What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [87]
After passing a new waterfront condominium complex being marketed to an upscale population and promising to revitalize the area, I found my way onto a street gray with dust from the surrounding Tilcon gravel company and noisy with its mixing trucks and conveyors. Just as I was about to turn back, I entered a dead-end suburban street in the small, secluded area once known as Dutch Town.
Toward the end of the street, a congested colony of enigmatic stone heads appeared on the low-slung front porch of a green two-story frame house. I pulled to the other side of the street and sat for a few minutes gawking at the sculptures. Moon-shaped heads hung from the porch roof and were nailed to its posts. Square, oval, and oblong heads were stacked on shelves, perched around the mailbox, piled atop one another, and corralled in a side yard.
Before I had a chance to gather my thoughts, a tan, unexpectedly youthful-looking Theodore Ludwiczak appeared at the side of the house. He flashed a warm, self-effacing smile that quickly settled into a tighter, more impassive mien. His face was handsomely grooved. A thin tuft of sun-bleached hair topped his high forehead. He was dressed in a thin, well-worn grayish T-shirt, smudged unbelted khaki shorts, and sandals—his work uniform for the summer. His left hand was bandaged in a dull white piece of cloth. Instead of reaching out to shake, he held it in front of him apologetically and explained, “A bee stung me yesterday when I was working. So I won’t be able to work today. It’s too hot anyway.”
With the sun blazing and the temperature in the high nineties, Ted quickly ushered me into his unair-conditioned house. I barely had time to catch a glimpse of the dense throng of stone heads and statues—some weighing several hundred pounds and standing four feet tall. But I was already mystified: How did a person who spent much of his life grinding contact lenses in a one-room “factory” transform himself into the sculptor of these statues? What inspired him in the first place? Where had he acquired the skill, strength, and compulsive will to carve so much striking and original art so late in life?
Ted showed me into his spartan living room. There were two kitty-corner couches in disrepair with cotton throws over them. A small wood coffee table was cluttered with magazines, newspaper clippings, and a grandchild’s plastic army tank. A dark desk in one corner of the room held a hodgepodge of papers, pens, tools, and a large stone head. Rows of small carved heads sat on a couple of tables next to a vintage television set. The walls were hung with a copy of Les Saltimbanques by Picasso (“I like him because he worked right up till the end”), a few framed newspaper articles about Ted’s sculpture, and four faces—suggestive of Old Testament prophets—Ted had carved in relief on two large flat jagged clay-colored rocks.
Flushed with modesty, the sculptor began to recount how carving his first head led to making another: “When I got finished, I cemented it right in the middle of the seawall, so he could see the sunrise on the other side of the river,” he said, speaking of his first carving as an animate being. “I was pleased. But the next morning when I came down to the wall to admire my work, I was disappointed. The day before, he looked so happy and I was so proud, but now he looked sad and lonely. Maybe he needed a companion. Maybe he needed a friend. I found another rock and went and got my tools and began chiseling another stone into another head. At the end of the day, I cemented it into the wall, too. The next day, I began another.”
That summer of 1988, Ted chiseled a dozen primitive heads and cemented them to the breakwater. It wasn’t long before sailboats and powerboats slowed and stopped and their occupants called ashore to ask if Ted had made the heads, how and why. “They were curious. There were a lot of photographers who came and took thousands of pictures,” he noted. Their curiosity