, until the fickle whims of art directors finally drove him to pull the plug on the setup, and to pursue his muse through wood and metal. In his mid-30s, with two children and an uncertain future, he remembers saying, “God, if you do this for me, I’m gonna do things for other people.”
He moved to Castine in the late 1950s, where he continues to live with his second wife, Liddie, also an artist.
More than 40 years and 1,000-some odd pieces later, it appears Fitz-Gerald kept his pact with the creator. Once an idea is fully imagined, he seems blessedly equipped to actualize it, a skill he has sought to foster in young people by teaching workshops in area schools.
“When you have the right to do what you want to do and make money at it, you can’t help but feel some guilt. You owe something back,” he says. “My problem is, what should I do? This is what possesses me. I have a great concern as to whether anything is worth doing.”
The many small models lining Fitz-Gerald’s home bookshelves are testament to some of his grander projects, such as “Mitosis,” a mammoth bronze depicting a dividing cell, precursor to life.
Yet a project need not be grandiose in scale to merit his attention. His 18-inch-high armor-shrouded “Man with a Closed Mind” hints at his impatience with organized religion’s inflexibility and bureaucracy.
As a tribute to democracy, he fashioned a voting box with a scallop shell fastening for the town of Castine. More recently, he crafted a time capsule to commemorate the town’s bicentennial.
At the moment, he is focused on sculpting a crab commissioned by a psychiatrist for his home in Chesapeake Bay. Other projects in his studio include two twisted forms reminiscent of the mobiuslike piece in Bangor.
“There are a lot of things I do that have no beginning and no end,” says Fitz-Gerald. “It’s all about renewal.”
General admission for the Clark B. Fitz-Gerald retrospective is $5 at the door, $3 for Castine Arts Association members, and free for MMA students. Snow date is 7:30 p.m. Feb. 10. For more information, call Lib O’Malley at 326-4212.
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