Naked emotion
Sculptor plumbs the depths of feeling to convey human drama
Published in The New Bedford Standard-Times on February 9, 2007
http://archive.southcoasttoday.com/daily/02-07/02-09-07/01living.htm
New Bedford sculptor Stacy Latt
Savage's life-sized figures are the embodiment of emotion. She poses and places
the human form in ways that express what it feels like to be alive and aware.
But she does not shy away from exploring the difficult emotions that frustrate,
confuse and frighten us, and that we'd sometimes rather just sweep under the
rug. Her desire to use sculpture to
articulate the range of human feeling was validated one day in graduate school,
when she asked her fellow student and future husband, painter Shane
Savage-Rumbaugh, "Can I make art about emotions?" He replied,
"What else is there?" In the confidence and clarity of his
response, Ms. Savage knew she had found her direction as an artist.
Ms. Savage, 38, grew up in a suburb of
Buffalo, N.Y. The only girl in a neighborhood of boys, she and her friends
built elaborate snow forts during the long winter months. She loved elementary
school art projects that involved constructing large forms, especially an
assignment in fifth grade to make a large-scale dinosaur skeleton. Her most contented childhood time was
spent with her brother, 13 years older, who rebuilt a Camaro in the family's
garage when she was 5. Her brother would let her hold wrenches for him and
explain what he was doing to each part of the car. The garage was her favorite
place to be, and she would endlessly clean and rearrange the space.
Ms. Savage attended Wells, a women's
college near Ithaca, N.Y., with a strong liberal arts program. She immersed herself
in a range of subjects that explored many aspects of the human experience —
philosophy, anthropology, sociology, history and architecture. These studies
were complemented by studio classes in figure drawing and painting. She found "the life-changing
experience I needed" during a semester spent in Italy. She discovered an
immediate affinity for the native Italians who embraced their emotions, and who
lived "a natural life with human rhythms." Surrounded by a culture
that "bleeds art," she applied herself with new sense of dedication
to her drawings and paintings of the figure.
She took her first sculpture course
the following summer during an internship at Christie's auction house in New
York City, when she enrolled at the renowned Art Students League. She was the
only woman in the class; the other students were older, working as plumbers and
electricians during the day and taking art courses at night. In this atmosphere
of camaraderie and creativity, reminiscent of the time she spent with her brother
working on his car, she learned basic sculpting techniques and found her love
of working in three dimensions.
After graduating from Wells with a
degree in art history, Ms. Savage moved to New York City with her best friend
from college who was a poet. She worked during the day for an advertising firm
and continued to take evening classes at the Art Students League. At first, she
and her friend enjoyed the fast pace of city life, taking in as many museums
and performances as they could. But after a year they realized they would
"become like everybody else" if they didn't concentrate on their own
art. So they moved from their Manhattan
apartment to "the middle of nowhere," a small house in Ithaca with a
wood-burning stove and no neighbors for miles. They signed up for courses at
Cornell University, and Ms. Savage worked as an assistant to one of the
sculpture professors there. This relationship revealed to Ms. Savage what the
life of a dedicated studio artist could be like. She observed her professor and
thought, "I want your life."
This experience gave Ms. Savage the
courage to commit herself fully to art, and she enrolled in Cornell's graduate
school, where the sculpture program emphasized organic form. The department
chairman's term "invented anatomy" guided Ms. Savage to the format
that interested her most: figures that combined realistic imagery with
abstracted shape. At Cornell, she met Mr.
Savage-Rumbaugh, a painting student, on their first day of graduate seminar.
The two began spending hours together at the university's spacious art library,
poring over volumes of art history and artists' writings — Michaelangelo's
drawings, Van Gogh's letters and Delacroix's journals. Theirs was both a love
of art and a love for each other; Ms. Savage and Mr. Savage-Rumbaugh married on
the day they received their master's degrees from Cornell.
Soon after graduation, Ms. Savage was
hired to teach a course at UMass Dartmouth, and she and her husband moved to
New Bedford. The city's affordable living conditions allowed the couple to
fashion a lifestyle together that was a continuation of the commitment and
discovery of their graduate school years. Their time was devoted to studio work
while they were both teaching part time.
After 10 years of this focused way of
life, Ms. Savage was hired as an assistant professor at UMD and Mr.
Savage-Rumbaugh an assistant professor at Stonehill College in Easton. These
permanent positions strengthened their decision to be a part of the SouthCoast
arts community, and they bought a house in New Bedford and rented studio space
at Cove Street. Two years ago, their daughter Martha was born, and the joy of
parenthood has enhanced their lives as artists.
Ms. Savage says that her inspiration
often comes at unexpected moments. The flash of an idea for a pose or gesture
is likely to come when she's standing in line at the grocery store or driving
down the highway. Back in the studio, sometimes working
from a live model, she expands these ideas in drawings or in small prototypes
of clay, wood or cardboard. She makes many of these studies and selects the one
that seems to call out to her. Then the complex and lengthy process of bringing
the figure to life begins.
The artist builds a full-sized
armature of steel pipe, then surrounds it with foam held on with wire. Finally
a coating of clay covers the form. These three layers can be compared to the
skeleton (pipe), musculature (foam) and skin (clay). When this stage is satisfactory, Ms.
Savage makes a mold by covering the form with a layer of plaster and then
brushing on a thin coat of rubber. To create the final piece, she pours
Hydrocal (a very hard plaster) into the mold and removes the finished form. The
process involves such painstaking care and technical skill that many artists
send their work out to professional mold-makers. But Ms. Savage prefers the
experience of seeing the whole project through from start to finish.
Ms. Savage's work is currently on
exhibit in "Humanly Possible: Four Figurative Artists" at the New
Bedford Art Museum. Her five pieces in the show display a range of emotion,
each stemming directly from experiences in her life. "Waiting," for
example, was inspired by her struggle to remain patient during agonizing times
of waiting in hospital situations for her loved ones: When her mother was
undergoing surgery for cancer, and when her daughter was in a neonatal
intensive care unit.
The figure in "Waiting" holds her face in an
expression of forced calm, but an underlying tension is revealed in her arms
and hands, which reach forward and clutch at the air. She seems to be trying to
grasp the future and pull it toward her in an effort to end the excruciating
wait. The realistic part of the body stops across her chest, and the lower
portion consists of a series of short rusted rods, arranged in a crossing
formation that suggests a seated position. The frustration in the figure's arm
and hand muscles are echoed in the compressed tension of the jagged metal
strips that make up her legs and feet.
At first glance, Ms. Savage's sculptures
bring to mind those times of heightened emotion that threaten to overwhelm us
with their intensity — alienation, fear, despair. But upon closer reflection,
her figures remind us that it is often these trying times that bring us the
greatest insights of empathy and understanding.
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