What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [86]
Twenty-one years later, the eighty-two-year-old Ludwiczak hasn’t stopped. Since carving his first head, he has chiseled about twelve hundred others, using stone found on his walks along the river, on roads, and in nearby forests. Some smile with twisted lips, others are inscrutably serene and mysterious. Some have long, thin noses and jutting chins. They do not have eyes yet they seem to see nonetheless. Dozens of his sculptures are embedded in the seawall along the riverfront an hour north of New York City. Hundreds more populate a small yard, one hundred feet above the river, making it a remarkable folk-art environment and garnering gazes from curious sailors who pass Ludwiczak’s place. “They call it Easter Island. I know what they mean. I’ve seen pictures of the statues in the South Pacific. I guess I made my own Easter Island—an Easter Island of the Hudson.”
In recent years, the late-blooming sculptor’s reputation as one of America’s most accomplished living folk artists has grown well beyond those who ply the river on boats. Although he is a reluctant seller of his work, several pieces now reside in the American Folk Art Museum in New York and the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, which recently purchased ten pieces to create a fountain that will serve as the centerpiece of its lobby. His works are also on display in numerous private collections, including that of the Oscar-winning actress Ellen Burstyn in Nyack. Ludwiczak has been interviewed by National Public Radio, filmed for HGTV, and featured in popular roadside travel books. Before he was first represented by art dealer Aarne Anton at his American Primitive Gallery in New York City, Ludwiczak often sold his heads to admirers for sixty or seventy dollars. Now, the larger heads fetch thousands of dollars. Anthony Petrullo, a collector of self-taught and outsider art, explains why: “His pieces are pure and simple. And if you remember the primitive tools that he used to make them, you begin to see the intuition they embody.”
When I phoned the artist to make an appointment to visit, a man with a thin, energetic voice answered. He sounded sweet, buoyant, and grateful that I was interested in his work, but not eager for a visitor. We were in the middle of a heat wave, and he wanted to wait until it cooled before submitting to an interview. When, after several days, the heat showed no sign of abating, I phoned again. This time, he resigned himself good-humoredly to my request.
Ten minutes north of the Tappan Zee Bridge, the road to Ludwiczak’s house angles down a hillside off Route 9W and toward the working-class village of Haverstraw, with its odd mix of elegant Victorian houses and tightly packed, shabby, low-income housing for an increasingly Dominican population. I missed the correct turn and quickly got lost in this village that Henry Hudson first visited in the seventeenth century on his ship the Half Moon, and which the Dutch settled in 1666, calling it Haverstroo, meaning “oat straw.”
For a century and a half, from the mid-1770s, Haverstraw supplied a significant portion of the bricks used to construct New York City’s buildings. At the height of their productivity, its brickyards sent as many as a million bricks a day downriver to build the metropolis. To do so, brick makers dredged deeper and deeper into a spectacular deposit of powdery blue clay left in the Hudson River by melting glaciers of the Ice Age. In 1906, despite signs that the riverbanks were becoming unstable, the dredging continued, and clay supporting the embankment in Haverstraw slipped away. A hole opened and swallowed three blocks of houses, claiming nineteen lives. Soon, lighter European bricks and other building materials