During the early 1930s, Harvey Fite was moving
away from his longtime dream of a career in the theater. But a passion still
burned in him—as he wrote in his journals, “I must find a way to leave my
footprint in the sands of time.”
He was moving inexorably toward sculpture. The
epiphany had come to him when he was acting with a touring troupe called the
Jitney Players, performing melodrama. While he was waiting backstage one night
for his cue to go on, a wooden spool discarded by a seamstress rolled under his
chair, and he picked it up.
Good Texas farm boy (and jack
of all trades for the theater company) that he was, he usually carried a
jackknife with him, and on this night, he unclasped it and began whittling the
spool.
What he
whittled that night is buried under the sands of time, as is that spool, but
the impact it had on Fite, and on American art in the 20 th Century, was
profound.
But like
the hero that his friend Joseph Campbell wrote about in his seminal Hero With a
Thousand Faces, Fite was at first hesitant about accepting the call. He tried
painting, And he wrote. He had written plays in college; he tried some short
stories now,
But soon
Sculpture became his only muse, and he gave up writing, even in journals, until
1948, when he found himself drawn back to ink and paper again to create the
character of a little boy who finds adventure and self-knowledge in the World
of Stone, and through the spirits of the great stone-carving cultures.
He named
the boy after his young stepson—me—but Tad is really Harvey Fite himself, a
young sculptor in awe of the classic traditions of stone-carving. Harvey was then nearing
the end of his first decade of work on Opus 40, the great earthwork project in
stone that was to consume the rest of his life.
He looked
briefly for a publisher, but he came to realize that the story was not quite
developed, and he left to return to the stone in which he found his true voice,
and in which he spoke so eloquently.
The Rocklins is a unique and invaluable look
into Fite’s developing—and developed—philosophies of sculpture, including his
love-hate relationship with the mastery of Michelangelo, his guarded optimism
about the future of American art, and a vision of that footprint he hoped to
leave in the sands of time, especially powerful now that carving in stone has
become almost a lost art. Harvey Fite left his footprints, all right. But he
left them in stone.
I’ve done
some work with plot and continuity, and a little of the adult Tad has crept
into the character of young Tad, but the story is Harvey’s.
Tad
Richards
Saugerties, NY
2009
Opus 40 is now in the middle of a fund drive to begin the crucially important work of restoring the hurricane-damaged portion of the sculpture. Please donate to this campaign -- click the link here.
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