 I think this is our 10th annual Artist of the Year celebration. I'd like to identify the other members of the Santa Cruz County Arts Commission who may be here with us this evening. I represent the first district, Betty Allen, from the second district. If you're here, fellow commissioners, would you please stand or raise your hand? There's Betty back there. Reynaldo Barrios from the third district, Diana Hendrickson from the fourth district and Mary Kay Hubbard from the fifth district. We're really delighted that at this Artist of the Year celebration we can welcome former recipients of our Artist of the Year and those wonderful members of our community include Tandy Beale, Lou Harrison, Jim Houston, who's down here in front. Jim, would you stand? The Cabrillo Guild of Music. I believe Celia Hartman is the current president. George Barotti, Charles Hilger received an award in visual arts. Charles is here. The Cultural Council of Santa Cruz County, Felix Robley is president. William Everson, the poet who's joined us here this evening. And last year's recipient, Doug McClellan. Doug? I'd like to take a minute to explain to you how our Artist of the Year is chosen. Our Artist of the Year are chosen for their outstanding achievement in various disciplines, the performing, visual, and literary arts. They must be a resident of Santa Cruz County. Their work must have a national, and in fact all of our artists have had international reputations. They must have contributed to the enrichment of the local arts community, and we're very pleased that the artists in our community have really become members of our community and are participating as volunteers and are working side by side with so many of us in a lot of different ways. They must also have presented or assisted in presenting their art here in Santa Cruz County. As a commission, we believe that the arts are very special in Santa Cruz County. It shows up in so many ways. I don't know how many of you are aware of our Art in Public Places program, but as you travel around the county over the next few months, I hope you'll take an opportunity to go into some of our parks. You'll see in the Brommer Street Park, for example, a wonderful piece by an artist that was done with some schoolchildren of tile work on a wall as well as a fountain that was designed by an artist. There's also new pieces going in at Seventh Avenue. There's a new park there. There's an artist that's been working on an installation. There's also out in Willowbrook a new park there, and will be dedicating both the Willowbrook Park and the Seventh Avenue Park in the months ahead. I hope when those dedications occur, or in the meantime that you'll go and stop by and see how artists in our community's work is coming up to show in public art. We also feel very committed to arts and education, and we're very proud of the Spectra program that the Cultural Council does. We're looking forward to working to identify new ways for arts and education to be strengthened. We also believe that building bridges through art is very important in our community, not only in terms of recognizing the multiculturalism that our community has developed, and recognizing that multiculturalism, but also in building bridges to other communities. I'll give you a couple of examples of some projects. I'm very pleased to have helped seed. At juvenile hall, we've had an artist working with young people who have been incarcerated in creating a mural, showing them that there's ways to find self-expression other than through the means that they've chosen in the past. We also have a mural on the freeway if you're coming along traveling south towards Soquel Avenue exit near Dominican Hospital. I see a mural along the side. An artist worked with the community of disadvantaged kids in that neighborhood, bringing them together. They had been conflicted with each other and there was potential for gangs there, and those kids came together and found a new way to communicate with each other. And as you travel along Front Street towards the beach, you'll see on the left-hand side a residential mental health center being painted on the exterior by an artist. The whole exterior has been designed as a mural. I'd like to now take the opportunity to introduce to you Ray Belgard, who's our fourth district supervisor who'll be serving in the next phase and also to recognize, I think we have a couple of other supervisors here with us tonight, Gary Patton and Walt Simons. So welcome to all of you and I hope that you enjoy the evening. Ray? Thank you very kindly, Barbara, for inviting me here and it's a real pleasure to be here in such a fine surroundings, although a bit small it would seem. But I think the county has long shown its support of the arts and I think that goes back to days when Ted Durkey, who was sitting here tonight, was the CAO and we've tried to do little bits of things but I think that part of the county's support in getting the financing and the money for this place it speaks for itself, I believe, and I'm just, I'm excited to be here and I was trying to think of things to say that would make it sound really good like I wasn't preaching to the choir but what I could say about art is, you know, you already know, so its message is loud and clear, it comes in the form of ties, it comes in the form of drawings and paintings and looks and all sort of things, so I don't want to waste a lot of time, I want to get down to the nitty gritty of things. I usually try to get to the basis and I brought a proclamation here to present to Jack on behalf of the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors and I saw Jack in the back of the room somewhere a little while ago, he disappeared down one of those halls, did he reappear? Oh, why don't you come on up and join us, Jack? We got two or three things we probably want to show you. You stand like this, like Jack Bitty would sort of do and I'll sort of read this thing to you a little bit if I can read. I'll just approve, I'm close enough to do so. That's good, now this is a proclamation from the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors honoring Jack Sejak as the 1993 artist of the year and I think quite an honor and well deserved. It says, whereas Jack Sejak's work including both paintings and sculpture in metal and stone has been widely acquired and shown by museums of fine art in public places across the United States, in Spain, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Yugoslavia, Israel and also over to the County Government Center where a lot of people get to see some of it, including myself and whereas Jack has contributed to the enrichment of the community of Santa Cruz County by inspiring and encouraging young art students through his tenure at the University of California at Santa Cruz which began in 1969 and whereas in 1990 Jack Sejak was nominated to the National Academy of Design, America's highest award for the artist and received the Pré de Rome 1954-57 and whereas Jack Sejak also served the community as a member of the Board of Trustees of the Art Museum of Santa Cruz County as well as several public art and panels and committees and whereas Jack Sejak is probably the only sculpture in the world courageous enough to tackle water as a subject for his work. So Courage is here. He's like a lion, right? Whereas this community has graced with pieces of Jack Sejak's sculpture which will be appreciated for generations to come. Now therefore I, Ray Belgar, Chairman of the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors do hereby proclaim Jack Sejak as Santa Cruz County's 1993 Artist of the Year and honor him for his significant contributions to the arts and to Santa Cruz County's community. Jack, congratulations. I'm sure of this. You'll see that I'll be overshadowed a little bit by... Thank you. It'll be overshadowed a little bit in size and shape by the Senate and assembly people but this is homegrown so consider it. Thank you very much, Jack. That's wonderful. Well, I think you can stay here because now it's my pleasure to introduce Claudine Wildman who's here representing State Senator Henry Mello. Claudine? Thank you, Barbara. It's my pleasure to be here tonight to represent Senator Mello. Unfortunately, he's unable to be here. He's at another speaking engagement in the district. I think certainly the crowd here tonight is a testimony to this community's acknowledgement of Jack's achievement in the arts. And on behalf of Senator Mello, I would like to present him with the Senate resolution. Okay, one more. You know, I forgot to say I don't know. I'm sure all of you have been in this building before but I think this is also a doubly rich celebration. We're celebrating the new home of the Santa Cruz Art Museum and the space is wonderful and we're delighted to have Jack's show here in conjunction with our Artist of the Year. I'd like to ask Sally Johnson now to come up on behalf of Assemblyman Sam Farr. Sally? Hi, Sam is sorry. He couldn't be here either. But he's given me a few words to say, not to read the proclamation, but to say, as we all know, Jack Zajak is versatile, accomplished, and provides us with a model of self-determination. I've been asked to add that it's in consideration that he started with a bingo parlor sometime earlier in his life. Beyond his work can be seen his deep interest in his community through students, museum growers, county fair participants, and still beyond, he's taken us to a timeless flow that he's studied and is letting us in on. Thank you. All this is almost overwhelming. And Paige Smith, if you would please join me, because there is more words to describe Jack Zajak than I possibly have in my vocabulary. So we've asked Paige, who is UCSC Professor Emeritus, to introduce Jack, who I know is his friend, as well as all of our friend Paige, would you? I don't know. I mean, Jack's been pretty well introduced already, but I'm certainly pleased and honored to be asked to say another few words. If I were an art critic, I might feel obliged to undertake to review briefly Jack's various phases, phases of his work, but I'm sure he'll do that better than I could. And so I'll talk or speak very briefly about his biography or about that aspect of it that I am familiar with. Jack was born in Youngstown, Ohio in 1929. There are some facts here that I was uncertain about when I sat down to contemplate the nature of this event and my role in it. And I didn't feel I could call Jack because I was told he was too nervous to answer the telephone. So I thought, well, he's going to be here tonight. So wherever I come to some space where I'm not quite sure, I can simply ask Jack. He came to Southern California in... When was that, Jack? 1946. 1946. I think it's right that not just mythology, that he worked in the steel mill. He'd already learned how to play the violin. And then he was admitted as a special student. I don't mean to imply that there was a direct connection between the violin playing and being admitted as a special student, but he was admitted as a special student to Scripps College for Women in Claremont, California. Isn't that right? I've always been a lucky man. I think I'm right on this, and I keep referring to Jack. He met Corda Ebi, an excellent artist, in her own right. And that was at the beginning at, I don't know the precise date of their lifelong alliance. But in 1944, Jack won, as it's been mentioned, the Prix de Rome. He went to Rome. He won it for his painting, painterly abilities. And he went to Rome. He began to, or I don't know quite, maybe Jack will tell the exact circumstances, but he began messing around with a piece of clay, which turned into a lamb or goat. And he realized that was really his calling, and that was the thing that drew him. His standing lamb, circa 1954, was one of his first, or his first piece, and announced him, as one might say, as an instant sculptor. I think when one looks at the piece, it is amazing to think that it was the first? The first. That's so helpful. But I just think it is really remarkable, and I would be surprised if any sculptor, if we searched through the annals, we could find one who had done a piece that so instantly announced him as a person, an artist, a sculptor of power and significance. It has about it an astonishing assurance and maturity. Jack's love affair with Italy began then, and he and Corda have a home in Umbria and have divided their time between Umbria, between Italy and Santa Cruz for many years. I have told elsewhere and often, probably to the point of tedium, how it came about that Elouise and I came to Santa Cruz. When I was asked by Dean McHenry to come here to be the so-called provost of the first college, I had misgivings of one kind and another, but Elouise said, if you go, maybe you can get Jack and Corda's Ajax to come to Santa Cruz. While I was ostensibly making up my mind, we went to Italy, and Elouise spent most of the time in Rome trying to track down Jack and Corda. She didn't succeed, but she never wearied or slackened in her efforts to persuade Jack and Corda to come. Jack came, they came first on a visiting basis, I think in... 1969. 1969, and five years later? Three years later. Three years later for good. And so that's how I got to Santa Cruz. I came in order to try, at my wife's instance, to persuade Jack and Corda to come, and it took a little while, but here they are. I think in the strange, to me, strange desert of contemporary art, there's so much where there is so much plain ugliness, so much fattishness and pretentiousness, so much playing of the art game, the life and work of Jack, Zajac stands out with particular power and presence. I believe that all great work has to connect itself to the best in the past to speak to the time and yet to transcend it and connect with all time. At the threshold of this century, the critic John J. Chapman wrote that we needed to feed upon the great works of the past. Songs, aspirations, stories, prayers, reverence for humanity, knowledge of God, or else some dreadful barrenness will set in. To cut loose, to cast away, to destroy, seems to be our impulse. We do not want the past. This awful loss of all the terms of thought, this bagary of intellect, Chapman concluded. Whenever I think of Chapman's words, which I often do, I'm inclined to think of Jack's work and of the sense that it conveys of working within a great tradition. We live in an age which seems to want to overturn or deny everything noble in our heritage. There seems to be a strange rage of modernity in the land. Jack's work stands, to me, for square against such destructiveness. What seems to me most compelling about his work is the treatment, his treatment of the classic themes of suffering, death, sacrifice, redemption. His work speaks of power and passion and courage. Those are the words that come most readily to mind. When I look at and think about his work, and I think maybe courage most of all. I remember years ago, Harold Urie, the physicist, nuclear physicist, spoke at the campus and after his talk, a student asked him what he thought the most important quality of a scientist was. And I think people expected Urie to say thoroughness or objectivity or discipline or whatever, and he said courage. And then he went on to explain that a physicist or a generation, decade or two prior to Urie's career, had come upon the formula for heavy water, which was what Urie got the Nobel Prize for. And it was against all the accepted notions of that time in physics. And he was embarrassed about it. He felt he would just bring upon himself ridicule if he wrote or talked or announced that discovery. So he put it in his desk drawer and tried to forget about it. And that left it for Urie to discover heavy water and to win the Nobel Prize. And it seems to me that that is one of the qualities in Jack's work that I find most compelling. That is the work of a man of passion and of great courage. I think it's reassuring in a time of wild confusion in the whole realm of aesthetics that Jack's sculpture has been recognized as great and enduring work and that he has represented, as other people have mentioned, in the right museums and the right places in the right countries, the Museum of Modern Art, the Hirschhorn, the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, Proctor Munson Institute, and on and on. The simple list of the honors and distinctions that he has won or been awarded to him would take up quite a lot of time. For the work on the exhibition here in the gallery and in connection with the dual honors that are being conferred on him tonight by the university as the guest lecturer and by the county, I'm glad to borrow from the review of Kenneth Baker, art critic of the San Francisco Chronicle, in reviewing a wonderful retrospective show of Jack's work three years ago at the Oakland Museum. Baker was charmed by Jack's falling water pieces. He said he wrote, the streamlined standing forms of these pieces are inherently elegant and bring an unexpected range of allusions. They distill to an essence the fundamental paradox of representational sculpture. Fixed form, standing for the inimitable flow of life. And I think that's a very powerful phrase and that it's characteristic of all Jack's work that in it one senses the inimitable flow of life. Water, of course, brings me, the mention of water brings me to streams and rivers. Whenever I speak of Jack's work, wherever I start, I always come at last to trout. My most vivid picture of Jack is waist-deep in the Snake River, casting a beautiful long line across the current. The late art critic of the San Francisco Chronicle, Alfred Frankenstein, said, called Jack the Michelangelo of our time. I like to think of him as the Isaac Walton of our time. I give you Jack's idea. I'm going to make my thanks to all of you very short because anything longer would be rather too emotional. So thank you, Paige. I will thank you now for being responsible for having us come to Santa Cruz and finding all of this, this extraordinary life. It was Paige that first invited us up and lured us up with promises of, well, the San Lorenzo River full of steelhead trout, I think. He was a man of impeccable integrity, but in this case, he was hedging the truth. There were a few more than there are now, but thank you for that white live, Paige. This is an honor. I would never have guessed this to happen, and I have a fear that possibly I peeked out a little too soon. This specter may be five years from now of being in front of the Octagon Museum saying, sir, I'm the expertist here. These are my clippings, and this is my poster. And the only alternative of that is that we go down the coast with my sort of sculptures and moss landing or carmel or something and say, you know, you squint your eyes and you hold them up like this, they look a little like a dying clown. But I think we're happily doomed to spend our days here, and we'll do so, I hope, for good many more. The prospects of speaking about one's work always are loaded with perils, and one of them is getting ensnareled in one's own syntax and saying something truly stupid or incomprehensible. In the long tradition of artists saying stupid incomprehensible things about their work, for example, this is a story I mentioned before, a very famous great artist who I won't mention, his name was William de Kooning, gave us a drawing to a friend of his years ago, and his friend threw it away because it wasn't a very good drawing. And he met this friend on the street some months later and he said, you throw my drawing away. He said, if you were going to throw it away, I would have given you a good one. And so the complexities of artistic thought are over and over demonstrated. I can enumerate a great many others, just that it's nerve-racking to try and recollect how the work was done in an honest pattern and to make it seem somehow more interesting than it really was, which is what we try to do. Because there's a great lot of donkey work and a whole lot of muddle. In fact, when Paige mentioned the fact that this one piece came so easily, I made up for it more than enough by the many, many blunders and destroyed work and failures that were carted off and abandoned and so forth, and I'm going to share that with you. There is one good reason to speak about one's work, and that is precisely to make it as sort of as art history often sees it. We read about things and they seem to kind of develop without flaw and without hesitation. I will explain that. It also is good for students to know, and I know there are some of them here, and to share with them the fact that you can change your mind. You can alter your course. You can fail. You fail in dignity, if not always in agreement. So I'm going to start with paintings and move through and try and make the water pieces a point at which the most important thing in my life happened, which was a renewal. That is the surrendering of all early skills and achievements. And the discovery of new means to work with this new body of work. So I'll take the first slide now, and my strange story begins as a painter. This is a painting that goes back to 1951, I think, and it's fairly representative of paintings were my concern at that time. A reflection of both the observed California landscape and an attempt to assimilate the prevailing genre of that time, which was abstract expressionism, which had this enticing liberty and energy and the gesture of the brush was a great part of it. And these paintings were an attempt to assimilate, that which was before me in fact, and that which was a trend in the art world at that time. The next few pictures are now... They were designed to move very subtly, actually predating kinetic art by almost a decay. The figure was also a concern, and the next group of paintings are a very large group of 100 or so, which I worked on for five or six years and never came to any sort of consensus on whether they were good or not. Now, these things parallel the iconography in a great many religions. A lot of religious fables have this concept of man dying for the redemption of others. It's a very strong image, although these don't make no attempt to specifically use those images, or rather the specifics of that fable. They parallel in a general way. As I got further into this, the figures became more in flux. The paintings were at times the same painting might be seen as a deposition, a figure taking one figure down from the sight of the crucifixion, another a sense of resurrection. These things were turned over and over again. They got deeper in the kind of cosmic soup of possibility and much more difficult to sort of get out of. They are very clearly beholden to Goya and the chiaroscuro paintings, kind of agio, and at that time I was trying to work with mainly black and white with some color as a kind of accent, but the drama was in the organization of light and dark, and that's the lamb. Aw! I know this sounds like an art story, but it's absolutely true. In the midst of this fervor of making these big paintings and trying to synthesize great many things that were very secure in their own isolated parts, this seemed a great refuge. It was real sanctuary. I found this clay after an excursion in Rome at that time. This was made during the Rome Prize. It was surrounded very closely outside the first wall by pastures and you would see this wonderful ancient sort of bucolic scene. This was a simple sort of labor of love, no attempts at any significant statement, but the Mediterranean has a tradition of taking the kid, the sacrificial animal, as a feast on Easter, and although it is not specifically a sacrifice, it seemed to me a kind of irresistible image of the object of sacrifice, or the sacrifice, the ritual still continuing, although the religious significance was gone, and I tried to sort of see it again as a sacrificial animal in the true sense of the word, a bound goat straining at its bonds. If one were to sort of think about religious iconography, at that time it seems that everything had been seen so often and so became so hackneyed in the kind of emotional sentimentality of those images that the goat seemed a fresher way to say something about that without using the old image. The steak, this is called Easter goat too, and the steak was an introduction, rather an invention of my own, to give the goat a thing which would threaten its fragility. These steaks touch the stomach of the animal where all life seems to dwell. A goat's belly is very fragile seeming and the goat also has a wonderful architecture. It has a kind of full hand of sculptural form of the whole index. It has a bony scaffolding, a very soft stomach, the beautiful udder, and all the stages in between. So this combination of the steak and the goat's stomach was the point of these. They were sort of referred to over and over again as the impaled goat which may be sort of very sort of irritated because the death is not imminent. It's still, I mean the death is not happened, it's still imminent. This is a very clear kind of representation of that sort of, that steak. It also gives a kind of strong geometry, a way of anchoring the piece and referring the violent parts of the goat to that rigid diagonal steak. Not having the frame of a canvas around me I suppose I wanted to sort of find something that would give it this leverage. One doesn't see the cord, one just sees the sort of contortion of the goat. This is the first of another group called the metamorphosis. In the process of retouching wax in the foundry one usually has a wad of sort of taffy-like wax in one hand and a sort of hot tool in the other and you try and recover some of the freshness of the wax before it goes into the final state of bronze. And I began to make small figures with this wad of taffy-like wax until it became an avenue in itself. I began to sort of make shapes very unconsciously and introduce a head or an arm or a figure which in a sense was both a metamorphic process in terms of the making and the image. And this is the most rudimentary of those and they develop in a sort of ethereal gesture over quite a number of these pieces. You can see the head, the profile of the head to the right and there's another figure emerging out of the upper right hand and these feet at the bottom. In time they got more earthbound and these are called deposition. They're about 12 inches high and there may be 20 of these existing. The piece got more to feel the weight of the figure that it was carried and to bow under this weight, the supporting figure is defined by these legs. One of the things that sculptors always have to say is photographs don't help see them very well and this is true because these things are done in the round so if you look kind of dazed and befuddled I'll understand but take my word for it, they're very, very interesting. You can make the figure out on the top in this little mark. Clearly. And it ended in a 10-foot piece that was commissioned by Redlands University. It's in bronze at that point. Now one of the things, one of the dangers of working in any art I suppose is that you get so comfortable and so secure in one style that you confine yourselves to that one image and even though things come along and sort of invite you to explore them you say that's fine, that's a nice sunset but it isn't what I do and that's a very dangerous thing to do as an artist because it seems, if anything can be said of it that your work cannot stay at a status quo. It either has to move forward or wilt and the artistic landscape is littered with artists who started off with very strong inspired things in the early phase of their life and have become a commodity and are afraid to relinquish that for fear that they will lose their status or sales or whatever. There was a very interesting painter called Fairfield Porter that said very so clearly, we must always be alert to the possibilities that present themselves and be willing to have the courage to follow those. And even if it seems dangerous or sort of un-rewarding at first, it's good to do that. In the process of working with these metamorphic figures I began to play with the clay. Someone seeing me do this likened it to the way a child plays with a cow pie sometimes. You squeeze it and this is a farm story. You city folks probably. But anyhow, the business of play is a very important part of sculpture for one thing, it's extremely boring most of the time and you have to divert yourself. So I began to squeeze these wads of clay and made these small masks that had a ram-like configuration because the wax oozed out from the two fingers and I put these things down. I'm a hoarder when I get onto some sort of track and insecure. So I make a lot of things and surround myself with these evidences of security and my ability to do things. Most of them are back in the pot. But for that moment, that seemed to be a lead to go somewhere. And I began to make these ram skulls in a bigger scale in plaster but they remained a kind of rigid mask and not really as successful as the great precedents in African sculpture and so forth. And in making of these things, one of these horns came apart and that began a series called Ram Skull with Broken Horn. And another thing should be mentioned here. The romantic version of being an artist is to get an idea, something vivid, a man being strangled by a money belt, by a man in a top hat, things like that. And then you proceed and you do these things. The fabric that weaves into making worker artists is so dense and full of chance and avenues that it's very hard to define it. But when this thing, when this one horn broke off and this thing began to lie on its side, it offered vast possibilities. The combination of the sweep of one horn now had a beginning and an end, the scalping, massive and complementary to the horn and so forth. It also allowed a scenario for drama, invented, but nevertheless useful for the artist working where you say this thing either seems to assume the look of a triumphant image that lived and had power and vitality and is now ravaged and altered, but still maintains its dignity. And that is what I felt at that time. It's so hard to define in a visual form a word like a triumphant or a vigor. I can do it. I can show you what it feels like. It sort of feels like that, you know? But that's hard to sort of put out. I remember walking along with Chris and Aaron once in Wyoming and walking during something like this. It was trying to define one of these sort of swan and its wake, water passing over a rock, and they were laughing hysterically at me. I didn't know I was doing this, but that's the way it was. This is triumphant. So in the development of these in plaster, the stratification of the plaster was very compatible with the idea of horn and bone and fracturing and sedimentation and so forth. So I'm going to go through these things. And that's one that's in the San Diego Museum. It's a big open skull about four feet long. This is at the UCLA Sculpture Garden. You see the horn to the right and the skull pointing upward. And that's at the Hirshor Museum in Washington. And this one, when artists get a little uppity, they should really always go to a foundry and get cut down to size, because I call for the mold of this in Rome to the foundry. And Ramos said to his worker, Romulo, vai prendere quel prosciutto. And they refer to this as the hand. And then he caught himself and said, Bama professore, scherziamo. You know, we were just kidding. But they weren't. These are smaller versions of those. At a certain part in the working of these things they came apart and I would sort of have a horn and a piece and try to join it. And other times they were left to remain apart. And that is one of the first that are in two parts. And the prosciutto looms up there in the background. These are quite small. Now here's the part that I want to pause in and I'll do more talking now than ever again. But it's important too. Since this, in the show at the octagon, are of the falling water pieces, the water pieces represented an interlude that is, that was very important for me. It was a humiliating, or at least a process of both exhilaration and the removal of any confidence I had in the earlier work. If you could say that all the earlier pieces, the metamorphosis, the early goats, these skulls and horns were expressive. They had a working method that was one of change and a kind of freedom in where they could go. They all related in a certain way. And we were in Southern California in Ontario in I guess 1961. And I had an industrial building full of large skulls. I tried to make these earlier pieces in a grander scale and left them to go to New York to do an errand of some kind. Went to Connecticut to see a friend overnight. And it was March and we were going along a river in a train and I noticed the frozen river having all these wonderful mounds and sort of trails and corrections and then reflected back on Dutch out rivers and so forth. And came back to the studio in Ontario and made a small, very small, fairly harmless panel of two currents convening as they sometime do, one pressing to the other and reconforming itself. It's the kind of thing you could write hikers about, very subtle, very remote, appreciated probably by small hunched, Taoist poets in China mountain tops. But not enough of a kind of statement to sort of beat me satisfactorily. And I tried a number of those and then tried a falling water piece just the idea seemed to happen. And then I tried another one and I thought I would put these away and go back to the skulls. And over a period of two years I worked every day compulsively with a few days off to try and get this falling water thing to work. And it wasn't going. And the reason it wasn't going is that I had too many sort of securities within artistic forms and wouldn't sort of let go of them and begin to learn anew from what I was seeing or feeling. And it was a process of surrender, of giving away everything I knew and learning newer things to deal with these water pieces. And at least 40 of these things were made in an eight foot scale and every time I did one I thought that was the one and this was really the one. And a few weeks later it was obviously a mess and it went to the landfill at Pomona, the Pomona Dome. And finally one good one came about and then a few more. I guess there were seven of these and they were all against the pedestal. I had to sort of explain them by putting them against something that said this is the source. This is a marble. After the vertical piece I tried the panel again, the flow of water being interrupted at this time by a blade shape which I call a swan because it's a kind of convenient participant in our history. I don't mean to make comparisons here, but a number of years later Court and I were in the Metropolitan looking at the Leonardo da Vinci drawings from the Buckingham collection and believe me this had never been out and I looked up to the upper panel where there's a blade being interrupting a flow of water and I waited for Court to say, great minds work alike. But she didn't. Let me go back just again. So this was the byproduct of the water pieces, the falling water pieces and these are called swan and its wake, not swan's wake because that would be baby talk. So I had some problems with that. There are four or five feet. This is owned by a very good friend of mine who happens to be in this audience and will go unmentioned because he's an anonymous collector. That's a marble version. This mound in the center is a nautilus shell embedded in the clay because it has that wonderful triumphant look that certain things do and the rest of the thing was built around it and then it was carved in marble. That's called black swan. And this is called beach pebble which is in fact, if you go along the beach you can see these pebbles with the reaction of sand around them where as the water washes back there's a collar above the pebble and then a wake which remains to be analyzed and seen. I found a little too late for the other pieces and this is called river grass. I tried a few fountains too. Water is pumped up through a hole in the middle of this and it spills over two surfaces front and back. This thing is a few inches thick and this is another version of it. This is another interlude, sort of a theme within a theme. I call this split almond and it came about rather fortuitously. A friend of mine had come to the studio for lunch with his new wife. They had just married and traditionally in Italy the newlyweds get almonds as a gift and we were cracking these things open after lunch and eating them and found many of them in two halves. I don't know whether this is a purposeful tradition but the metaphor was irresistible in this of these two things that combined make a hole and one was usually more massive not to be gender foolish here but I know letting myself in for something the other one more delicate and feminine? Anyhow, this was one of several this was in black Belgian marble and they're about, you know, 40 inches long, something of that sort and this is called alternate mounting. We have this parked at the county building at the moment when you go to pay your parking tickets you can stroke it. This was a shot of Carrara. We, a number of sculptors in Rome discovered this great resource in Carrara and Pettus Santa wonderful carvers that were kept alive by doing statuary for gardens quite corny things, lots of copies lots of funerary art and we went up there and began collaborating with these people having them cut in marble things that we would do and this is a piece that's 11.5 feet long and about 8 high and weighed a whole lot getting cut off the quarry it's at the Beverly Hills National no, it's no Wells Fargo bank plaza in Los Angeles and sorry, that's the upside down version and this is called the hollow of heaven and it's about 6 inches high so the range of marble, the registry can be very, very grand and be kind of useful in almost any scale from the idea of swan the blade that started in this water the swan and its wake piece began to have a life of its own and there were a number of pieces that came out of that this is sort of reduced as any work I've ever done it's called Black Swan after Potos and it's only as thin as a wafer tapers in a kind of wedge and this line you see they developed from the idea of a couple of wings sort of touching and sort of interacting there are two of those these interblades are slightly raised so they catch the light this thing of working in cycles is something I can't seem to kick I come to the end of something and 10 years goes by and then it seems like a good idea to start again with new ideas and it's happened three times with the goats and three times with water pieces and this was one of five pieces done in a week actually in a state that used to be called Divine Inspiration and is now called Manic State or Manic High coming down from the country in the house in Italy I told court I wanted to do another goat maybe a life-size piece I went to the studio that evening and started this which is called Bond Goat Sunday and it went very well and I finished it Monday and started another piece which is this and they seemed to take about a day and it was one of those I actually even played the violin on key that week I remember that vividly it was sort of a divine moment of being beyond oneself that's Wednesday and this is Thursday and it was great I called the mold maker in and had him cast in plaster and it was sort of I think a whole lot we lived in Rome for 20 years from 1954 to 74 really with a few excursions back home and a town called Orvieto which is one of the great jewels in Italy one of arguably the most beautiful cathedral of all in its square and it's just it has great Etruscan sites and perfect thing it is perched on a escarpment above the Tiber Valley it was originally an Etruscan fortress and they had a program called Uno Scultore Orvieto in which you were invited and would have your work out for six months in this beautiful garden called the Fortress of Alborno and I had it in 1976 and started work again with the return to these big skulls and horns feeling that maybe this would be necessary to deal with this sort of extravagant site we were confronted with so after abandoning those 10 skulls in Ontario I started with another one they were named after months roughly the fall of 1975 this is called October and November December and January and we had the installation and these were shots from the fortress itself which is wonderful these pieces were out for six months without a night guard and there wasn't a single piece of graffiti or vandalism in them and they were quite fragile some of these things could be picked up with one hand and sort of moved out it was a wonderful experience this was originally an Etruscan amphitheater that's one of the water pieces at the end of this battlement that looks over the city that's permanently there Bob Cerrito saw a couple being photographed in their wedding to dress in front of that and I thought that really was a compliment they're too young to know it was just a recent Johnny Cup lately sculpture and I tinder it I guess that's the end of those slides I invited a friend up here and he said, he's an old friend he knows me very well, he said well you're giving a talk, can I come up the hors d'oeuvres and go and I said no, you have to sit through the lecture and he said it's kind of like the midnight mission you have to sit through the sermon before you get the ball of soup and that's what you're doing here but if this gets too this is another view that's behind October November and finally somebody came the last week I'll always get some anyhow, let me go back a little bit now I mentioned that sculpture is often very boring it is more often very boring than not because one unlike painting which moves along rapidly with ideas and you can change and there's a whole structure with things a few flourishes sculpture is donkey work for the most part you have an idea and you work this thing and then there are the mold processes and making it respectable so you have fantasies you invent ways of entertaining yourself and these dreary ambience that sculptors live in I usually either fall asleep or think about trout fishing but occasionally artists usually in a kind of fear of survival think about great collectors and patrons so you always imagine that somebody's going to knock on the door and it will be your own mad Ludwig and he'll give you this great job to do and I had a fantasy like this where the doorbell would ring I would go to the door and there's this distinguished gentleman looking sort of like Inziopinza, do you remember him? exactly and he would say you are the sculptor Zajac and I have been searching far and wide he says I have this wheela in Pojibonzi named after me his name is Giovanni di Pojibonzi and it waits for you and so you suddenly say here is the divine shazam waiting all my life for and I have always been waiting all my life for to do monuments to things hitherto thought unworthy of commemoration because we have plenty of courage, patriotism pioneer motherhood all those things we don't have monuments to timidity and the morally handicapped and all of those things which are a big part of life so anyhow I let my imagination run wild and I did a series of etchings which have all of these things monuments to the timid to the clumsy and the end of the scenario is that you take all your sketches to the fortress or the villa Pojibonzi and you knock on the door and the man comes to the door and he has a white jacket on and you say I am the sculptor that the Count has chosen to do all of his work and the man in the white jacket says oh dear, another one the Count must have gotten out again so you're stuck with always great ideas and this wonderful sort of tragedy which makes art go around so I thought well I did these suites there are 49 embossments called the pleasure gardens of the Count Giovanni Pojibonzi I told the story once and it was reported in a journal as being a fact which is kind of interesting anyhow here's the monument to the timid to the clumsy and to a cloud there are some that are maybe risque but I will do without these when we came to Santa Cruz in 1974 we came back we were here a year and I got a call about the possibility of a show at the Fordham Plaza at Lincoln Center there's a great bar in space out there and they have a sculpture show every couple of years and there was this wonderful forge the old foundry as you come in the entrance of the university and I got that place for a couple of months I tried to build these skulls up again to a monumental scale and we got very large this time and three of them actually got cast into the temporary state of fiberglass and sent back and joined other earlier pieces but these things this piece goes about 11 feet high and the horn that you see coming out of the side and looping over is a linear 23 feet so they were large scale and we I asked a friend of mine a mold maker from Rome called Romolo Feliccia to come and do the molds and he flew over and we had this wonderful month with him and we had five or six students working and Steve Rudzinski and Ed Gillum sort of supervising this this is Romolo the jet lag working on this mold and you can see the pieces he's doing to make the mold from which the fiberglass would be poured or painted and that's Romolo the center surrounded by his two assistants and and that's one of the horns and we got them and put them up in the meadow for a few days just to see them and photograph them and that's called Big Skull and Horn Santa Cruz Forge number one that actually got cast into bronze by somebody in Southern California there's a sense of the scale and sort of configuration of these pieces again they're very hard to see in photographs and that's the hideous dreadful shot of a crane groaning picking up pieces I'm beginning to be like Pavlov's dog I just hear one of these things and begin to quake and slaver and that's one of the installations you could land a plane on this place it was kind of a terrifying space this prop on the horn was only in the fiberglass state so it isn't part of the primitive this piece and the other one the big circular piece were also sort of decided against them and buried at the local landfill I do a lot of business in those places you know in 1985 I started this last series of water pieces in which you'll see 12 examples and enlarged them somewhat and left them freestanding with the marks of the sort of working on the top and bottom and that shows the clay piece to the left and they're cast into plaster the plasters were fine and another mold is made from that and it's cast into bronze I had the good fortune of presenting the Monterey Sculpture Center in which is now in San City in its infancy in a sense and began to work casting there and they slowly accommodated my grandiose dreams by finding the means and technology to cast larger and larger sections of these pieces they also provided the kind of metal that is to call us and very necessary in the work of such high refinement so this was the beginning of the first of these pieces which number 21 these were plaster states and that's one of the molds to the right that we work with both these pieces are in the octagon and I tried to write in both the intentions and also the problems in these things as far as I know they are an original concept the idea of falling water as a sculptural motif I think has not been done certainly not in a serious way accurately it has in ornament but so this was these pieces were extremely hard to find ones where there's nothing to look at and they have to explain everything within what would be a kind of implied probability they're not scientific although they can't sort of disobey these the common sense of the way a common water would fall one would think of it would fall and that's the scale of the last one and that's one of the finishers of the foundry Kyle who is one of the magicians great great finisher that's the mold being sort of taken of this guy and and these are these little paintings that I've been doing in between these maybe make a kind of symmetry to the earlier pictures this is why I included them they're very small and they're shots of west cliff usually from west cliff and these last things and I'm almost embarrassed to sort of show these things because I can hear somebody saying oh jeez he's doing the elements first water now clouds but it's irresistible this idea of to try and define what could be a cloud shape and put it on a mountain so this is one of three and then the last three slides and now the ball of soup before you have a chance to thank me let me thank you for all coming and interesting that you could sort of bear through this sort of bumpy ride you've had thank you wow this is loud is the octagon still open great so we invite you all to go see jack's work next door in the octagon and thank you very much jack for sharing your work with us