What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [92]
“Every day, he’d carry down a couple of pails of cement and do a little work,” recalled his daughter Renee Sabini, an archivist. “My father has always been good with his hands. For years, my father rented a room to a man who lived upstairs. He had an old Volvo. Once, when it needed a new shock absorber, my father fabricated one for him out of a can. For a long time, it worked. He could fix anything.”
By the start of the 1980s, Ted’s profession faced extinction. Two decades earlier, a Czech scientist named Otto Wictherle, who discovered the nylon used to make stockings during World War II as well as the material used to make soft lenses, invented the spin-casting machine to produce soft contacts. In the 1970s, Bausch & Lomb introduced the first commercially available soft contact lenses. Within a decade they had become so popular that if Ted hoped to stay in business he would need to learn a new technology. He had neither the desire nor the interest. “I was too old. I didn’t want to be bothered with learning all that at that age.” In 1986, at the age of sixty, he sold out and retired.
When, two years later, he carved his first heads, his family was astonished. “Yes, I was surprised,” exclaimed daughter Susan Santic, a full-time mother. “I think even he was surprised.” It was the urge to create art, not the manual skills, that surprised everyone. Ted had, after all, perfected the craft of cutting a 10-millimeter lens blank from a plastic rod. And he could maneuver a diamond tool to cut the lens while it spun at high speeds. “I had that touch,” he said, rubbing the roughed ends of his fingertips together and assuming, probably correctly, that all the years of repetitive work with his hands had trained his brain and given his fine motor skills additional finesse. “Even if what you’re doing is primitive, you’ve got to get the details of eyes, the lips, the mouth. You need to create expressions.”
Stone, particularly the kinds of stone he uses, can be as unforgiving as glass. Chisel too hard or too deep or choose the wrong place to strike, and all may be lost, he explained.
Ted’s work first gained public attention after one of his tenants called a friend and insisted that she had to see Ted’s sculpture. Kathy Gardner, a photographer who works for the Journal News, a Gannett-owned newspaper, showed up—with her camera—and was amazed by the work. “It was wonderful. The faces had humor and intelligence. I felt privileged to meet Ted.” In September 1990 the newspaper published a full-page feature article, accompanied by Gardner’s photos. Larger media outlets picked up the story, and Ted was soon fending off unannounced visitors wanting to see and buy his work.
The enthusiastic responses stoked the artist’s ambition. The publicity also led art dealer Aarne Anton, a resident of Rockland County, to Ludwiczak’s doorstep. “I was astonished. Here’s his house, this folk-art environment, in this untouched pocket, almost a forgotten place from the Twilight Zone. I got very excited about his work. There aren’t many stone carvers out there. At first, I liked the heads in the seawall best. They were really weathered. Some of the noses were broken or smoothed down. Lichens were growing on them. Ropes were hanging down around others. Some heads are battered by logs and objects floating on the river. They continue to change and evolve. That’s part of what I like about the work,” Anton said.
He also likes that Ted is not a slave to realism. His heads achieve their power organically, their expressions seemingly dictated by the stone. While many of the faces wear bemused expressions, the emotional impulse behind them remains elusive and devoid of obvious sentiment. They possess the electric authenticity of the work of the self-taught,