In Search of Motion: John William Cavanaugh...John William Cavanaugh, "the 20th century's master of...

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1 In Search of Motion: John William Cavanaugh Information for Volunteers DO NOT CIRCULATE THIS PACKET TO VISITORS; THIS IS FOR VOLUNTEER USE ONLY. John William Cavanaugh Echo Hammered Lead

Transcript of In Search of Motion: John William Cavanaugh...John William Cavanaugh, "the 20th century's master of...

Page 1: In Search of Motion: John William Cavanaugh...John William Cavanaugh, "the 20th century's master of hammered lead," was born in Sycamore, Ohio, on September 20, 1921. The third of

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In Search of Motion: John

William Cavanaugh Information for Volunteers

DO NOT CIRCULATE THIS PACKET TO

VISITORS; THIS IS FOR VOLUNTEER USE ONLY.

John William Cavanaugh

Echo

Hammered Lead

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OTHER RESOURCES

John Cavanaugh Foundation: www.cavanaughfoundation.org

The In Search of Motion: John Cavanaugh/Sculptor - Biography /Catalogue Raisonné is

available in the Museum Store for $25.00 ($20 for volunteers!).

BIOGRAPHY From the John Cavanaugh Foundation

John William Cavanaugh, "the 20th century's master of hammered lead," was born in

Sycamore, Ohio, on September 20, 1921. The third of four sons, of intensely religious,

poor and rural parents, John was perceived to possess unusual creative talent very early.

Premature hardships, the death of his father, Chauncy Floyd Cavanaugh, to suicide in

1929, frail health, partial hearing loss, and the onset of the Great Depression, while

particularly dreadful, may have also equipped him with rare courage.

John's mother, Hilda, acknowledging his talent, seeing no art classes offered in Sycamore

schools and possibly in hopes of one son becoming a priest, sent him to the Ursulan

convent in Tiffin, Ohio, to study. Though Cavanaugh later described it as a "horrible

experience," it began a sequence of art training within religious confines that would have

considerable influences on him throughout his life.

In 1938, again at Hilda's direction, Cavanaugh went to live and study art in Urbana, Ohio,

under the authority of Alice Archer Sewall James (1870-1955). Mrs. James, founder of

the Urbana Movement, ran a school of classic art instruction interspersed with the beliefs

and readings of the Swedenborgian Church. Pious through and through, James once gave

a lecture, from her sick bed (suffering a bad case of hives), after hearing of the "goings

ons" between male and female students at the school. In this lesson she stated with a

"sense of joy and triumph" she had "been permitted this trial of temptation to touch

herself in order to resist for all of them the lust of touching."

Taught to draw from cast and paint in oils, in time Cavanaugh expanded his study to

sculpture, excelling in several media. Mrs. James treated him with firm care and is said to

have considered him more a son, than she did her own. Her empathy for his partial

deafness prompted her to say he had "a wonderful mind and heart shut in, almost without

verbal expression from the early lack of hearing." After five years of intense instruction,

concerned his spelling would "handicap him all of his life," in 1942, James gave

Cavanaugh one hundred dollars, aiming him toward college to "learn how to write."

Cavanaugh registered at Ohio State University initially studying English Composition

and Literature, then during his second and third years, he enhanced his curriculum with

sculpting courses, receiving his undergraduate degree in 1945.

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In 1946 Cavanaugh married Janet Corneille, in Columbus, Ohio. Soon after the wedding

they moved to Boston where John studied at the Swedenborgian Theological School in

Cambridge, under the Reverend Franklin Blackmer (president Urbana College 1926-32).

In 1947, Janet became pregnant. Nine months later, suffering with hydrocephalic

syndrome their baby boy died, shortly after birth. Grieving the death of their child, and

struggling with growing disillusion and conflict with the Rev. Blackmer and the church,

the Cavanaugh's returned to Ohio, taking up residence in Columbus.

In 1948, John and Janet moved again, to Iowa City, Iowa. John enrolled full time at the

University of Iowa to study engraving and sculpture and worked at the University

Hospital to make ends meet. The following year, Janet gave birth to a healthy baby boy,

who they named Jon. Soon after Jon's birth, Cavanaugh fell ill with pneumonia and

injured himself falling off a bus. Weak and exhausted, he took his family to Upper

Sandusky, Ohio, to recover at his mother's. Hilda and her second husband Maurice,

"Shorty," who was her deceased husband's brother, had built the house from plans John

designed as a teenager. The house still stands today on North Warpole Street. John took a

job in a land mine factory and managed to support his family.

In 1951, resolving to further his education, Cavanaugh re-enrolled at Ohio State. Largely

working in ceramic he also experimented with cement, cast stone, aluminum, wood, sheet

metal and sheet copper. That year he was awarded a National Sculpture Society Purchase

Prize at the National Ceramics Show, for his sculpture Goose, now in the Everson

Museum at Syracuse University. Following that honor he was offered a grant to attend

Cranbrook Academy, in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, though unable to accept for

financial reasons, the recognition was "exactly what I needed," Cavanaugh said, arousing

a surge of work he truly called his own.

In 1955 Cavanaugh had his first one-man exhibitions, at Antioch College and the

Cranbrook Academy. These exhibitions promoted his growing reputation, with added

recognition coming in the form of a faculty position at the Columbus Museum School

where he taught clay modeling. Noverre Musson wrote in the catalogue for John's

Antioch show, "He has an imagination which conceives unthought-of techniques for

fabricating the forms he visualizes." His often abstracted designs "magnified the essential

concept," offering an expression "strongly individual"; attributable, Musson believed, to

Cavanaugh's eclectic training as first a painter and later as a ceramist and sculptor.

During this time Cavanaugh also began producing sculptures of large headed children

which he recognized, in retrospect, as references to his first born child. With their

enchanting and equally haunting effect, the artist through the 1960's and 1970's repeated

these sculptures. "Everybody loved them," he recalled.

In 1954, Cavanaugh created his first piece with hammered metal, Goat Head. Winning

the highest honor at the Columbus Art League Annual Exhibition, it was again seen that

year at the Eighth Annual Ohio Ceramic and Sculpture Exhibition. North American

Aviation, where John worked and obtained the metal for Goat Head, made note of the

piece in their newsletter. TakeOff, NAA's newsletter, proudly noted "Experimental

worker here at the plant, John Cavanaugh, recognized local sculptor and painter, is the

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guest artist tonight in the Columbus Gallery of Art's 'Meet the Artist' series... [his award

winning Goat Head] was formed "from a piece he obtained incidentally, from the NAA

Salvage Yard Department." Another benefit of his job at NAA was finally being able to

afford studio space in Columbus. Studio mate Laura Ziegler, a distinguished artist whose

work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Hirshhorn, among

others, recalls he "tore in there and worked and worked and worked with incredible

facility." She remembers he was without a doubt an "extraordinary artist," and "a master

of technique."

1956 was full of torment for Cavanaugh. With growing doubts about his sexuality, his

marriage, his art and religious beliefs, he was traumatized by his battle to stay true to

Janet, his son, his family, himself, and his religious training. The ensuing guilt wreaked

havoc on his spirit and that September John Cavanaugh caught a bus for New York,

leaving his wife, son, extended family and friends behind. His mother disowned him,

sought to turn his brothers against him and he never saw her again. Only after her death

was he able to renew his close relations with his brothers. For His wife, Janet, at least

said in retrospect, John was "a man who was very strong in many ways but never had the

chance to direct it the right way till later in life." They kept in touch, and she frequently

expressed her faith in him as an artist. Their son Jon's love remained strong for

Cavanaugh. He was never angry with his father because he'd "never felt abandoned."

Cavanaugh's hosts in New York, old friends from Ohio, once hearing Cavanaugh's

avowal of his struggles said, "you could not help but reach out." Once settled on Staten

Island, John sent for his son who attended first grade while living with his father.

Cavanaugh realized he was in no position to care for Jon and took the "traumatic" step of

having him sent back to Ohio. John supported himself by producing window dressings

for Resident Display in Greenwich Village, and worked part time as an industrial

designer producing and delivering hair curlers. Artists Alice Beardsley Carroll and Ruth

Jacobson, also working at the display house both recall his emotional turmoil. "He was

very troubled," and thought he was "very evil," said Alice Carroll, "and what I did was

listen and not be impressed by this 'evil'. I kept saying there are worse things; what

you've done is nothing." Jacobson recalls that for the display house he was doing

"enormous murals," "amazing splashy works... and that really helped him."

During that first year in New York John wrote regularly in private notebooks and

journals. He felt a pattern of thought that was like "old worn clothes, I cannot dump or

wear..." He re-established his contact with Rev. Blackmer, sending a letter expressing his

sense of conflict over desires to acknowledge his own sexuality, and creative drive, as

well as the divinity of Christ. Cavanaugh wondered did Christ, "separate sex and love?"

Cavanaugh claims that during this time his self-inhibition was so strong that he could

neither sculpt or sleep.

Several months after his arrival Cavanaugh met Dorothea Denslow (1900-1971) who in

1928 founded the New York Sculpture Center in Brooklyn and remained acting Director.

In return for firing the kiln and cleaning the Center, Denslow allowed studio space usage

free of charge, where he devoted spare time to sculpting in terracotta. By January of 1958

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his self confidence was "growing by leaps and bounds," and he found himself "emerging

quite a different sculptor than I thought I would be." In a letter to a friend he wrote "lately

I have started to [make] sculpture again, to dream again of a future, and to reorganize

attitudes or convictions." Then in 1959, he made the acquaintance in the village of Philip

Froeder, then an architecture student at Columbia. They soon became partners and

remained so until Cavanaugh's death.

During the early 1960's Cavanaugh found the financial means to produce bronze castings

of his terracotta works. Generally a single cast was made, though on occasion he

produced an edition of three or four castings. In 1962, Cavanaugh found lead. At first

daunted by the medium he soon developed techniques permitting him to produce

sculptures faster than he could mold clay and providing the impetus to expand his work

to life-size proportions without fear of prohibitive cost. Beyond cost and scale, more

artistic influences most surely were the somewhat older artists Jose de Creeft, who made

hammered lead portraits, and Sal Baizerman, whose mammoth works in copper inspired

countless artists. Cavanaugh grew close to Nina Winkel during this time, a sculptor in

hammered copper who had been exhibiting at the Sculpture Center since 1944. Winkel

became an increasingly important influence and support to him. And Dorothea

Greenbaum, a highly accomplished sculptor working in hammered lead, considered

Cavanaugh a "tour de force" in the genre of pounded lead sculpture.

In 1963 he had his first one-man show at the Sculpture Center, consisting of 47 works in

lead, bronze and terracotta. Reviews of the show were unreservedly positive. The Times

praised his "Graceful and emotionally subtle figures" and his "fresh poses, almost

catching the figure unaware." The Herald Tribune likewise praised his figures for an

"arresting self-containment that is never cold, never awkward," "charged with emotion"

and "leap[ing] to life through an expert and palpable technique and through the artist's

own concern with the subtleties of personal involvement."

That same year, with Philip having been offered a job with an Urban Planning firm in

Washington, DC, John decided to move with him. Continuing to travel to New York

frequently, Cavanaugh found Washington to be a well-suited environment. He said he

"produced like he had never produced in his life." With studios in the neighborhood of

Dupont Circle they served as both workshop and exhibition space. His first studio show,

in 1964 led to major commissions, allowing him to avoid taking other work. Cavanaugh

presented twice yearly studio exhibitions from 1964 through 1984 in Washington;

amounting to 800 pieces in lead, ceramic stoneware and bronze, of which 200 were life

sized. He staged five additional one-man shows in New York at the Sculpture center

(1968, 1971, 1973, 1975, 1978), single shows at Ohio State (1964), Ball State University

(1976), among others. In addition he exhibited regularly with the National Sculpture

Society in New York, which to this day awards the John Cavanaugh Silver Award on an

annual basis. He was the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the 1984

New York Foundry Prize of the National Sculpture Society.

Adding to the income of his art John would also act as foreman on many of the

restoration projects carried out by Philip. His lead sculpture, as a result, came to adorn

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public spaces and the facades and walks of homes in Washington, which can still be seen

today. He was sought out for large commission work for an assortment of clients, to

include the Marriott, which bought several major works, the Landmark Corporation and

the Crown Tower apartment complex in New Haven, Connecticut, among others. One of

his large female figures, Reclining Female was featured in the movie The World of Henry

Orient starring Peter Sellers.

Though living in Washington may have distanced Cavanaugh from the center of gravity

in the art world, as New York was seen to be, it did keep him away from the time-

consuming politics of the art world and galleries, allowing him to focus on the output and

innovation of his work, and he obviously thrived.

In the early 1980's John was diverted by illness, found to be related to cancer from

working in lead. During his last two years, Cavanaugh worked with intensity and zeal. By

June of 1984, he was depleted of the "tons and tons of energy" required to hammer the

lead into shape. With typical self-sufficiency, he turned his attention to a specialized sort

of glass painting, and sculpting directly in a combination of plastic and wax, molding

pieces to be cast in bronze by the lost wax process. Five months later in December he had

produced over seventy wax models for casting in bronze, including five life-sized pieces.

John Cavanaugh died in 1985, leaving his sculpture to express the courage, spirituality,

optimism, and vitality, which were the essential qualities of the man and his work. His

last letter to Nina Winkel ends with "It's time for me to go."

During his last days John was once again planning an exhibition. He intended to call it

"The Spirit of Motion is Almost Balanced." Philip Froeder did hold that exhibition in

honor of John's wishes, as a tribute to his life and work and as a way to honor his many

friends.

He is remembered by all who knew him as a warm, outgoing and spontaneous individual.

He shared his insight and humor freely, drawing people from all walks of life into his

creative world. Joan Gildemeister, now president of the Cavanaugh Foundation marveled

at his generosity in recalling how he "shared his creativity with his friends, letting us in"

to his studio and life.

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TECHNIQUE From the John Cavanaugh Foundation

John Cavanaugh is by far the 20th century's master in hammered lead. Possessing an

intensity that is hard to match in the lexicon of American Artists, Cavanaugh produced

close to five hundred finished pieces in the lead medium. Numerous other artists

experimented and produced in "hammered", "beaten" or "pounded" lead, but none took

their empiricism to the extent Cavanaugh is known to have. Saul Bazierman, Nina

Winkle, Jose de Creeft, Ellie Nadleman, and Dorothea Greenbaum, among numerous

others, were known to produce lead sculpture. These artists, indeed superlative in their

accomplishments in hammering metals, choosing material such as copper, inspired

Cavanaugh in his pursuits, but could not match him in his prolific life's body of work in

the lead medium. John Cavanaugh's work in sculpture, be it ceramics, plaster, wood, wax,

bronze and specifically lead, is unquestionably an inspiration to artists, and a valuable

resource for art historians and collectors.

The history of lead in art begins in Greece with statues and relief sculpture. As an early

cast metal, lead has been found as votive figures in Sparta in the 6th Century B.C. It was

also a significant medium during the 12th century, in English and French Romanesque art

and architecture. Considered through the centuries as a non-pretentious medium, able to

handle the elements of weather without damage, lead sculpture most recently reached its

height during the 18th century, experienced a decline during the 19th Century, and then

again saw a resurgence in the Arts and Crafts movement. In the first half of the 20th

Century, lead was considered appropriate especially for architectural details and garden

sculpture, such as relief panels or fountains.

The soft effect and delicate appearance of lead was felt to harmonize with architecture

and landscape, and was ideal in suffering outdoor elements. Lead's availability, during

and after WWII, in contrast to other metals, played a role in its application by numerous

artists during the war years. Barbara Lekberg, renowned sculptor, remembers that it was

not possible to cast during the war and welding was not yet an option, but lead pipe,

available at a plumbing supply store, could be cut, flattened and used in small sheets.

Pb, Leads chemical symbol, refers to the plumber - who formed, ran and fixed the lead

piping for water and waste systems in early Roman communities. From the Latin word

plumbum, meaning lead.

Early on, Cavanaugh's experimentation with materials such as clay, cast stone, direct

cement, cast and direct epoxy, anodized aluminum, sheet copper, and a kind of scratch

coat used for plastering walls, reveals the extent of his search for a medium best suited

for his extreme physicality and artistic expression. An unpublished manuscript of

Cavanaugh's focuses mainly on ceramics techniques covering topics such as clay body,

types of grog, drying techniques, the kiln, glazes, slips, and methods of finishing a piece.

Another early mention of Cavanaugh's ceramic techniques and expertise is given in his

1955 Antioch College exhibition. Here air bubble construction is listed, a method in

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which the artist traps enough air in to the hollow interior of a clay piece, to keep it from

collapsing while paddling and working on the exterior. More over his unpublished

manuscript also discusses clay construction, including slab, coil and thrown models. The

artist Ann Grifalconi observed Cavanaugh working in clay and relates that his hands were

"very alive, and the clay pieces were like living creatures" in his hands. Clay was a

medium Cavanaugh used for quick sketches, bringing instantaneous results while also

being kept wet for further working. Grifalconi saw Cavanaugh "model exterior planes"

while at the same time "feeling the interior surfaces." His early pieces were probably

fired at the Ohio State University, and later at the Columbus Museum Art School at the

time he taught there. During his New York period, beginning in 1957, Cavanaugh

modeled and fired at the Sculpture Center. Later on in his career Cavanaugh would use

clay to transfer certain thematic ideas to his metal works, retaining his practice in clay

while augmenting his command of metal.

John Cavanaugh's early and classic education in art, which was firmly incorporated into

his daily life, from elementary school through graduate study, and then his jobs in

industry - anodizing metal, and doing mock ups of war planes - gave Cavanaugh all the

formal, technical, and manual skills needed to master any technique or materials in the

province of sculpture. Cavanaugh himself, drawn to experimentation, saw in lead an

endless source of challenge and accomplishment, proudly proclaiming, "sheet lead

discovered the sculptor John Cavanaugh in 1962." And while his technical methods and

innovations in clay, bronze, and wax proved cutting edge, continued to be a source of

inspiration and production throughout his life, it was the work in lead that provided his

most teeming results. His first show of lead pieces at the Sculpture Center in 1963

consisted of twelve pieces, produced in approximately a year, or slightly longer.

Lead is soft and easily worked compared to other metals. Lead of high purity does not

require annealing, although it can be annealed at relatively low temperatures from 158 to

48 degrees Fahrenheit. It does not immediately become brittle and break when

hammered, so there is no need to heat and temper it as other metals require. Further, the

body of lead is stable and resistant to corrosion, once a light atmospheric corrosion has

coated its surface. However, lead's properties of extreme elasticity, a challenge to the

artist, require considerable care when hammering, not to stretch it too much, rendering it

thin and breakable.

This tendency of lead to thin out and break when hammered prompted Cavanaugh's

discovery of hammering from front to back, verses the usual method of hammering from

the back to push out the metal relief. Cavanaugh started at the front, outside edges of the

lead sheet and worked toward the center to create low and high relief as well as three-

dimensional figures in the round, which he formed by gradually hammering to bring the

sheet around and soldering the piece closed. Another innovation, related by Barbara

Lekberg, who saw Cavanaugh's hammered lead demonstration at the Sculpture Center,

was to drop or strike the edges of the metal before starting the design. Lekberg marveled

at Cavanaugh's notion of thickening and compacting the molecules of lead, as a solution

to its tendency to thin and split, a problem that caused her to give up on the medium ten

years earlier.

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Cavanaugh approached the lead sheet as a thin slab of clay, feeling its thickness and

forming its volumes through the interior hollow and exterior surface at once. He would

place a sheet of lead on the floor, leaning it against a pallet, or propped up with sand

cushions or a mattress, giving him a flexible surface to hammer against. In creating larger

pieces he would pivot the lead, lie on the floor under the piece, dropping stones from

above and work with additional tools beneath, working from both sides. Cavanaugh

struck the lead with a baseball bat, chisel, hatchet, file, screwdriver, stone or anything

that came into his hand. Ruth Jacobsen shared that he would collect stones for tools on

Gin Beach in Montauk, near her summer house and studio. He would come to the beach

with a mental list of certain roundedness and sizes of stones he needed, in order to form

specific ridges and folds or to smooth unwanted wrinkles in the lead.

In several demonstrations, taking place in a time frame of three hours and requiring

intense concentration and tremendous physical strength, Cavanaugh would transform a

dull sheet of lead into a fully alive sculpture in the round. According to Janak Khendry,

an artist, and director at the Sculpture Center, Cavanaugh appeared like a primitive

creature using whatever tool was in reach, striking the lead with "large flying strokes."

Cavanaugh would expose a finished piece to different oxidation's to achieve subtle

shades in the natural lead patina. A critic once noted that Cavanaugh's lead pieces, which

were "weathered in his garden, had a rich patina and a shimmering whiteness." He was

also known to electroplate pieces with copper and silver, achieving a beautiful and unique

patina.

Like Jose de Creeft, John felt that direct involvement with materials was essential for

meaningfulness in his artistic expression. Early on in his work with lead Cavanaugh's

techniques, level of artistic activity and method gave him notoriety, which continued

throughout his professional career. In addition to relief sculpture and freestanding figures,

Cavanaugh created many pieces for architectural use, such as a series of relief panels for

the building on Swann Street NW, in Washington DC, where he had his studio. Taken

from Proust's, Remembrance of Things Past they revolve around the theme of planting

and romantic love. Cavanaugh's design of these pieces for the building niches, his

exploitation of rippled edges and other accidental and abstract forms show his enrichment

of the expressive possibilities of lead in its historical architectural context.

Cavanaugh's inspiration throughout his life can be found in a myriad of subjects.

Questions of existence and a way to express the animate nature of man characterized

Cavanaugh's early and mature work. His central themes during his lifelong search

focused on the subjects of women, men, animals, and children. He often did work

representative of his friends, his family, and those national and international social and

cultural happenings of the day. In the later years his series of dancers brought critical

acclaim, but while he was working on them the Iran Hostage Crisis was in full swing.

With his mind burdened with the hostages kidnapping he was compelled to create a bust

called 'The Hostage' in order to get his mind clear, and then continued with his series of

dancers. No matter the medium or the subject, John Cavanaugh worked in a wholesome,

honest and fluid ways, evident in his work. He felt that if the formal abstract elements of

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a sculpture were well considered, if the process of creation flowed freely and uninhibited,

the criteria, rather than any predisposition to style was most important. That along with a

great respect and knowledge of materials, a sculpture would reach the heights the artist

intended. Cavanaugh's fierce imagination and physical strength made the pounded lead

medium a perfect fit for his unbounded strength and creativity.

Just as Saul Baizerman developed lung disease through his work with lead, so John

Cavanaugh was stricken with lung illness in the early 1980's. At this point unable to

express the physical strength pounding lead required, he turned to working in wax. Just as

he had transferred his skills and aesthetic goals from clay to lead, he moved on to a new

wax technique. In 1983 he stated: "Now I have been working in wax successfully for the

first time in my life…. For 40 years I have tried to work in wax and now with a new

method I have invented, I can work faster and with more control than I do in clay or

lead."

Cavanaugh's new technique used a combination of waxes, which he experimented with

until he came up with a recipe that would achieve his end of continuing a prolific

sculptural output, while easing the physical stress of working in pounded metal.

Eventually getting the perfect combinations of wax, Cavanaugh would dip thin sheets of

plastic into a shallow pan of his wax mixture, coat it on one side, and then put another

piece of plastic over it. The sheets of warm encased wax could then be molded into a

roughly shaped figure. The molded sheet becomes a strong, tissue-thin armature which

could be shaped, cut or joined with added wax. More wax would be brushed on or

applied with tools, modeling the sculpture and building the thickness of the piece, from

3/16" to 5/32".

Cavanaugh was pleased that he had discovered a technique to form a strong wax figure of

the required thick-ness which was not too brittle, but strong enough to hold up during hot

Washington summers while being worked or stored. This method saved him the physical

work, added steps and expense of putting out a clay piece to create a mold for casting.

These large wax models, which supported themselves, could be built without the need of

an interior armature or a cumbersome outside armature for support. An example of this

process as a finished piece is seen in Youth, was built from a freestanding wax model. A

tireless need to create kept him working till the last days of his life in the genre of

sculpture.

Even closer to the end of this life, Cavanaugh devised a system of wax painting. Placing

colored wax between pieces of thick glass, he produced many of these 'wax paintings'. He

would then create freestanding stands for them so natural or electric light could shine

through the piece.

Never one to dwell in the negative aspects of his life, John Cavanaugh continued to create

and show his work until he was literally unable to get out of bed. Only stopping his work

a month and a half prior to his death. His unfettered motivation to express himself in art

never left him. Cavanaugh believed the "art that rises above the ordinary has nothing to

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do with style; it has to do with message." The message he leaves us is one of power -

unstoppable, authentic and permanent.

While we now know that lead, the pounding of it, and the soldering of it, can be

dangerous business, it is artists like John Cavanaugh and Saul Baizerman, and surely

many other people, including laborers, working in lead prior to now known health

hazards, who paved the way for the safety methods and innovations used today. Literally

they gave their lives for their art/work. While there are few artists using the medium

currently, it is the hope of the Cavanaugh Foundation and Sculpture Fund that this

beautiful metal will see an awakening in the coming years, finding new expression in

new artists, using proper safety techniques.

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IMAGES

On Point

Bronze, direct wax cast, 15 x 8.5 x10”

Recast in 1992 from a mold, edition of 24

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Daphne

Lead, copper plater, 24 x 16.25 x 14.25”

1981

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The Groomers

Appaloosa