The Gib Singleton Newsletter

The Gib Singleton Newsletter
his guy’s always been one of my
heroes,” Gib says of the man
depicted in his newest piece, Geronimo.
“He was never defeated, he never
surrendered and no bullet could
kill him.”
afterward, that’s what
everyone
outside
the tribe thought his
name was.
“He wasn’t really
a chief, in the way
we usually think of
that term,” Gib
explains.
Geronimo was a MescaleroChiricahua
Apache
who
became one of the greatest war
chiefs in American history.
“He was more
like a medicine man
and a prophet. He had
visions, and the chiefs
relied on that spiritual
power and his wisdom to
help guide the tribe. And,
of course, the fact that
he seemed invulnerable
to bullets gave him huge
standing.”
Gib Singleton
Geronimo
39” x 28” x 10”
bronze
edition of 45
“Geronimo
wasn’t
his
real name,” Gib says.
“People started calling him that after
he fought a bunch of Mexican soldiers
with nothing but a knife. Man, they had
muskets and bayonets and he just cut his
way through them. The soldiers were so
scared they appealed to St. Jerome to save
them, yelling ‘Jeronimo!, Jeronimo!’ And
Geronimo might never have
become famous had not a group
of Mexican soldiers attacked his
tribe’s camp while he was away
and murdered his wife, his mother
and his three young children. When
he returned and discovered that atrocity,
he swore revenge and became a dedicated
war chief. For the next 30 years, he ravaged
the northern Mexican provinces as well as
Arizona, New Mexico and western Texas.
“At one time,” Gib says, “they had like
5,000 US troops chasing him, which was
about a quarter of the entire Army. Plus
several thousand Mexican soldiers. And
he out-thought and out-fought them all for
a hell of a long time.
“They finally stopped him by attacking the
women and children and old people of his
tribe. He could have continued to fight a
hit and run war from the White Mountains
forever, but he had a vision of leaving for
the east on an iron horse,” Gib says, “and
he knew in order to save his people, he
had to lead them onto a reservation.
“There’s a picture of him and his warriors
sitting in front of a train waiting to take
them to captivity, and you can still see the
character in his face. No matter what they
did to him, they never broke his spirit. He
gave up his own freedom and lifestyle for
his people. That’s courage, man. That’s
honor. That’s a warrior.
“He was the last of his kind,” Gib says.
“The last great Native warrior of the West.
And I think in a lot of ways, he’s a model
for our times. You know, the paratroopers
in World War II used to yell his name
when they went out the door of the plane
into combat. It was like a talisman. ‘No
bullet can kill me!’ Like, ‘Hail Mary, here
we go!’ That kind of courage is what we
need today with all the stuff going on in
the world around us.”
Geronimo died in 1909 at Fort Sill,
Oklahoma, still a prisoner, still separated
from his people. The official story was
he fell from his horse, but Gib doesn’t
believe that. “He grew up in the saddle,”
he says. “He could literally ride in his
sleep. He committed suicide by diving
headfirst off an ammunition bunker. He
took the warrior’s way out.”
Restoring
Michelangelo’s
Pieta
collecting all the fragments. We even found a couple pieces in
the wax from the candles around her. But people took a lot of
the fragments away as souvenirs or relics, including pieces
of her nose. We ended up having to make another one from a
piece of marble we took out from her back.
“We also had to go out to Carrara, which is
northwest of Florence by Pisa, to get more
marble. Michelangelo used Carrara marble
because it’s a really fine grain. The molecules
in it are really tight, so you can sculpt
fine detail in it. But what we had to
do was grind it up to dust and mix
it with epoxy so we could mold it.
W
e were delighted last week
to receive an email from Scott
Peck (Curator and Co-Director
at the Museum of Biblical
Art in Dallas where a lot of
Gib’s work is shown)
with a link to a video
on YouTube. The video,
which is a grainy black
and white in pretty poor
resolution, shows the attack
on Michelangelo’s Pieta
in the Vatican
in 1972. Then
it shows a bit of
the
restoration
process, including
some footage
of Vatican
Workshop
staff. Since
we know Gib
was at the Vatican
workshop in those days and worked on the Pieta restoration, we
couldn’t wait to queue it up and see if we could identify Gib.
And the answer is . . . we couldn’t be certain.
And neither could Gib. “There were several guys who worked on
that,” he told us, “and we all wore those blue lab coats you see in the
video. Almost everybody was Italian, and most of us had dark, kind
of long hair and beards. It’s hard to tell us apart. There’s one shot of
a guy with his back turned that I’m pretty sure is me, but maybe not.
What’s cool though is that you can see from the video what we did
to restore the piece.”
The need for restoration arose when the Pieta was attacked by a man
with a hammer. “It was Pentecost Sunday,” Gib says. “This crazy
guy – I still remember his name; Lazlo Toth – all of a sudden jumped
out of the crowd and started attacking the sculpture with a hammer.
There was no real security and he hit it like 15 times, screaming all
the time, ‘I am Jesus Christ!’
“Man, he busted the heck out of it. He broke the nose off, and her
left arm, and when the arm fell and hit the marble floor, the fingers
snapped, too. He also gouged her face and her head and her neck and
her veil. We were down on the floor afterward with feather dusters,
The Gib Singleton Newsletter
Vo1. 2, Issue 3
“We’d take an impression of an
area that needed to be filled or
built up with clay or silicon,
and then we’d pour the dust and
epoxy mix into the mold, then
fit it and grind it until we
got it right. On the bigger
pieces, like the fingers, we
had to epoxy them in place,
then fill the voids with
the marble dust and
epoxy mix and
smooth and shape.
It was an incredibly
painstaking process.
“What was also interesting was we
found where it had been damaged
and repaired before. Sometime
in the 18th century, they
were moving it and ended
up breaking the fingers off
the left hand. A guy named
Giuseppe Lirioni did the
restoration and some
people think he took the
liberty of changing the
hand position more to
his own liking.
“After all that, the Vatican
decided not to take any
more chances with the
piece. These days they
keep it behind bulletproof glass.”
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Gib Singleton
Pieta
3/4 Lifesize
bronze
edition of 33