Whether it`s swinging from a tree or standing guard at a gateway to the legal profession, Mary Block`s art draws interest. But if any artist stops to rest on accomplishments, he must be dead or boring, according to her way of thinking.
”Art is considered a risky investment, especially when dealing with contemporary people,” Block said in her quaint and practical custom-made home-studio in scenic unincorporated Forest Lake, just east of Lake Zurich.
”You don`t know if the artist is going to develop or instead repeat himself and get boring. I grow with each piece I create because each piece is unique. I start with an emotion when I sculpt, not with a literal representation of my model.”
However she approaches her art, it has drawn interest. At the relaxed suburban level, her work hangs from a tree swing as a Highland Park landmark. At the more prominent urban level, it greets visitors to the Chicago Bar Association at the behest of architect Stanley Tigerman.
A University of Illinois graduate with training at the University of Iowa, the Chicago Academy of Arts and the Skowhegan School of Sculpture in Maine, Block is best known for her larger-than-life male figures.
Her bronze ”Golden Boy” hangs on a fabricated steel swing from a tree limb, patiently watching over the busy intersection at Green Bay Road and Central Avenue in Highland Park. When Arthur Rubin opened his art gallery there, he commissioned Block to sculpt the eye-catching male as an alternative to a hanging sign.
Rubin, a collector of figurative art who helped establish the Chicago branch of the International Galerie of Art in Paris, recalled: ”I met Mary by chance in a local coffee shop 10 years ago. She was covered with cement, plaster, in dirty jeans, a holy mess. I told her I was interested in purchasing a sculpture, something that was timeless, humorous, slightly erotic but in good taste, that would make people smile. I`d seen her two free-standing, life-sized bronzes displayed outside a nearby gallery and was impressed. She took me to her studio, then in Highland Park, and drew me five sketches. In four of them the figure held on to the swing with his arm outstretched, parallel. But I chose the sketch in which his left arm bent to hold the swing lower, a much more interesting pose.”
After his gallery went out of business, Rubin donated the figure to the city of Highland Park.
Block, who has been seen on occasion wearing a plaster-free dress and jewelry for an evening out, said her ”Boy on the Swing,” as some call it, brought her needed recognition in the community and beyond. She recently sold a life-sized ceramic piece to the Kohler Museum design center in Kohler, Wis., and has two more life-sized figures on loan to Skokie for its new sculpture park.
Block`s most significant commission came in 1989. ”Justice,” a 9-foot-tall cast-aluminum male figure, guards the entrance to the Chicago Bar Association building on 321 S. Plymouth Ct. in Chicago. Tigerman of Tigerman/ McCurry, which designed the 16-story high-rise, selected Block`s untraditional male interpretation of the more typically female blind justice figure from a nationwide search to adorn the facade of the Gothic-modern building.
”Tigerman wanted a fresh approach to the theme of Justice, based on Themis in Greek mythology,” Block said. ”Typically the female goddess was depicted with the seven vices and virtues, holding a scale in one hand, a sword in the other. She was blindfolded in the late Renaissance, in the 17th Century. Interestingly, Themis was earlier depicted as a male god, in the 12th Century Gothic period, standing on a book of law, wearing a long judicial robe, and had a sphere for unity and a dove for peace. As the Gothic period merged with the Renaissance, the female figure became more popular because of the church`s link to the Virgin Mary, and the symbolic depiction of Justices` seven vices and virtues was easily understood by a generally illiterate public. I felt the male `Justice` was better suited for the Bar Association because its accouterments are less combative than the female`s. She seems to say `go out and punish,` while his message of unity and peace seems to say
`compromise.` ”
Block said the relatively light-weight aluminum cast won over bronze
”because the figure weighs under 300 pounds. A bronze that size would have weighed 1,500 pounds,” she said.
”Mary did a lot of wonderful research and found out things that I think a lot of people don`t know,” Tigerman said. ”She`s intellectually inclined, and I like her as a person. She`s very good.”
As Block said, she begins each work with emotion. In fact, Block`s life had quite an emotional start as she entered this world a triplet with two brothers as womb-mates.
”That was extremely unusual since fertility drugs were not in common use 40 years ago,” noted Block, who asked with a chuckle that her age not be mentioned.
Her mother, Bette, a writer and former social worker still living in Deerfield, said that in those days only one birth in 60,000 was a triplet birth. ”It was a hectic time for us, so I joined the Mothers of Triplets Club in Chicago, a support group for solving emotional problems facing multiple-birth families, and some practical ones, too, like locating a stroller built for three. We wanted to raise three distinct individuals. And we did.” Bette said that having children from a special birth carries some negative baggage. ”My husband and I kept our sense of humor, which helped,” said Bette, who remembered Mary and her brothers getting so accustomed to special attention in their neighborhood that on their birthday, Nov. 11, ”our kids assumed the people parading in the streets waving flags were honoring them, when in fact they were celebrating Armistice Day, then a national holiday.”
Block once viewed her unique birth as cause for celebration, but she now sees her busy work week as a celebration in sculpture. Molding her studio sculpting with her teaching career (two courses at Columbia College in Chicago and one at the Suburban Fine Arts Center in Highland Park), she also puts in 15 hours a week at her family-owned Consolidated Hardware and Industrial Supply on North Pulaski. Started by her grandfather, the business is now run by her triplet brother, Marc, a CPA-mathematician who is Mary`s next-door neighbor.
While Mary helps Marc in the shop, Marc helps Mary transport and install her heavier sculptures, and he models for her on occasion. Their brother, Mike, is a major in the Air Force, stationed in Italy.
”Since Mike moved overseas, Mary (who is not married) and I have gotten very close,” Marc said. ”We purchased the vacant lot between our houses, hoping Mike will live next to us when he returns from Europe.”
Mitch Gilbert, a Skokie resident and longtime friend and employee at the Blocks` industrial supply business, modeled for ”Justice,” posing four hours in the evenings, twice a week for five months. ”I`m an active person. I play a lot of racquetball,” said Gilbert, who is fit, slender and 6 foot 2, a physique Block wanted for the sculpture
Gilbert confessed that holding a pose was difficult, ”but when I started to see the figure take shape and form, it seemed worth it. It was amazing. . . . It was me.”
Gilbert said his friends envy and tease him a little. ”They say I`ll have longevity on this Earth once I`m gone.” Although his body was utilized, his head was not. ”Justice`s” face was based on Block`s father, who had deep-set eyes ”appropriate for this figure,” Block said of Benjamin, who died four years ago.
” `Justice` gives Mary enormous credibility and visibility as a sculptor,” said Tom Taylor, fine-arts coordinator at Columbia College, where Block teaches courses in three-dimensional design and bronze casting. ”The college is proud to have her. She`s upbeat and challenges her students to think, and I like her energy and boundless enthusiasm. She introduced bronze casting to our curriculum by connecting our students with a foundry. The students can now work on original waxes that are then invested and burned out in Mary`s kiln, then brought to the foundry.”
Investment is a mixture of plaster and sand that sandwiches the wax form. Known as the lost-wax process, the wax is melted out, and the space created is filled with bronze, poured at the foundry. Sculptors can start with a wax figure or plaster a clay figure, remove the clay from the hardened plaster forms, then add the wax and investment. That`s a major devotion in time and money.
Block encourages people to buy art not merely for financial investment but ”because you want to live with that piece. I realize art is not something you need to have in order to live, like food or transportation, but art enlarges and broadens you. Without art you live a much more impoverished life. Having art is part of what good culture and good living is about.”
You will need to make a good living to purchase a large Block sculpture, which can cost as much as $40,000 for a bronze taking more than a year to make. ”A very small ceramic piece may cost under $1,000,” she said, noting that with enormous sculptures come big obstacles. For those 9-footers, Block utilizes her 400-square-foot pole barn, a metal outbuilding behind her house equipped with tall ceilings and large kilns.
”A perfect day for me is no equipment breaking down,” Block said.
”Today I`m having a problem with my compressor and a kiln. I get up at 5:30 a.m., have a strong cup of coffee and start sculpting while the birds are chirping.”
Block doesn`t feel out of the art world`s mainstream in bucolic Lake County. ”The urban-suburban-rural argument sounds like people just grabbing for attention,” she said. ”Either you`re a good artist or not. It doesn`t matter where you put yourself. An artist`s location was more of an issue in the 1930s, before the days of modern transportation and communication. Now you could live on the moon.”
Maybe, but that would be quite a long commute to the Suburban Fine Arts Center in Highland Park, where Block teaches a course in clay sculpture. ”We had been after Mary to teach here for some time,” said Ann Rosen, executive director of the center.”Her students are at a professional level. She has a wonderful rapport with the students and nurtures their creativity.”
Said student Alice Adler of Wilmette, ”Mary has a great imagination, and she`s very considerate.”
Classmate Nancy Wolf of Glencoe agreed: ”She`s inventive and is not afraid to try different clays.”
Elaine Altenberg commutes from Waukegan to the arts center. She said,
”Mary`s fantastic. She doesn`t impose her own style on us.”
But sometimes Block does impose her hard-learned experience on her students. ”I told one aspiring sculptor that if she didn`t hollow out her clay figure it might explode in the kiln. I think she appreciated the advice,” said Block, who can be found in her studio clad in jeans, plaid shirt, protective goggles, torch in hand, molding clay into not only human forms but into any number of other organic forms, including dogs, horses and plants. Her end result may be bronze, ceramic or glass.
”Glass works in a way that bronze does not,” said Bruce Pepich, director of the Charles A. Wustum Museum of Fine Arts in Racine, Wis., where Block has exhibited. ”There`s an airiness and glow when light hits her glass work. It`s more opaque than that shiny glass finish most artists use and reminds me of Etruscan glass found on archeological digs. She uses the glass form to play against types. The contradiction of a man`s physique done in glass, which is much more delicate than bronze, can be quite interesting, like Harrison Ford playing a wimp in a movie.”
”I start my glass pieces by constructing an armature, which is basically a skeleton of pipe or wood,” Block explained. ”Starting from the core with small globs of clay, I build outward. I think of it as an organic process, like a person growing out from the center. I walk around my model and figure. It`s like drawing in 360 degrees. I make an alumina-silicate mold and melt glass cullet, or pellets-chips and chunks of glass-to the mold, my form, with a torch. And that`s just the beginning. It`s a process I developed, involving many steps to achieve the look I want.”
Her current model, Eric L. Fornander, 38, of Spring Grove, poses in her active studio, which is filled with heavy tools, plaster body parts, wax heads and a life-sized plaster woman strapped sideways to a gantry for transporting, like Houdini ready to be lowered into the water. Fornander, a tall, patient ex-Marine with muscular arms and well-toned legs, assumes a pose inspired by violinist Isaac Stern when he defiantly played on at an Israeli concert in which the other musicians stopped to put on their gas masks during an Iraqi Scud missile attack, ”a spirited and emotional moment in history,” Block said.
Fornander`s raised arms are not holding a violin but are inserted into foam-rubber supports that hang from the ceiling. The heels of his feet are propped up on bricks. ”This can be a tough pose after about three hours,”
complained Fornander, a part-time model who works days at Gander Mountain Sports Outfitters in Wilmot, Wis. ”The more painful the pose, the better it seems to work for Mary,” he quipped. ”Listening to music puts the right mood into this work. Otherwise time can drag.”
Fornander, who knew what he was getting into because he has posed for two other Block sculptures, seems drawn toward unusual physical jobs. ”I worked casino security in Vegas,” he said. ”I saw some weird things on that job, mostly people losing a lot of money quickly.”
Fornander has an athletic build, but Block said she`s ”not always looking for Charles Atlas when I choose a model. That`s just not how most people look. I`m looking for charisma and strength in the male form.” Block said she is less interested in the female form. ”I just think men are really attractive and interesting.”
Block slightly clothes her male models and sculptures. ”There`s a great resistance to the nude male form,” Block explained. ”People offended by nudity may still find my clothed male figures erotic, which is fine with me. But if my figures do disturb them, they cannot blame nudity.”
Several sculptures and paintings by other artists share Block`s living room space with sculptures of her own. ”Artists create for two reasons,”
Block philosophized. ”We really like to make things, and we feel the urge to communicate through our work. I enjoy other artists` work around me because it communicates with me. It`s like having a lot of interesting conversations when I come home. I don`t like hearing myself talk all the time. I like hearing, through art, what others have to say.”
