Peter Lu Photo
After 35 years, Gar Waterman has made so many sculptures that he has nowhere left to store them. Hence the “Dumpster Clause” in his will.
In Waterman’s West Rock Avenue home/studio by the West River, the sculptures balance on armchairs, sit next to stacks of lumber, hide in wooden shavings on the floor, and rest between apples and crackers on the kitchen island. There are onyx sea shells and trilobites and feral seeds; there are two-foot iron discus throwers and five-foot stone leaves; there’s a reddish-brown lump that looks like a three-dimensional Venn diagram; there’s a half-finished marble frog.
Waterman can’t sell them, but he doesn’t mind. He has what he calls “the Dumpster clause”: Waterman said, with a trace of irony, “There’s enough money in my will for a big Dumpster so that when I die, all this crap can be piled in.”
Waterman — five feet eleven, with a wiry frame and a serrated, plunging bald spot — is a stone sculptor. He learned the trade because, in his 20s, he realized he wanted to be in a profession where his hands would never stay still. Every few years, he flies to Italy — where he spent seven years in his 20s learning his craft — to pick scraps of stones: Afghani green onyx, Iranian orange onyx, Portuguese pink marble. When the stone he has shipped home reaches Connecticut’s shores, he drives a rented pick-up truck to the pier and loads the crates himself.
He is not a typical sculptor: he eschews the aesthetics of the art world. Neither traditionalist, nor modernist, nor post-modernist, her claims he’s not an artist at all. “I don’t even tinker with labels,” he says. “I’m a sculptor because ‘artist’ is such an abused term.” All he wants to do is make things, he said, and sculpting allows him that freedom.
In his sculptures, Waterman starts with a piece of brittle, sharp stone. He cuts and sands and polishes it, though what he really does is kneads the stone, smoothing it and twisting it and pulling it, like play-dough, into a manifestation of his imagination. His pieces look as if curves within curves have melted into the stone’s core and percolated to the surface, the contours of the topology absorbing and reflecting rays of light from arch to arch. The finished stone exults in its sensuality, a homage to the beauty and boundlessness of nature’s forms — especially those which Waterman saw as a child, following his father into the depths of the ocean.
From The Bible Belt To Tahiti
His father, Stan Waterman, was the first diving instructor in America, a feat that earned the Waterman family a spot on the cover of Sports Illustrated. Once diving was in vogue, he bought an underwater camera and became America’s first underwater filmmaker. He began to produce documentaries of Bronze Age shipwrecks, promoting his underwater filmography with one-night-stands at Kiwanis clubs and town hall meetings across the Bible Belt. He used a manual tape recorder to play the soundtrack and sounded the voice-overs himself. When the Watermans had a windfall in the stock market, they gathered their belongings in sleepy, privileged Princeton, N.J., and moved to Tahiti for a year.
In French Polynesia, Waterman’s mom tried to home-school him. But the lagoon off the back porch made it difficult to keep his attention on math and English. Stan had more success: father and son flew amphibious planes to shipwrecks, slid down volcanic rock shoots, and trekked up 600-foot waterfalls. The family moved by boat; every island they lived on had beaches full of crab holes and breadfruit-laden local feasts. Some days, Waterman played with the four daughters of a sailor; they were mixes of Polynesian, Asian, and American. Other times, he interacted with men in his dad’s orbit: lifetime fishermen, Kon-Tiki raftsmen, a Gauguin museum curator.
Waterman’s father would take him on underwater expeditions whenever he could. During the off-days, Waterman took his education into his own hands. After collecting whatever he could find from the beach and the jungle, he would start to create: coconut husks transformed into to boats; sticks piled up to build a dam; two clotheslines and a Bic pen became a biplane. When the family returned to America, Waterman’s formal education — in high school at Andover, and in college at Dartmouth, where he majored in French — never managed to seize his “heart of hearts” quite like those sunny afternoons spent crafting nature’s toys with his hands.
Waterman considers his year in Tahiti to have been the most formative of his life — and rightfully so, because he is still creating. Any task, large or small, artistic or menial, is an excuse to use his hands. What other people buy, he insists on making himself. When it comes time for lunch, he spends an hour peeling carrots, breaking apart trays of ice cubes, hand-drying arugula, and constructing grilled cheese sandwiches. Every ingredient has been plucked by hand from his backyard — except, he notes remorsefully, for the carrots. There is nothing else he would rather do than fabricate every meal from scratch.
Take one step from Waterman’s kitchen and you’ve reached his self-designed studio. His makeshift photography booth is junked together from soft-box lights, leftover canvas, and his brother’s unwanted tripod stands. His heater is an old wood-burning furnace he coaxed back to life, fed daily with neighbors’ unwanted timber. His lone speaker is self-wired, which, as he sculpts, plays 30-year-old cassettes of Joni Mitchell and Chris Whitley — recorded off Boston public radio. For inspiration, he has plastered his walls with pictures of flying fish, scarab beetles and squirrels; portraits of nudes, priests, and comic book heroines; paintings of Renaissance lovers, orange peels, and glowing blue aliens; advertisements from 30 years ago with slogans like, “Big weenies are better”; and a self-portrait of his ex-girlfriend, Gabriella, when she was 16. Hundreds of seed pods sit in displays and hang from wooden beams, striped and splayed and furry, pepper-shaped and handbag-shaped and oyster-shaped, mottled brown and deep mahogany and rusted pineapple yellow. Scattered on the counters are skulls of seagulls, wet pumpkin seeds, a Mobilgas decal, an old electric guitar, a Lucha Libre mask, a yellowed picture of his grandfather’s house before it burned down, creamy green augers, and two plastic light-sabers.
Take a step back from his studio and you’re looking at his proudest piece of handiwork: his house. Fourteen years ago, he and his wife Thea Buxbaum bought an abandoned, derelict 8,200-square-foot brick warehouse from the New Haven city government for $1, then ripped, gutted, carpentered, and refurbished the space into a gallery, kitchen, bedroom, studio, and second-floor loft. In his backyard, he planted an apple and a cherry orchard; transplanted hops, Australian kiwi, and blackberry brambles; and seeded the Virginia creeper that now runs amok over his house’s metallic frame, like underwater vegetation on a sunken hull. Tucked into a corner of his backyard is his workplace. (The studio has, over the years, become more of a storage area.) In the middle are his workbenches, assembled from discarded planks. Above is an iron trellis, built to support the weight of a mélange of plants, the shade of which keeps him cool in the summer. Below, the ground is coated with concrete and tar. All around, his orchards press in on him; when sunlight streams through the leaves, it feels as if he’s working not in the middle of a city, but rather in a quiet forest clearing.
After Waterman finished remodeling his house, he started working on his community. In the early 2000s, Westville center was struggling. Waterman and Buxbaum assembled a group of private investors, purchased an ugly bank building, found a not0for-profit housing developer, and renovated the space into affordable artists’ housing. The project was so successful Buxbaum started a not-for-profit organization called Arts Loft West. Now, 17 apartments span three buildings. Living there are residents with various claims to fame: a world-class flute player, Garry Trudeau’s inker, a film student previously at the Moscow Theater School. The influx of this community catalyzed Westville’s transformation. On the formerly quiet sidewalks of Whalley Avenue now are the popular Lena’s and Bella’s cafes, a hair salon, a racket shop, a bakery, the Kehler Liddell gallery and a smattering of antique stores.
Waterman never contributed much to Westville’s economic development. “I was just the excuse to start the project,” he said. “Thea did everything.” His wife’s business acumen hasn’t rubbed off on Waterman. He doesn’t mass produce practical, easily sellable carvings like sea shells; his works are more wondrous than functional, more innocent than useful. As a result, he never knows when he will have his next sale.
Right now, though, what’s frustrating is not a lack of sales — it is a lack of time to sculpt. “I have all this shit I have to wade through,” he said, “before I can push my pleasure bar sculpting.” What he means is maintaining relations with his tenants (there are four), writing grants for public art projects (competition is fierce), helping Buxbaum shop and cook (they’re dedicated locavores), and caring for their 6‑year-old son Geffen. (Waterman became Lord Voldemort on Halloween.) As for feeding his family, luck has always been on his side — during various economic downturns in his life, he has managed to pick up a commission designing the Wooster Square archway, teach at the Foote School, even trade an old sculpture for his current pick-up truck. While sales are worse this year than ever before, Waterman doesn’t seem too worried. Besides, he still has one slightly crazy idea. It stems from his latest project.
The inspiration for his current project — like every inspiration in his life — ambushed him. One day he walked by a rock that had sat in his garden for years, and was struck by how much it resembled a nudibranch (known colloquially as a sea slug). He pursued the vision; two years later, he has nearly a dozen finished nudibranchs sleeping in coffin-shaped plywood boxes.
Nudibranchs (pronunciation: NEW-dih-bronk) are blind. With just five photoreceptors in their “eyes,” these inch-long sea slugs can barely detect light from dark. Yet myopia doesn’t prevent these carnivores from hunting sponges, hydroids, sea squirts, anemones, tunicates, corals, algae, barnacles, and even other nudibranchs. Nudibranchs will take on the color of their prey, steal other animals’ defenses, or just suck air into their stomachs to float, bobbing innocently before engulfing their victims whole (or just nibbling off their tentacles). These hunting techniques are possible because of two tentacles called rhinophores. Sensitive to touch, temperature, water current, and smell, rhinophores detect faint chemical traces dissolved in sea water, allowing nudibranchs track their prey’s movements.
Waterman has been drawn to nudibranchs since his early snorkeling days in Tahiti. He decided to sculpt them because he loved their sensuality, from their fluid underwater movements to their carapaces’ riot of color. But the two have more in common than that: just as nudibranchs use rhinophores to feel their way around the ocean floor, Waterman uses his hands to lead him through his own world. But nudibranchs, for all their talents, are blind — and in business, although Waterman is hardly blind, there are times when his rhinophores aren’t as sensitive as he might hope.
Waterman has never seen Jorunna funebris — colloquially referred to as the polka-dotted nudibranch — because he has never dived in the tropical waters around Singapore. He doesn’t know that Jorunna funebris looks like a cookies-and-cream candy bar; that its fleshy white body, just one centimeter long, is dotted with raised black bristles; that feathery gills — part snowflake and part fern — protrude from its back. He doesn’t know that in the shell and mucus of this sea slug there is a natural compound called Jorumycin, which can be modified it into a synthetic compound called Zalypsis.
But he has heard of Zalypsis. In fact, he knows who makes the drug — one Jose María Fernández Sousa-Faro, founder of the Spanish company Farmamar. Waterman’s money-making plan is simple: find Sousa-Faro, introduce himself, then pitch an idea to have his nudibranchs form the centerpiece of a marine conservation campaign. Because Farmamar touts itself as the first company in the world to make a cancer drug from marine origins, Waterman thinks Farmamar’s foundation arm might jump at the opportunity to support this educational programming.
So, on the afternoon of Nov. 1, 2010, Waterman set off to find Sousa-Faro.
He drove to Boston and set up a display of ten stone nudibranchs in the ballroom of The Liberty Hotel, a former maximum-security prison. At night, during a two-hour cocktail party for the Society for Translational Oncology, he talked to cancer researchers and pharmaceutical representatives about his sculptures. Waterman’s inside man, a bigwig doctor, had promised him that Sousa-Faro would be in the audience.
He wasn’t.
While the nudibranchs looked great to those who saw them (he even managed to snag an article in Oncology Magazine), the creatures all returned to Westville, where they have sat in crates on the floor of his studio ever since. Waterman doesn’t look worried; he’s happy that he tried. “It was a nice pipe dream,” he says, with a sheepish smile and shrug. “This is a long run thing, anyway. I have the pieces.” Besides, now he has another half-formed plan. “There’s a zillionaire in California who flies his jet to Australia every time there’s a new nudibranch spawn,” Waterman said, chuckling. “I just need to cross paths with him.”
Despite his failure, Waterman’s hands cannot stop: on his workbench, he is blocking out his next nudibranch. For this one, he uses Portuguese pink marble, a well-known stone with a strong crystal structure. From the side, the stone looks like a shard from a rock slide; from underneath, the curved base resembles a fish, a foot sole, a slug, or a golf course par‑4. He scratches red chalk (the final piece remaining from his last Italy trip) onto the marble’s grainy surface, sketching a crude cylinder to visualize the rhinophores. Hasty swipes demarcate where the elevation will change; a center line is whipped from front to back to ground the curvature. The nudibranch is taking shape. With more than 3000 species in existence, nudibranchs are an ornate carnival of hue and pattern, of form and viscosity. This natural abundance gives Waterman the freedom to shape abstract, aqueous creatures with a generous dollop of imagination — protuberances like humps, gills, and horns can be placed anywhere and in any design. For the current project, because the stone isn’t tall enough, he shades the gill plume on the nudibranch’s back as rising and falling from left side to right; this way, the petals will unfurl as if they’re toppling over in the sea current, frozen in mid-wave.
The movement of a sculpture is never actual motion, but a suggestion of motion. Change happens by implication; curves and lines intimate that the sculpture will jump to life — in the very next moment. The vitality of a piece is dependent on taking away just enough stone to reveal what Waterman calls “the serendipity of the piece.” This initial exercise, called blocking out, is when he has the most fun. After he’s “found” the piece, the rest of the work — chipping away at extraneous stone — is just monotonous follow-up.
Before he blocks out, Waterman makes sure all his equipment is laid out: a dry-cut diamond saw for large, blunt cuts; a diamond drill for medium-sized cuts; an air hammer (a mini-jackhammer with an air-powered piston) for intricate carving; a hammer and flat chisel to knock off weakened and exposed sections; an angle grinder to sand the surface; and a dye grinder, which looks like a metallic syringe, to smooth hard-to-reach areas. A rusty Altoids box holds dozens of diamond bits, some coarse, some fine.
Waterman puts on a pair of well-worn black and red headphones (no safety goggles, though) and cradles a brazed diamond saw, one hand over the top handle and the other in a vice-like grip over the side bar. The machine looks like an extension of his hands. His fingers rest inches away from an open air blade capable of spinning at 6000 revolutions per minute. He flips the switch and the blade roars, drowning out the chirping of nearby birds and the hum of far-away traffic. When blade meets marble, the marble shudders dully; a spray of chalky white dust explodes from the incision in a V‑shaped jet, looking like the plumes fighter jets leave in the sky. Waterman makes six two-inch-deep cuts along the marble’s raised back half. The work looks effortless, as if he is cutting moist cake. Then he finishes the job with a hammer and chisel, wedging the chisel into one of the two-inch indentations and hammering it downwards. It is not a clean cut: multiple serrated edges jut from the fault line. While Waterman works, shards of marble clink as they fall to the ground, and litter the dirt in a beach of white.
When the bare-boned outline of the nudibranch is completed, Waterman moves to smooth the nudibranch’s surface. He takes his angle grinder, a fiercer version of electric sandpaper, and runs the spinning metal bit over the stone’s surface. Tremendous effort is involved, but he looks as if he’s ironing clothes or playing a relaxed game of curling. Plumes of dust rise everywhere. The marble mist engulfs Waterman, painting his hands white, billowing on his black Levis, dyeing his owl-like upturned eyebrows. Flecks of power land on his golden-brown hair. The chalk fills the air with the smell of sulfur and sea salt. Nearby leaves become stained in white; it looks as if winter has already come.
Waterman continues by focusing on the sculpture’s edges. He retrieves his air hammer and sticks the chisel point (which looks like a railroad spike) into the piston. The moving pieces start bouncing madly. As he grips the handle, the clattering is absorbed into his hands. He thrusts the air hammer into the curve where nudibranch’s back meets its underbelly, and begins to whack-whack-whack the edge, leaving periodic crevasses where stone breaks off. The entire sculpture wobbles from the concentrated force. Instead of silky dust, the air hammer produces small chips, more dangerous looking, that fly outwards from its point of contact. Chips fly into his face; he swipes at them with his gloved hand. Hammer in hand, he combs over the sculpture’s contours until every surface divot disappears; the stone’s edges now feel, to the untrained finger, like glass.
Waterman can’t work on one task for too long. He starts digging around in a nearby milk crate containing half-finished sculptures, withered plant stems, and unadulterated stone, some yellow with bisecting white lines, some clay red. He returns with two pieces of Persian orange onyx. They will become the rhinophores. On the wooden bench, the onyx looks like large pieces of rock salt; in his hands, the stone looks like a jeweled papaya. He takes his chalk and sketches the rhinophores’ shape on the surface of the nudibranch: they’re to become cones, but instead of a sharp top, the antennae will be softer and droop outward. He wedges the stone into a vise and chops off its extremities; then, taking the stone in hand, he sands the sharp edges. This doesn’t create roundness immediately, but rather disperses the sharpness to different corners by creating another face on the stone. After the shape is completed, the rhinophores will be mounted to the head of the nudibranch, the golden orange contrasting sharply with the pastel body. As the “hands” of the nudibranch, the rhinophores will be the sculpture’s centerpiece.
It takes Waterman two weeks to finish blocking out the Portuguese pink marble. The sculpture is still blocky and awkward, but it is enough for the imagination to grab onto: the nudibranch’s sensitive half-inch ridges seem to burst out of its boxy wrapping, and its fiery spire seems to blossom from its back. Waterman pours muriatic acid over the marble’s surface, causing it to fizzle audibly; the liquid then falls off the nudibranch’s side, leaving a trail of bubbles jostling with each other. The acid eats away at layers of powdery debris collected during hours of grinding, and the formerly chalky stone turns a shade of light pink, darkened veins gleaming. In its unfinished state, the marble face exposes itself unwillingly, semi-opaque and still rough. When the nudibranch is completely finished, every inch of its surface will dazzle.
There may be no amphibious planes and volcanic rock shoots in Westville, but in November, there are plenty of leftover pumpkins. On a Thursday afternoon, Waterman and Geffen sit carving a post-Halloween pumpkin in his studio. Geffen is wearing a sabre-tooth tiger shirt and hacking away with a half-foot long kitchen knife. Waterman is on the other side, concentrating on carving the jagged wings of a bat. Light from the window soaks his studio. Geffen loses focus; he drops the knife, leaving a haunted house half-carved, and takes his bike out in the backyard. Waterman stays inside a minute longer, still whittling half-bitten slices of pumpkin. Then he steps away, looks at his new creation, and, satisfied with his progress, walks outside. As he meets Geffen in his backyard, the pumpkin remains in his studio, just another piece of Waterman’s handiwork.