Zenos frudakis biography of martin
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I’m still doing that.”
Books and the development of his budding artistic skills helped him escape the uncertain silence of his home.
He spent chunks of his adolescent years in the local library. This started his lifelong habit of studying and creating art every day. “It’s fun to watch and interact with him, fun to be involved with an artist and sculptor of his skill.
It gets too extreme.”
With Rizzo, Zenos says, “I thought you could use the money that it would take to bring it down, and use it to put an African-American figure next to it, and install plaques that could explain both of them. “I had a clear image in my mind who was going to be in my life and that was Zenos.”
She says she identified with some of his background and traits.
“He wasn’t an ‘American,’ we were both first-generation,” she says.
She is playing a keyboard that looks like a floating wave. “We patterned it after the Pennsylvania Academy, where they have a gallery and a school.”
Zenos told his brother they would handle the business and he would continue to learn from him.
“When we started the business, we started a gallery to sell his work,” Zenos says.
“We resonated about those things. It was placed outside the Rhea County Courthouse in Dayton, Tennessee, in 2017. “We had the opportunity to comment on the work, and he would ask us what he thought about this ear or that. “He took his concept, less than a foot tall, and it became at least fifteen feet tall.”
Paradigm Shift was installed at the GMAC Corporate Center in Washington, Pa., in November, 2007.
“This was another exception because it’s so different, it shows the breadth and scope of what he can do,” Lutz says.
Other influences inform Zenos’ 21st-century work, including his working-class roots and his natural sympathy for radical democracy.
His maquette for boxer Jim Braddock, the “Cinderella Man,” included a right arm outstretched, as if the fighter was actively holding back the Great Depression, the time during which the boxer exceled.
The client wanted the more traditional boxer’s crouch, which Zenos gave him.
Zenos’ larger-than-life 2002 Molly Maguires Memorial symbolically reveals a defining and tragic moment in the northeastern Pennsylvania miners’ history, in 1877, when ten rebellious workers were hanged.
Zenos represented them as a single hooded figure on a scaffold just before the hanging.
His fascination with intellectual history is reflected in several of his sculptures, including Knowledge Is Power, at Rowan University in Glassboro, N.J, an 8- by 12-foot bronze of an open book, installed in 2014.
Faces and figures of more than two dozen philosophers, writers, and scientists surround its two main portraits of Albert Einstein and Charles Darwin, including Socrates, Galileo, Beethoven, Shakespeare, Machiavelli, Thoreau, Nietzsche, Freud, as well as Susan B.
Anthony and Margaret Sanger, Harriet Tubman, Anne Frank and Rosalie’s modern dance inspiration, Isadora Duncan.
Time and the River
Zenos is now working on a dynamic maquette of Hypatia, the great Neoplatonist philosopher of ancient Alexandria, who was cruelly flayed and killed by Christians in 415 A.D.
“It’s a personal response to the state of the world,” he says of his work-in-progress, and compares it to his Clarence Darrow piece.
Another bust of King that Zenos sculpted is in South Africa, yet another, four-foot-tall version, rests in Chester, Pa.
“His absolute interest in people, the stories behind people and the context from where they came, how sometimes very ordinary people achieved extraordinary things, are part of what makes him unique,” she says.
“I think he’s the consummate professional,” says Wilson Wyatt, a Mason who several years ago watched as Zenos sculpted the bust of his uncle, Solomon Wallace, 33˚, the sovereign grand commander of The United Supreme Council’s northern jurisdiction.
“He pays extreme attention to detail and opened up to us,” Wyatt says.
“It’s a sculpture people driving by will experience differently than employees coming into the building day and after day, hundreds of times a year, year after year.”
Lutz compared the work to one of Rodin’s masterpieces, Gates of Hell, a copy of which is outside the nearby Rodin Museum. “I knew what a traditional sculpture studio looked like and I saw the potential.”
It was the beginning of the most fruitful decades of Zenos’ career
The Business of Art, The Art of Business
Zenos says he learned a great deal from his ten years with his brother, but to run a business based on one’s art, work must be produced regularly and you must meet deadlines.
The business in Philadelphia ended because, he says, the gallery was expensive and they were not producing work quickly enough.
“I think of what it’s going to look like in bronze, thinking about the patina, tool marks and how it will affect the final work.”
He says he goes to the foundry several times for each piece he casts.
“If you don’t go, you’re not safeguarding your work,” he says.
These include golf, baseball, hockey, and boxing stars.
Payne Stewart at Pinehurst
Golfer Payne Stewart is shown in a famous pose. He also sculpted K. Leroy Irvis, the first African American Speaker of a State Legislature.
Sculpting People and Portraits
Frudakis kept making sculptures that focused on people and their faces.
“I’m very conscious of how one commission leads to another.”
But Zenos doesn’t confine himself only to realistic figures, Lutz says.
“I was in his studio one time, and I saw what looked like an abstract piece, lots of curves, and I asked if he could scale it up,” he says. It stands on a 3-foot granite base. “I did the elephant in a year, he took five years to do The Signer.
At that time, South Africa had apartheid, a system of racial separation.