daron aric hagen

Atop the bookshelf in my son's room sits a terracotta sculpture of me for which I recall sitting for my mother during the summer of my ninth year. As she smoked Pall Malls and fashioned the gritty clay on the back porch of our house, I saw my form slowly take shape beneath her expressive hands. I remember the dog day thrum of the cicadas mingling with the purling of Paganini Violin Concertos—to which we listened, mother having been a violinist well into her teens—one after another, as she worked on the statue for the entirety of that idyllic summer.

My mother sculpted my image because she needed a subject, she loved me, and because I was available.

On particularly fine days, or when my buddies would swing by to ask me to play Last of the Mohicans, or Star Trek, or Rat Patrol in the woods with them, mother would say, ‘Listen, go ahead if you like, but if you want it to look like you, you have to stick with it; don’t be surprised if it starts looking a lot like your brother Britt.’

At one point, while modeling the feet, I remember her simply slicing them off with a bit of cutting wire and dumping them into the clay pail. I fished them out, saying, ‘They look fine to me.’ ‘Yes,’ they’re okay,’ she replied, ‘but they’re not your feet.’ ‘But nobody will know that except us,’ I protested. ‘But we’ll know,’ she sighed. ‘Where’s the satisfaction in not getting it exactly right?’

A wet cloth was draped over the statue, and for the next few days she executed sketch after sketch of first her own feet, and then mine: ‘I’ve got to freshen up my skills so that I can understand what a foot really looks like,’ she explained. Resuming her sculpting, she was pleased with the results: ‘Let’s roll up your pants a bit, like Tom Sawyer,’ she said. ‘Now that I’ve captured your feet, I want people to recognize them.’

As far as I was concerned, we were done, and I was headed for the Greenfield Park swimming pool. She had more to teach me: ‘You have to have a secret,’ she said. ‘Otherwise, this will just be a statue of a little smiling boy. What do you want your secret to be?’ she asked.

I was a serious child. ‘How can a statue have a secret?’ I asked. She didn’t answer. ‘I could be hiding something behind my back,’ I ventured. ‘Good,’ she laughed. ‘Don’t peek; I’ll put something in your hands behind your back when we’re done working on the front.' In due course, the piece was finished and fired; when we picked it up at the kiln, I learned the boy’s secret: he was clasping an enormous toad.

I had learned that all good works of art require six ingredients: hard work, love, dedication, discipline, craft, and a revealed secret. Mother has been gone for a quarter of a century. One of Art’s consolations is that someday the terracotta boy's timeless secret smile and all that it embodies may beam down in answer not just to my mother's grandson's smile, but even to her great-grandchild's.