Miniaturist Aaron Cullars is fiddling with his masterpiece. He turns on and then dims tiny Gothic lights, each just slightly bigger than a needle’s eye. “You are about to enter the land within your own soul,” he mutters, a little dramatically.
Before him, in a spare bedroom of his Schaumburg home, is his piece de resistance, eight years in the making. The 3-by-5 1/2-foot miniature model represents the seven cardinal sins of yore: lust, sloth, greed, envy, hatred, gluttony and pride. He calls the work “The Seven Deadly Sins.”
The model–done in dollhouse scale but nothing whatsoever like a dollhouse–is something of a morality play in dolls. Cullars has included a wizardlike figure that represents chaos, a blacksmith for morality, and a handsome knight for conscience, all built around a dungeonlike room littered with bones and rats and even a tiny bitten apple, representing the temptation of Eve.
Cullars built all of the structures himself, then commissioned other miniaturists to create the tiny figures that populate them. His work of art, which he began constructing by hand in 1989 and completed in March 1995, represents his deeply held views on everything from religion to spirituality to right versus wrong.
“What Aaron has done is unusual,” says Jeanne Delgado, the associate editor of Nutshell News, a Wisconsin magazine for miniaturists. “(`The Seven Deadly Sins’) has landed like a bomb in the miniature world.”
Delgado points out that most miniaturists are doing cute room boxes and houses or vignettes from books, usually something cozy and Victorian such as Sherlock Holmes, not Dante’s “The Divine Comedy,” which is Cullars’ inspiration.
“Miniatures are an art form; you can use them to depict anything from real life,” Delgado says. “Aaron chose to do something else. He wanted to make people think.”
Cullars is continuing his unique perspective with a new project called “The Final Illusion,” which centers on a figure representing deceit.
Buzzwords like “unusual” and “unique” are nice enough for a relatively unknown craftsman, but Cullars’ soft-spoken wife, Dorothy, has a different take on her husband’s work. “I think it’s cute,” she says fondly, and with a slight smile, watching quietly as Cullars explains his masterpiece.
If you walk around the raised perimeter of “The Seven Deadly Sins,” it brings to mind Colleen Moore’s Fairy Tale Castle at the Museum of Science and Industry. Remember the little angels dancing on the head of a pin? Cullars has had little porcelain figurines specially made that are almost that small.
Although the fantasy element is the same, Cullars’ vision is darker. In the Great Hall of Judgment, the centerpiece of the work, tiny skulls on the floor are a testament, he says, to all temptations that aren’t acted upon. The big wizard in the middle, Chaos, is a threatening presence. A crystal represents the Eye of God.
” `The Seven Deadly Sins’ was going to be an allegory of my own life. I don’t want to point the finger at anybody,” Cullars says. “I tried to pick out certain (sinful) events in my own past.” Then he pauses, and jokes: “I thought, `Wow, you’ve got a lot to choose from.’ “
The work is even more amazing given that it was the first miniature creation in dollhouse scale Cullars has made, although he was for a time interested in model railroad sets and small-scale military and fantasy modeling.
“I was tired of railroading. I was tired of HO scale,” he says. “It’s just kind of small. I’m not an impatient man; otherwise, `The Seven Deadly Sins’ would never have been completed. But the scale was too tiny for me to work with.”
He then started buying fantasy figures that were dollhouse size, and that interest led to “The Seven Deadly Sins.”
He opens a little door to the first vignette, “Hate,” which shows a miniature Adolf Hitler and a wall of gas chambers. The Hitler figure is standing on shredded cloth, meant to represent the uniforms of his prisoners.
“Hate is easy to show,” Cullars says, drawing out the word “easy.”
He understands his work is interesting to look at, but its socially relevant themes may disturb some onlookers who have viewed his creation. That’s fine with him, Cullars says, as long as his viewers are thinking.
“You want to get mad? You want to get angry, fine,” Cullars says.
As he talks, he peppers his narrative with bits of doggerel, biblical references, political commentary (i.e., the decline of the welfare state) and a wide range of other subjects from rap music to Tonya Harding to O.J. Simpson’s trial. There is also much sermonizing and philosophizing, which should come as no surprise, given that Cullars, a lapsed Baptist, is the grandson of a preacher.
“Death does not care if you’re lazy, if you don’t live your life to its fullest potential. He’s still coming!” Cullars, 62, says, pausing at the small room that reads “Sloth.” Inside, a debauched man lies on a small cot in a room littered with little talismans, including the tiny Death figure in its center.
Other rooms depict lust, greed, envy and pride. Cullars has a door for gluttony but no vignette. That would have been too easy, and “then I would have had to get into politics,” he says.
When the idea for “The Seven Deadly Sins” first came to Cullars, in the middle of the night when he couldn’t sleep, he says his vision was just a door, a door that now leads into the Great Hall of Judgment. He made a sketch of it and went back to bed.
“At first I thought I could make a nice dungeon, and then the idea of depicting the Seven Deadly Sins just evolved,” he says. He does admit to being highly influenced by Dante’s “The Divine Comedy” and Milton’s “Paradise Lost.” He has several translations of “Divine Comedy” around the house that he reads regularly.
When he first began, he had no idea how complex his execution would be. His role is that of a visionary, rather than craftsman, and he doesn’t work off of plans.
“I’ve got the blueprint in my head,” he says.
But he does create the scenes, and he ended up making the tiny bricks for “The Seven Deadly Sins” by hand, tuckpointing each of them with papier-mache, a long and laborious process. Dollmakers and miniature artisans from around the country were tapped to create the dolls and accessories for the project, including 20 specially made rats smaller than a pencil eraser. Cullars commissioned those from an Indiana artist, sending her a National Geographic article on the vermin as a guide. After all, as Cullars puts it, “What’s a dungeon without rats?”
Ultimately, “The Seven Deadly Sins” became a one-of-a-kind creation that Cullars now hopes to place in a museum, perhaps the well-known Carole & Barry Kaye Museum of Miniatures in Los Angeles.
“Nobody has ever done anything like what Aaron has done before,” says Tom Bishop, an Elk Grove Village native who now runs a miniature show business near Ft. Lauderdale. “It’s realistic, it’s lifelike, the horror of it has shocked some people. But the work is outstanding. He is a unique and very fine artist.”
Since its completion last year, “The Seven Deadly Sins” has been exhibited at a miniature show held at the Radisson Hotel in Arlington Heights. Cullars has no plans to exhibit it again just now, as it is difficult to transport. So it will stay in his Schaumburg home until he can sell it or donate it to a museum (he has talked to the California museum, but no deal has been made).
Where the urge to create this project came from is really a mystery, as mysterious as the urge to sin itself. Cullars has always been an artistic, creative force.
“I can never leave well enough alone,” he explains. He landscaped his whole yard by himself. He put tile on the ceiling of his entryway. He built a gingerbread-enhanced storage shed in his basement using a picture from the magazine House Beautiful as a guide.
Cullars’ twin brother, Artis, a retired postal worker with whom he remains close, says his brother was born with an artisan’s need to express himself.
“It was intrinsic,” explains Artis Cullars.
Growing up, the two read a lot, listened to jazz, stayed in most nights. “We weren’t the type to run the streets,” Artis Cullars says.
The two were raised on the South Side, first by their parents, a nurse and a bricklayer, and later, after the twins’ father died, by grandparents.
After the pair graduated from Calumet High School in 1952, they entered the Marines together, Aaron going on to complete a stint in Korea, Artis in Japan. Upon his return, Aaron Cullars worked for a while for the CTA and then for the post office, before becoming an X-ray technician at Cook County Hospital. That’s where he met his wife, Dorothy, 64, then an X-ray technician, now a nurse.
“I was impressed with his intelligence,” Dorothy Cullars says. “He was very easy to talk to.” The two married in 1971 and moved to Schaumburg in 1972. Cullars went on to work at Cabrini Hospital as an X-ray and then ultrasound technician, before retiring in 1995.
Cullars now has time to devote to his hobby, and he is hard at work on “The Final Illusion.” It will be a grand scene from an opera stage, with a figure representing deceit, his face decayed and crumbling, holding a jeweled opera mask.
He has commissioned the dolls, and he is starting to build the set. He plans to complete “The Final Illusion” in a year.
“The Final Illusion,” he believes, will speak to all onlookers, depicting as it does those who blame their transgressions on others, who deny their maker.
Cullars still wants to wake up the miniature world, where furniture and dollmakers are so often preoccupied with cutesy gingerbread cottages and gazebo dioramas. He wants its artisans to do more thought-provoking work.
“Let your imagination go where it hasn’t gone before,” Cullars says. “Do what your imagination wants to do, in small scale.”
IT’S SHOW TIME!
Although Aaron Cullars will not be displaying “The Seven Deadly Sins,” the Chicago Dollhouse Miniatures Show and Sale Friday through Sept. 8 at the Radisson Hotel in Arlington Heights will feature many of the artisans and dollmakers who contributed to the piece.
Seventy dealers are expected at the show, which will display dollhouse furniture and miniature accessories ranging from knickknacks for 50 cents to handcrafted silver worth thousands of dollars.
Cullars will also be on hand, “looking at the goodies,” as he puts it, and meeting with artists on his next project.
The show at the Radisson Hotel, 75 W. Algonquin Rd., Arlington Heights, begins with a preview from 7 to 9:30 p.m. Friday and continues 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday and 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sept. 8. A preview ticket, good for all three days, is $10; general admission is $5, $2.50 for children.
For more information, call 847-427-4220 or 954-755-0373.
