After graduating from Hongik University in Seoul, South Korea, artist Anna Koh came to Chicago in January 1982 for further study at the School of the Art Institute.
She says she enrolled in sculptor Eldon Danhausen’s figurative sculpture class by accident.
“I (really) wanted to explore more abstract work because that was the fashion of the time,” she says. “I got into the Art Institute because of my stylized work, not because of realism.”
In Danhausen’s class she met artist Jeffrey Hanson Varilla, whom she would marry three years later. Varilla, a graduate of the School of the Art Institute, took the class because he was interested in sculpture.
“I saw Jeff’s paintings and I couldn’t believe my eyes,” Anna Koh Varilla says. “He did a small rural scene from imagination that looked like a Dutch painting. At the same time I saw one of Jeff’s portrait sculptures in bronze. It was breathtaking.
“Jeff influenced me tremendously. And I went to the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. I went to Italy and Spain. I had never seen the original art. Everything I saw (while studying in Korea) was in art books. All the Old Masters, they speak to you. My Korean colleagues thought I was crazy to study realism. At that time if you were doing realism you couldn’t get into any show. You were rejected. You were treated like a dollmaker.”
In 1990, the couple started the Koh-Varilla Guild, an art studio at 1801 W. Byron St., where they teach classes as well as work on their own commissions. And lately, they’ve been very, very busy.
A revival of figurative art has been under way for several years, and there also is renewed interest in portrait sculpture, a classical art form that dates to the 5th Century B.C., when Greek artists began infusing their statues with the animation of real life.
“People are hungry for this kind of work,” Jeff Varilla says. “People miss spirituality and humanism.”
“I think in the 20th Century humanity was out,” Koh adds. “I miss the beauty. I want to create something that (I react to by saying), `Oh, how beautiful’ and I can touch my heart.”
Varilla believes the non-figurative movements of this century “were an expression of a kind of cynicism for humanity, and for good reason-World War I, the Depression, World War II, Vietnam, the atomic bomb, Nazism, Stalinism, Fascism. It’s understandable why so much of modern art of the century got away from the human image. People didn’t like themselves.”
Sculptor Margot McMahon of Oak Park, whose bust of activist priest Monsignor John Egan recently was dedicated at the new Egan Urban Center at DePaul University, says that “recognizing humanity has been my reason for sculpting figuratively. I’ve been doing it for a long, long time. I feel each individual has a lot to offer, and I can’t think of anything more interesting.
“That will always be my viewpoint, and now the art world and all the rest are coming around to deciding that we do need to look at the individual again. We need to look at both the endurance of the human spirit and the fragile nature of the human spirit.”
Koh and Varilla began working together on portrait sculptures out of necessity when they received their first corporate commission in 1987, a bronze bust of Alexander Graham Bell for Illinois Bell Telephone Co., and had to meet an early deadline.
“Sometimes Anna would work the day shift and I’d work the night shift,” Varilla recalls. “We were pleased with it and thought, `Wow! Maybe we can work together on getting a lot of
commissions completed.’
“Of course, sculpture by its very nature is collaborative. It’s heavy work that involves a foundry. Traditionally, if you go back to the Renaissance and the 17th Century, there were workshops where three or four different artists would work on a single project. It wasn’t until the 19th Century that the romanticized idea of the isolated genius with a personal vision emerged.”
To begin the actual sculpture, the Varillas construct a framework made of steel and other materials to support the clay that will form the piece. If a terra cotta piece is intended, the completed sculpture can be prepared for a direct firing in a kiln. For a bronze sculpture, a mold is made for a replica of the sculpture in wax. At a foundry the wax is covered in refractory plaster; the wax is burned out and replaced by bronze. The newly cast bronze is immediately sandblasted and cleaned by grinding. The Varillas apply a patina and do the final waxing themselves.
Koh and Varilla went on to complete commissions for a bust of Mayor Richard J. Daley that is displayed in Mayor Richard M. Daley’s office, a bust of naturalist and artist John James Audubon for the Audubon Museum in Henderson, Ky. (its first casting is displayed at the Field Museum) and a bust of hotelier Conrad Hilton, castings of which were made for offices in the Palmer House, Chicago Hilton and Towers and Hilton’s corporate headquarters in Beverly Hills, Calif.
Like most portrait sculptors they work from the inside out, trying to capture the personality and spirit of their subjects.
“When we receive a commission we do a lot of research,” Varilla says, motioning toward some terra cotta pieces in the studio. “For instance, the bust over here is of World War II veteran Manuel Perez, who was killed in 1945 in the Philippines and received a posthumous Congressional Medal of Honor. I read about paratroopers-what they did, what they wore, their equipment-and I read about his personal life. We like to identify with the subject. It stirs the imagination. You get an idea of what the person might have been like.”
Although they have no choice with posthumous portraits, Koh and Varilla try to avoid using photographs as a basis for sculpture. They’ve been doing quite a few commissions for churches recently, including a life-size terra cotta sculpture of the Holy Family for St. Raphael Church in Naperville and a life-size bronze statue of the Virgin Mary for St. Edna Church in Arlington Heights. They hired models to pose for this work.
“We don’t try to create an idealized face, a generic-looking face,” Varilla says. “For the models it’s almost an acting situation. If they pose for the Virgin Mary or St. Joseph they almost unconsciously become that person. The facial expression changes during the sittings.”
Koh notes that they used the same model for both the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene. “She turned into Mary Magdalene! Totally different look. The face is a powerful thing.”
Sculptor Erik M. Blome, whose bust of the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall recently was unveiled at the city’s new Thurgood Marshall branch library, 7506 S. Racine Ave., believes that “the most controversial subject is a portrait.”
“Everybody has a vision of what the portrait is going to look like before they arrive at your studio to look at what you did,” he says. “They may have been thinking of some very heroic-looking portrait with the chin in the air, tough. And if you’ve made them very human they’re not going to relate to it.”
Blome, who recently started teaching out of the Figurative Art Studio, a storefront at 1230 W. Loyola Ave., earned fine-art degrees from the University of Michigan and Boston University. He also did postgraduate work at the Royal College of Art in London, including a class in sculpting and drawing heads that he says he improved upon when he taught a similar course at the School of the Art Institute last summer.
In addition to using live models for the course, Blome enlisted the help of Dr. Mimis Cohen, a plastic and reconstructive surgeon at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
“Plastic surgeons deal with some of the same things sculptors do-form and beauty,” Blome says. “When people come in to talk about having portraits done, they’re saying the same thing to the artist as they might say to a plastic surgeon. `Well, maybe you can lift the cheekbones a little bit or maybe you could lower the eyebrows a bit. Could you take those bags out from under the eyes just a little bit?’ “
At first he did not like the idea of doing commissioned work, but obviously Blome has changed his mind. “It does not inhibit creativity,” he says. “In a way it enhances it. It’s all in dealing with the person. You have to be able to understand people and able not to take things (they criticize) personally.”
Anna Koh Varilla says that “sometimes the client can overpower you. I experienced that when we did a bust of the retired vice minister of South Korea. I should not have listened. We changed the face four times. Now he is just thrilled. It’s so flattering.
“When we did this other man, he did not like his nose, but Jeff did not listen. We were telling him, `You have a beautiful nose.’ “
Adds Jeff Varilla: “In dealing with a person’s reaction to their likeness, you’re part psychologist and part biographer as well as a sculptor or a painter. People reveal so much about themselves when they criticize. Other people will say (the portrait) looks just like the person, but the subject himself doesn’t like it.”
Author Saul Bellow had already moved from Chicago to Boston when sculptor Sara Miller was finishing a bronze bust of him that real estate executive and philanthropist Seymour Persky donated to the Harold Washington Library Center in 1993. But she says Bellow’s initial sitting, during which photographs and head measurements were taken, was enough. One of Bellow’s dear friends told her it was a perfect likeness.
Miller had only one sitting with poet Gwendolyn Brooks for a bust also commissioned by Persky, who says he was inspired by the Poets’ Corner in London’s Westminster Abbey where William Blake, John Milton, William Wordsworth and others are honored with busts and memorials.
“I’m able after a good visit to capture a person so long as I have photographs and head sizes,” says Miller, who became a sculptor late in life after retiring from the real-estate business in Chicago.
Her third Persky-commissioned bust, one of Ernest Hemingway, recently was unveiled at the library.
Margot McMahon insists on five or six sittings for a portrait sculpture. She usually selects subjects in the context of projects like “Just Plain Hardworking,” a series of 10 busts of longtime Chicago community leaders that was funded by the Retirement Research Foundation and exhibited at the Chicago Historical Society and in neighborhood community centers. It is on display at DePaul’s Egan Urban Center at 243 S. Wabash Ave.
“I’m fascinated with the uniqueness of portrait sculpture and getting to know the person while interpreting them,” McMahon says.
“There’s an immediacy to it. If I can capture something I found intriguing about the person, it is solidified in the sculpture in a way that carries beyond the immediate emotion into a timelessness.”
