Through August 8––

Heads Up! Rudolf Sculptures At Library

By Dottie Evans

Former State Senator Jack Rudolf says the best thing about his retirement is finally being able to create works of sculpture whenever he wants, full-time, “at my will.”

His subjects are his heroes –– courageous famous people like Babe Ruth, Winston Churchill, Amelia Earhart, and Abraham Lincoln –– and when he is in the middle of a project, he absolutely hates to stop.

The best part, he adds, is being able to stay up late working on a piece, and not have to get up the next morning to go to a full-time job.

While Mr Rudolf was a state senator working in Hartford representing Norwalk and Westport, sculpting was a hobby that he took up “because it sort of relaxed me.”

“I was always sketching or making things, and during terms in office I began to spend more time on it. Often I’d get involved in the work, so much so that I just could not leave it. I was up until the wee hours of the morning.

“You grow tired and the next day, it’s a mistake,” he recalled.

Mr Rudolf and his wife Barbara are residents of Bethel, living on Dodgingtown Road.

They were at the Cyrenius Booth Library recently, where they met with Collections Curator Caroline Stokes to set up an exhibit of some of his pieces nearby the second floor circulation desk. The exhibit will remain until August 8.

 One of Mr Rudolf’s earliest pieces, completed in 1969, is a bronze, full-figure sculpture of Abraham Lincoln. It is stylistically very different from the portrait busts that make up the bulk of his later works.

 Lincoln sports a tall beaver hat and stands tall on a block of wood made from an elm tree. His elongated body seems frozen in midstride, one knee raised, and his head is bent as though lost in thought.

The block of wood has a wavy grain and sets the figure off beautifully. Mr Rudolf was grateful to have located a piece of elm for Lincoln’s pedestal.

“I had gone to a couple of nurseries to find it. At that time, there were reports that all the elms were dying from Dutch elm disease, and I wanted to preserve a piece for Lincoln.

“After all, I thought, he was a rail splitter and he knew wood.”

An Inspired Mistake: The Left-Handed Fiddler:

In 1973, Mr Rudolf’s father, David Rudolf, 88, was bedridden at home with his last illness.

Since Jack Rudolf found himself spending many hours sitting by his father’s side, he began to fret about there being nothing better for them to do together than watch television.

“I decided we needed some way to occupy our hands. So I started the armiture for the fiddler, and my father helped me.”

An armiture is a wire framework from which a sculptor works. Aluminum wires are bent and twisted, and when the figure seems right, a fixative material is applied to hold the wires in a permanent position.

“I started him applying the fixative,” Mr Rudolf said, “and when he died, and I finished it.”

An interesting aspect was that Mr Rudolf had used a record jacket from the musical Fiddler on the Roof as his model, working while looking directly at it.

When the piece was finished and cast in bronze, his wife, Barbara, commented, “You’ve done a left-handed fiddler!”

“I didn’t realize what I was doing,” said Mr Rudolf.

He had been concentrating so hard he did not think about the fact that the image would be reversed, as in a mirror.

Amelia Earhart:

One Coincidence Leads To Several Others

Strangely, it was one of Mr Rudolf’s favorite heroes, Amelia Earhart, who led him to place his sculptures on exhibit at the Cyrenius Booth Library in the first place. At least, the undeniable fact is that the world-famous female aviator seems to have been at the center of a series of interesting coincidences that led to the sculptor’s decision to place his works on exhibit there.

Jack Rudolf loves telling a good story, and this one seemed to resonate with his enjoyment of life’s quirkier side.

“I was doing some research on my next piece on Mark Twain, and I had called the Booth Library to see if they had a pictorial section. They said no, but that there was a reference section on the third floor, then they connected me with Beryl Harrison.”

The two chatted and Mrs Harrison, reference librarian, gathered material for Mr Rudolf, which he planned to pick up the next day at the library. On his way out the door, at the last minute, he decided to bring a piece of his sculpture to show Mrs Harrison.

 “Out of all my pieces, I just happened to latch onto Amelia,” he said of the portrait bust he had done in 1999, adding, “I have no idea why I took her off the shelf.”

Carrying the bust up to the third floor reference section, he placed it on the desk while talking to Mrs Harrison.

“Immediately, she [Amelia Earhart] started to draw a crowd. Someone said I should go downstairs to see [Program Director] Kim Weber about putting her on display.”

When he got to the second floor circulation desk, Kim Weber called her daughter, Caitlin, over saying, “Come here, you have to see this.”

Mr Rudolf was surprised at how delighted they were to see the bust, until he learned that Caitlin Weber had done a school term paper on Amelia Earhart not long ago.

Then Mrs Weber decided to call Library Director Janet Woycik out of her office to see the bust.

Mrs Woycik took one look at it and said, “We’ve got to get [Collections Curator] Caroline [Stokes] over here. Do you have other sculptures?”

“And do you know what day this is?” Mrs Woycik asked.

Jack Rudolf knew it wasn’t July Fourth, that was two days away. He said no.

“It’s July 2, the same day that Amelia Earhart was reported missing 66 years ago, and here you are walking in here with her,” Mrs Woycik said.

She had just finished reading a front-page story about the search for Amelia Earhart in The New York Times. Ms Earhart’s plane went down somewhere on the way from Lae, New Guinea, to Howland Island, southwest of Honolulu, Hawaii. With only 7,000 miles left to go on her round-the-world flight, Ms Earhart was headed across the Pacific Ocean, and her destination, which she would never reach, was Los Angeles, Calif., the place from which she started her solo flight on May 21.

“There was always a controversy, a mystery, about what happened to her,” said Mr Rudolf.

“Was she captured by the Japanese? Did she crash in the ocean off Japan? That’s what I think happened,” he added.

Originals Awaiting Molds

Most of Mr Rudolf’s sculptures are originals, in that a mold has not been taken. He explained that he likes to work in terra-cotta, because “it is quicker, but you have to keep it damp.”

After the form is completed, it is fired and finished in a bronze patina.

“If someone is interested in owning a copy, I’ll make a mold out of bonded bronze.”

His most recent work is the head of Winston Churchill, completed in May of this year, and he is preparing to work next on the Mark Twain head.

“Then I might go on to Albert Einstein,” Mr Rudolf mused.

As he and his wife Barbara were setting up the library exhibit, she reminded him that he had not started out as a sculptor.

“That’s true. I had been studying painting on my own in 1965. I was working away in oils and my wife noticed I was scraping at the layers of paint with a palette knife, so she asked, ‘Why not try sculpture?’”

 Mr Rudolf received his formal education in sculpting in three semesters at the Silvermine School of Art in Norwalk, and his teacher, who also taught at the National Academy of Fine Arts in New York City, saw how fast he was progressing.

“You’re on your own now,” his teacher said.

Jack Rudolf might have answered that he had always been on his own, creatively speaking. Trusting his instincts, he was led into sculpture by a love for heroes and the qualities that made them unique.