Swank in The Arts; 121; Octavio Medellin, sculptor

You are looking at a figure, a small figure, of course, cast in bronze by Octavio Medien. Good evening, I'm Patsy Swank. It's over 30 years since I wrote a story for the Dallas Morning News about a Mexican-American sculptor who was making plaster casts for North American Aviation during World War II. Later I did the story when his wood figure, the hanged one, got the top award at the Allied Arts Exhibition at the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts. It seems that I have always known Octavio Medien, though years may pass between our visits, but he was here in working and teaching and making art. He got other awards, newspaper notice was pleasant, talented students delighted and inspired him.

But these were the passing picnics in the real stream of his life, his work in stone and clay and metal and wood in glass. Two others who know Octavio Medien are with me this evening. Janet Cutner is the art critic for the Dallas Morning News, and Roy Williams, a young sculptor, is Medien's student. So that you may know Medien, I want you to see a film that we did early in the series made possible by Mr. Mrs. Algrimettas and the Metta's Foundation, Mr. Mrs. John D. Merkerson and an anonymous foundation. I must have been about 11 years old when I first started carving in San Antonio. I went to the San Antonio River and dragged a black walnut law, which I didn't even know what black walnut was, then. But it was a piece of wood and I dragged it home. And I started to carve.

Octavio Medien was born in Mexico, the son of a mining man who worked in the mountains. The family came to San Antonio when he was a small boy, and though his formal education had to stop after the death of his father, the carving, the cutting, the casting, all that would be his true vocation soon began and never stopped. His career grew unpretentiously but steadily. His sculpture was exhibited in the east, included books on American artists, and there is a repository of his working papers at the University of Syracuse. Sometimes he saw his subjects realistically, sometimes fully in the abstract. He is equally at home in the many media of sculpture, clay, metal, stone, wood, glass. A major commission for the City of Dallas is soon to join the body of his work, most of which is to be seen in North Texas, inside and outside of churches and synagogues, schools, offices, and homes.

Medien came here in 1938 to work and teach, first at the North Texas State University in Denton, then at the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, and for some time now in his own studio and school at the Oak Cliff Creative Arts Center. When I teach my students, you know, people that come to the class, there's the first thing that I mentioned to them. The technology of material is there and you must know it, and if you don't know the insides of it, you'll never find out what you will do with the medium. It's not only the medium that counts, it's you also. If you do what I tell you, see then you will have enough arm because the arm is going to be very narrow. So why don't you take and do this first, the breast, take and narrow it, and then cut it down to the line of the arm.

Also, you have to come up into here, see. See, this is deviating you from the vision you have in mind. If you elongate this, then you have a harmony of the long form. You never get it, if you have this stubby form, see this part, just cut your hand, bring it up to here. And then you'll have a long form, and that gives you that feeling of long form, you see. So why don't you go ahead and do that. They begin mixing the clay by hand, or else I don't want them in the class. Not until you learn how to mix clay, then you learn to do build clay, and then you learn to do other things because when you build clay, you learn form in space. And you begin to get the conscience of all that. In sculpture, many pieces, many forms, in a design, is very, very hard and difficult. And I got too much knowledge to come up here.

You don't have enough heat in here. See, you have to rotate this thing until you build a heat, that's why you're building a lot of lumps in there. And the copper absorbs a lot of the heat. So once you start melting it, then it begins to flow. Oh, that's a tricky one. I tell you what you think to do is to get a water-send paper. See, that you can buy, and that water-send paper, you use water, and you rub it, and you won't have those scratches. Because you have to have it immaculate from scratches until you can polish it. All right, thank you. But I'm not a professional teacher because I never had a academic degree, and a academic degree that says, well, you're a teacher. Consuelo and Octavio Medien have been married for more than 40 years, and lived still in the house they bought long ago, because its three car garage could become his studio.

Their three children are grown and gone from home now, but they were babies in 1938, when the whole family traveled to Yucatan to live for three months among the Indians in the ruins of Chichinita. Even in 1947, when the drawings he made there were published in book form by the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, the world at large was generally unaware of the full importance of that earliest American culture. But the effect on Medien of the first direct connection with his pre-Columbian heritage was tremendously powerful. Chichinita was a great impact to me. When we first landed there, the first night I went at midnight and looked up from the top of the Mount of the Ruin, the highest ruin, which is the Temple of Cucull Khan, and they looked to me like they were made out of silver with the moon shining on them. It was beautiful, so I decided I would start drawing the designs that were there, copying them. I didn't do them exactly in scale. I just drew them with black and white drawings, but pencil.

Then it took me months because the first day that you look at the carvings, you don't see what was there. All you see is like an erosion on the rock, but then when the sun moves around it, then you begin to see the designs of the carvings. It was the second thing I landed. I started to look into to see what it could do for my work as a sculptor. I started to study the carvings and trying to look back into what was behind them, what they meant behind each hieroglyphic inscription that was there. Still, I live in a modern world as a sculptor, and I keep that heritage that I can't deny the fact that there is there behind me.

Even though I want to copy it, I don't want to be an imitator of them, may I, or they all make, or the tall tech, or any of them. But it gave me a rich understanding of design, because that's what I was after trying to... It was cool to me that taught me by just simply making those drawings that I did. That schooling had its effect on the entire city in another way. In 1952, Jerry Bywaters, then director of the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, bought these four objects from an acquaintance of Medigame, and so began a collection of pre-Columbian art that would be expanded by further purchase and generous gifts to become one of the most distinguished in the country.

To me seems like it was nature that drove me into it, because we lived in the mountains for many years, and I used to see the rock, you know, the beautiful formations of rock that you see. When you come out of the mind, and even at that time, I used to go and look around through the rocks to find the beauty in color that was in them. And to me stone was only my favorite medium. I work on any medium now. I have respect for each one the same as the other, even play. He has never lost that openness to medium and to change. What a work is to express determines his design and his material. Not even the commission for the new Dallas City Hall, significant and gratifying as it is, alters that direct and intuitive approach. When I was asked about this project, that to me it was a very important project. I went to the site of the new City Hall, and of course I was very impressed by it.

I had to get blueprints. I designed a scale wall of the project of the City Hall wall. From then I started to play or figure the space together with the impression that the architecture made to me. So that became into one thing, which was this design that I developed. And it has some to do with the area of Dallas, the growth, the growing, the embracing, which is the metro plaques, you might say. This is what I call this thing, the metro plaques. I started to develop the form by using wires and getting it into three-dimensional form. Later on I developed it by making it sort of a normal tour of wires and already three-dimensional form. And then I started to form the plaster. Because after you made the study of the plaster, you have to develop it into the final work, which is the land.

And this is the first challenge that you have. The second challenge is to do the enlarging of the model. So you actually take this sheet lead and you begin to beat it from inside and outside, from both sides. You actually hang it, hang it like a skin, and you stretch it, and then you beat it into the forms that you begin to do. I feel like I'm renewed, something came new to me. See, there is something that I didn't expect at all. Everything that I do seems unfinished to me, though, I'm not completely satisfied. I keep going further and I would like to do another piece.

And I do that piece, and then when it's finished, I still not satisfied. I guess this is just until I die. I'm happy working, because that's what I enjoy, my working sculpture. The City Hall piece was commissioned for the lobby space, on which it was planned also to record names of members of past city councils. When Medien's concept proved too large to accommodate those lists, he was offered space elsewhere in the building. But Medien felt that his work was designed for that wall, and he said no. Janet, there are Dallas sculptors who have had more exposure and coverage than Octavio Medien, and there are others who have had less. On balance, what do you think it means to a city, to have such a man living and working here? I think maybe more than anything else, it lends a sense of stability to the community, and to the art community in particular.

But always there's so much more to life than just the bustle of our times. And an artist maybe reflects that in no way that anybody who works at something else can. I don't anyway mean that an artist like Octavio has not spent his life working very hard, obviously he has. But there's a sense of inspiration from someone who works on art. It does lend a dimension to life that we don't have in the business community, for example. Do you think that that's because we think of art as something outside every day activity, or because we put some sort of special aura around it? Well, I don't know that I think we do put a false special aura around art. We go with the current times, and we accept whatever the fact is. But that kind of special aura is not the stable kind that I'm talking about. Giving your life to art is a different kind of thing. It really is almost, I think, a spiritual kind of experience in many ways. So I think it deserves a special aura.

I don't think we put it there. I think someone has to feel it to make art. Well Roy, where does Octavio touch your life? I mean beyond your teacher student relationship? Well, it's hard to say just really to put your finger right direct on it. I think it's a variety of things that he do. It's not one particular thing. Say for instance, when he's telling you something to do a particular thing on your work, or if it's just being a friend, giving you some good advice about say anything really in particular. How does he teach? How do you learn from him? Well, learning from Octavio, he makes it, he really makes it easy in that he's so jolly in his teaching that when he tells you things, actually to do things, he put it in a kind of fond mood, fond way. It makes it easier to learn from him. When safe instances say, Roy, you did this wrong. Now you ought to do it like I told you to do it.

You know, he'd get you a little find something, a little car, he'd look for you and say, Roy, you're not here. You got to do this right. Do it the way I say do it. That's, it'll be right. He doesn't tell you what to do in the sense of what to make. No, he never do that. He leaves you, I guess he leaves you wide open as far as that goes. He kind of will give you an idea about certain things, but he never says do this particular thing. He don't want you to copy nothing, nothing like that. He wants you to be original in your own ideas. I wonder sometimes, now Octavio has had a considerable amount of exposure. I mean, he is an artist who is known pretty widely over the country. But he is not the kind of man who is aggressive in his own exposure. How much do you think this has to do with an artist's career?

With his success, how do we define his career? Is his career his life or is it his public acceptance? What do you mean? Yes, I guess what I'm saying is how do we define success? Well, I don't think, I think I know a fair number of artists and I don't think that they define success the real artist by either monetary success or social success or public awareness of what they're doing. It's not as much as a sense of satisfaction with what they've done with a certain period of time of their lives. So maybe we're placing false values on it. Maybe one of the strongest things someone like Octavio represents is the ability of a man to devote his life to art regardless of recognition. Sometimes when he received recognition and continuing during the sort of lean years when there was less recognition, certainly he's watched a lot of passing fads or trends go his way, go by him and not given way to changing his own style, changing his own pattern of living, changing his own convictions about what he's doing.

So to me, I think maybe that's one thing that a true artist can lend a community. Is this kind of feeling that yes society changes and we should be aware of it insensitive to it? Well, we don't necessarily value someone on the basis of what happens today. It takes a longer period of time before you devote your life to something. It takes periods of decades for it to be analyzed, not periods of six months, which is I think more the current trend. The way the wavelengths are getting shorter all the time. I think that Octavio really, he doesn't really in particular look for a special type of recognition, nothing that big or nothing. I think he really gets most of his satisfaction out of safe instance when he do a piece and he's satisfied.

He can look at and say, well, no, that come out exactly like I wanted to. I think one thing that is a little disillusioning about being an artist in Dallas is that it does take so long to be valued. There are so many artists who are in their 40s or early 50s who really have already devoted the better part of their lives to being an artist in Dallas. And I think they would probably look at us talking and question, how much does the community value my being there? I'm not sure, but that you have to be almost an elder statesman type like Octavio before you get proper recognition here. So what's going to, I start to say what's going to change that and I'm not sure that's a fair question, but what changes do there have to be? Is this a matter of more schooling? Is this a matter of a whole broader public understanding?

That seems to me to have been true as long as I almost as long as I can remember. Well, I think one thing that happens here is that artists are grouped as a special entity and not really, they're not brought into the general society. This I think maybe is true of all communities, but they're separated. And for example, very often I'm invited to a party at which local artists appear as guests because there's a visiting artist from out of town as the guest of honor. But no one would think to invite one of these artists over to dinner just to have a conversation. I don't know whether people are intimidated by artists and feel as though they don't know what they'll talk about or whether they feel as though they're social and furious and not up to the conversation. I think that people have an idea about artists that most artists are not right on that line with the regular people. You know, if you're artists, you are kind of you over here on the left hand, you understand.

But one particular thing that I think the community will have to learn that artists that time and the energies are all devoted to that particular thing, whatever painter or sculpture or whatever, and the community more or less separates them because of that. Artists don't, they don't really get out and mix that much. Because they won't spend that energy and getting out there and doing it. I wonder how many we lose that way. I know four or five that I could name on one hand of people who hit a level and then say, well, there's not anything more for me here. And they go to New York or they go to the coast or they go to Europe. Well, it seems to me as though those people move on for several reasons. One reason is they may have reached the point in their careers where they really do not get proper exposure in Dallas.

There's not a very good gallery situation and there's not a particularly lively situation of showing young or growing artists in any situation here. So there is a reason to move on, beyond a certain point. Some say that they become too comfortable living here, that it's too easy, that they need the struggle of big city. Does that mean the competition, more people, more artists and more? I think it means maybe being more uncomfortable, physically uncomfortable. The really urban kind of fight that you have in New York City or in Chicago or Los Angeles, whatever. Where you just don't settle in and finish your work day at five o'clock in the afternoon and have a beer and talk to your friends. I wonder how we ever are going to know. We will know from people like you, we will know from a few other people. The whole area is where artists like Octavio, who is of Mexican American heritage but who regards himself as an absolute singular.

His nationality is an artist. He is one of the most single-minded people that I have ever known in terms of how his community relates to him. I suppose we're extraordinarily blessed in having him and a few others, maybe not so few, liking. That's one of his great assets. He doesn't separate art. He thinks that if you are artists, you are. And artists, you're not, per se, black, Mexican, whatever. You speak like artists. That's what he teaches. And that has helped me in my creativity and self-knowledge. I try not to be particularly black or orientated, you understand, or whatever. I try to have a variety of things. He have taught me more or less how to arrange my works that way.

The true believer makes more true believers. Thank you, Janet, for coming. Thank you, Roy, for being here. This is Medien's Head of Christ, Castin Bronze. Thank you for joining us to talk about this singular man. I'll be back next week. Good night. I'll be back next week.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you.