Elementary school child We are worldly, educated
Can do what we can’t Proper and dignified
It is amazing what can happen You and I take it hard
Kitchen becomes forest That to play like the little one
Bench a grizzly bear An adult no longer can
*****
Life was hard for the children of hunter gatherers! They had no toys, not even a sharpened stick to draw pictures in the sand, or twine to pull a rock and imagine it was a pet. Little girls may have pretended chunks of wood dressed in scraps of animal fur were dolls. With no props to speak of the children relied on imagination.
It took millennia before that changed. Gradually, our forbearers domesticated plants and animals and became farmers, devised tools to improve their productivity or made weapons for hunting.
When new technologies made daily chores easier and life standards improved, not much changed for the children. The toys were minimalistic and cumbersome. Children pretended these objects were real, boys by bouncing their imaginary soldiers, woodsmen or robbers, and may have staged fights or hunts. The girls would cradle their dolls, nurse them and talk to them in small voices.
Bruno’s generation grew up before TVs, tablets, and computers provided entertainment. The pastime was reading. The city dwellers owned many books for all ages that they shared with friends. During the evenings, Bruno’s family would spread around the family sitting room, in their Chesterfield-style Armchairs.
Bruno's heroes were the Arctic and Antarctic explorers, but also the big game hunters in Africa, great inventors like Thomas Alva Edison or the Wright Brothers, and travellers in the mythical Far East. The world still held a lot of secrets and there even were a few blank spots on maps. Frenchman Jules Verne was the first Sci-Fi writer. Everyone knew books like Around the World in 80 Days or 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.
Bruno’s family was more interested in humanities than novels unless they were classics. One day, Bruno found a book about Greek mythology, the best quasi-religious tales ever written. Ancient Greeks, immediately followed by the Romans, were the precursors of civilization and culture in Europe. The book spawned Bruno’s interest in arts, specifically sculpture.
For one summer holiday when he was 14 years old, there was an opportunity to try some clay modelling. His parents’ cottage was in a small village where peasants’ houses were traditionally built from locally available materials. Although there were forests around, wood was still too expensive to use for walls, so they used adobe bricks they could make cheaply themselves in communal clay quarries.
They would dig for the clay, remove rocks and sand to make the mixture smoother, add straw and water, and then make bricks with wooden forms. Bricks were dried in the sun.
Firing bricks was time-consuming and the kilns they used were primitive, so these were used only for building chimneys.
The family cottage was built on a property that at one time had been the quarry. Bruno dug out some poor-quality clay by the fence, cleaned it, added water, kneaded it and was ready to give sculpture modelling a try.
The stuff was messy and sticky. Having no model other than himself, Bruno made a sculpture of his right foot standing on tippy toes, on a 5/8” slab of clay for the base. The whole “sculpture” was about 6” high.
The wet clay had a mind of its own, and kept leaning this way and that, and sagged limply downwards and sideways. It had to be propped up with matchboxes, wooden blocks and wedges. There probably was a better way, but Bruno did not know it. It was a battle between the frustrated youth and the inert material determined to stymie his ambition to become the second Michelangelo.
To his surprise, the foot dried into the shape and position originally envisioned. It was rough looking as the clay was still coarse and filled with impurities.
Having no access to a pottery kiln, Bruno's decision to fire it on a gas stove in the kitchen caused considerable discomfort to his mother. The firing took a long time. Much of the expensive propane was used while the sculpture was standing in the open on top of the burners.
It eventually heated up, but unequally. In the middle, right above the flames, it was white hot and glowing, next to it - red hot and on the fringes, even darker. The unevenness of the heat resulted in the finished piece having variable colouring, reminiscent of a tie batik.
The finished sculpture was unexpectedly good- even a notch above. It had the raw look of a fired brick as it was not glazed. Bruno knew nothing about glazing and its intricacies back then, but it was rock-solid and anatomically correct.
He was encouraged to keep sculpting and experimenting, although his mother outlawed any further firing on the stove for safety reasons. Reason must sometimes prevail.
Back in the city, when the womenfolk were done with it, he was allowed to use the kitchen for a studio in the evening.
When Bruno was 16 years old, he decided to make a relief of his face. It would be called a selfie today. He knew it would be more difficult work than anything he had made so far. It was winter, and darkness fell earlier in the day. The lighting in the kitchen was poor, so the conditions were not perfect. He set up a series of mirrors to see himself “en face” and from the sides.
The modelling took several hours. Around midnight, he had in front of himself a person's face with curly hair on the top of his head. It looked good “en face”, and from the sides. Nice mouth, deep-set eyes, and a straight nose. But the sum of its parts was not Bruno’s face. He could not figure out why.
Disappointed, he covered it with a wet towel and went to bed. A few hours later he woke up and went to get some milk from the fridge. Under the towel sat his creation, forgotten.
With a glass of milk in his left hand, he stood there, motionless, and removed the towel. The clay was still pliable. He spontaneously picked up a spatula and ripped into the face in front of him rather rudely. He adjusted the pupils of the eyes and the shape of the lips, and made a few new creases and gauges here and there. It took all of five minutes. Suddenly, Bruno saw himself like in the mirror; his face rendered in clay. It was perfect. He knew better than to keep tampering with it. His instinct told him to stop and go back to bed. He slept well.
*****
It could not be fired on top of the gas burner. It was much bigger thank anything he had ever made. Bruno never dared to have it fired professionally, lest it cracked.
Bruno should have been motivated to continue developing his art, maybe even take courses. But he was baffled by how his project ended. He did not know where the spurt of energy came from or why.
If he were to become a sculptor, what would be the process? Would he just stand in the middle of the night in front of a blob of clay with a glass of milk in one hand, spatula in the other, and wait for an inspiration that may never come again?
It was the last clay sculpting Bruno did for the next 40 years.
*****
Bruno never abandoned his naïve, childlike approach to art, and uses his freedom to dab into all kinds of arts and crafts. There are multitudes of events that inspire his creative impulses, and he is always willing to try something new. Learning new skills is the goal; the resulting creations are a by-product. Much can be achieved by simply trying and having perseverance.
