serendipity and a sculpture

by Rain Trueax

Now and again, I talk about serendipity and how I welcome such times. Well, everybody welcomes such times since it means an occurrence or series of events that play out in a beneficial way. Kind of a lucky chance. Serendipitous times are nothing I can predict, nor will I have done anything to make them happen. Often they are little things.


So this week, it involved one of my sculptures. On the back stoop has been one where years ago (guessing in the '90s sometime) Ranch Boss had taken one of mine and painted a rubberized coating that covered it to make a mold. 

Life moved on and away from sculptures. The little figure was a little ghostly looking as it stood on the stoop along with pesticides and gardening tools. It didn't get moved and I figured that the fired sculpture under the material would have been destroyed by that long in the mold.

The work had come from years where I both wrote, painted, and did a LOT of mostly clay sculptures. Some of my fired sculptures look like bronze because of the finishes chosen. The Arizona house has some in the garden. Up here mine are in the house-- and the attic. For anyone interested in more about the work and process, I created a website years ago (in the years where you had to use HTML), and it's surprisingly still there. I keep expecting it to disappear one day but for now, it's -- 

Rain's Sculpture Gallery

That is the background for the serendipitous event.

The guy who buys our lambs had come for some older ones. As usual, he and Ranch Boss chatted after the animals had been loaded in his trailer. He had seen something in the shop that came from the years of interest in casting. To show him how it works, Ranch Boss brought him down to the porch, where he picked up the coated sculpture and with his knife cut away the mold revealing the sculpture.

Later when he brought it into the house, I was delighted to see it had not suffered any damage from its years out there. I set it by our fireplace and looked at it with pleasure, like the prodigal returned. 

It wasn't until I was writing on my work in progress that serendipity happened, when I realized this sculpture totally fit one of my important secondary characters, a Navajo shaman. Benjamin Yazzie was also in the previous book, Unfinished Business. I hadn't personally visualized him until I looked at my sculpture and had an aha moment. It was him, and in seeing him, it is enriching my characters' interactions with him. He's tall, taciturn, complex and has come to life for me. He is old but the kind of old that also seems ageless.

The Navajo people are believed to have come from several ethnic groups-- one of which is tall, thin, and with sharper features. I sculpted him from imagination and now years later, he has an identity I couldn't have even imagined back then.

Ranch Boss took some more photos of him outside in the garden.