TED.COM & The Young Michelangelo
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TED.COM & The Young Michelangelo

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My husband Sabin Howard has become enthralled with the inspiring video lectures on ted.com. I understand why. Sabin and I are seekers of enlightenment, and that spark is the intention behind the website. I usually don’t mind when Sabin brings his MacbookPro to the bedroom and insists that I watch. Although I wish he wouldn’t do it on Monday nights at 9:00, because I am really invested in Jack Bauer saving the world.

The latest two videos were Ben Zander on classical music and Sir Ken Robinson talking about how schools kill creativity.
I had reason to ruminate on Robinson’s words in light of a lecture I attended last week at the New York Academy of Art on The Young Michelangelo, given by a professor who has a forthcoming book of the same name.
Now, this professor meant well. He tried to enliven his speech by mentioning sodomy several times. Usually sodomy is a provocative subject. This time, the unfortunately pompous academician managed to make both sodomy and the young Michelangelo Buonarroti boring. It was an accomplishment that made my husband seethe with fury. Not because of the former subject but because Sabin, as the finest living figurative sculptor, considers himself a direct heir to Michelangelo, and the sculptor poised to rebirthe classical figurative statuary into the modern mind as a living, breathing, urgent topic of thought. For Sabin, the boringization of Michelangelo is a catastrophic evil.
He got so mad that I wiggled out of the dinner invitation with a group of NY Academy folk and the professor. I didn’t want to watch Sabin get into a fight. Sabin’s the pale German/British/Northern Italian genotype and there was an uncharacteristic red flush on his cheekbones. It didn’t bode well for a civilized dinner.
And I got an earful in the cab on the way home. Good thing I bowed us out of dinner.
But I sympathize with Sabin. I’ve seen this distressing academic syndrome before. Professor Zollner, whose books I revere, managed to make Leonardo Da Vinci boring, in a talk a few years ago at the NY Academy. How, you may ask, could anyone make Leonardo, one of the top 5 most fascinating human beings in human history, boring? Well, it takes talent.
And a sense of oneself as an entitled gate-keeper who is generously doling out information to the special few out of the largesse of one’s brilliant scholarly achievements.
George Bull, the translator of Vasari’s Lives Of the Artists, succeeded brilliantly in transforming Vasari’s commentary into something dry, dull, and off-putting. This is just an egregious violation of all things holy, good, and true. Vasari was one of the early PR legends and a genius of a gossip monger. Lives Of the Artists should be rendered in the juicy, salacious style of US Magazine. If it were, everyone would want to read it. Everyone would love and hate Benvenuto Cellini, that stormy and sociopathic artist who, it is rumored, threw his assistant into the furnace to get it hot enough to cast his sculpture.
I stand for the democratization of art and ideas. Great art belongs to everyone. It cuts across class, caste, and education levels. This is one reason why post modern art isn’t art. It’s merchandise. Worse, it’s a shame that the 20th/21st centuries will have to live down: that ridiculous crap (by which I mean Dung Madonna, Piss Christ, anything by Jeff Koons, etc.) doesn’t appeal to anyone who isn’t getting a PhD or doesn’t have a monetary interest in it. That is, art dealer$ and gallerie$ will swear to you it’s great, but that’s only because they want to $ell it to you.
When Sabin loads his heroic scale APHRODITE into a truck to transport it, everyone stops, awestruck, to admire. Everyone responds to beauty. Firemen, school teachers, garbagemen, the women running the florist shop, lawyers, bankers, the restaurateurs on the corner–they all comment. Random people in cars pull over, get out, and admire.
This is what great art must do: strike people like a lightning bolt and uplift them. It doesn’t require a PhD to behold and be uplifted by Michelangelo!
How would I have given a lecture on Michelangelo? I’m a storyteller, and I want everyone to love Michelangelo. I would have pushed the lectern out of the way, grinned, and said, “Michelangelo was one of the greatest artists ever. He was also a mean son-of-a-bitch and a liar, so cheap that he’d wear his leather pants until they cracked and fell off his stinking body.”
A visit to Sabin Howard’s studio, from Adam Matano’s blog
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A visit to Sabin Howard’s studio, from Adam Matano’s blog

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My husband Sabin Howard is an excellent cook. Caroline Myss might say it arises out of the artist archetype he inhabits. Regardless, I am the happy recipient of his delicious Italian edibles (most of which come with rosemary, now my favorite spice).
There is only one problem, and no, it’s not the extra 5 pounds I carry on my small frame since we got together. Okay, 10 pounds, but I’ve decided to pretend that it’s only 5.
The problem is that he is the messiest cook imaginable. Yes, his shrimp scampi is delectable, to die for… He buys the fresh shrimp, when he can get them, and shells them himself. He heats the butter and garlic together in a small pan with a few onion bits for added zing and bakes them together with the shrimp until the salt-and-peppered white and pink crustaceans are the perfect hot succulence….
But the kitchen looks like a cyclone hit it. Slicks of olive oil glisten on every surface: refrigerator, cabinets, counters… How does a man with singularly excellent eye-hand co-ordination get McCormick’s steak seasoning on the ceiling?
“Sweetie,” I say, “I’ve invented this new and wondrous process. When I cook, I clean up as I go along.”
Sabin gives me that blank stare as if I’ve grown a second head and am speaking Martian. Now, I contend that I do have 1/3 alien DNA, but my English is at least as good as my Martian, and I take care to enunciate clearly when I speak with him.
I try another tack. “Honey bunch, there’s no cleaning fairy. When you do this,” I gesture at the piles of dirty dishes everywhere, “I HAVE TO CLEAN IT!”
Again the blank stare. Maybe I will try Martian, he might be more receptive to that tongue.
But in the midst of our on-going domestic skirmishes, and my sense of him as the man who lies diagonally across the bed so I have to sleep all squinched up on a tiny triangle, something else comes in. A reminder that he’s more than my sweet, sexy, maddening husband.
Sabin Howard is the greatest living sculptor of male nudes.
It’s pretty intense when that realization strikes. Few of us can say we’re the greatest living anything. I try to be the greatest living Traci L. Slatton I can be, and most of the time I don’t live up to that.
A talented young artist went to visit Sabin in his studio. His name is Adam Matano and he’s entering his senior year at the Lyme Academy. He left uplifted and inspired, as does anyone who visits Sabin’s studio. I don’t think there’s been anything like Sabin’s studio for a few centuries. Matano took with him his friend Kristi Kinsella, who took the photos, and who wrote, “To be a guest in Sabin Howard’s sculpture studio was to be influenced by the magical art of living.”
Sabin’s heroic scale APOLLO, which is nearing completion, is the ultimate expression of this magical art. In my opinion, and that of a well-known art critic, it’s the finest standing male nude since the David.
The question, then, is: should I stop hassling him to clean up after himself in the kitchen?
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The reality show of my life, part 1: Boob Model

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Personally, I think that reality TV shows herald, and probably contribute to, the demise of civilization. Reality shows are spawned when interest in story wanes; interest in story wanes when values do not grip people. When people stop believing in sin and redemption. When the mental vacuity of moral relativism numbs us to the fact that we define ourselves by our actions, and every action matters.

(I only sound Republican. I’m a registered Democrat.)

But if they’re going to make reality TV shows, why not one of my life? From the point of view of sad, absurdist comedy, it’s pretty rich. Start with an author married to a Renaissance-obsessed sculptor, four kids from three different marriages, a melange of religions, one communist daughter attending Amherst and one studious pre-med doctor-in-training-daughter at Johns Hopkins, my wild middle child whose first rule of conduct is “No restraining orders!” and a 4 year old imp who talks and reasons like a 7 year old.

The show could debut with the time my husband decided to advertise on Craig’s List for a boob model. Now, this was not a sketchy activity; Sabin is a classical figurative sculptor (think Michelangelo) and he was hard at work on a life size Aphrodite. He’d used several women already, one for gesture, a dancer for the uplifted arms, a tango teacher for the legs, an aikido master for the goddess’ core, all in their 20’s. But he didn’t like any of their busts.

I’m pretty sure he spent a few hours one evening evaluating my humble decolletage, such as it is after nursing three children. He was squinting down my shirt with a crease between his brows, in too clinical a manner for it to be foreplay. But there was no mention of my posing topless for the goddess. My husband was smart enough to hold his tongue. The rejection came and went unsaid.

Ecco, Craig’s List. “Wanted: breast model for a life size figurative sculpture. Professional classical sculptor pays same rate as art schools. See my website www.sabinhoward.com before contacting me.”

There were thousands of responses. Dutifully Sabin opened every single one. About 90% of the emails came from… Heather in New Jersey, who thought a shot of herself hanging upside down off a pole best showed her watermelon-sized endowments. Also exposed her nether parts in a way that only gynecologists, and not fine art sculptors, would find professionally interesting. Or there was Lindyloo in Queens, clad only in sequins, who charged not by the hour, but by the act. She listed a whole menu. I’m a writer and I know a lot of words, but there were things I’d never heard of. I thought about emailing back for elucidation. Maybe then my husband would look down my shirt in a less detached manner.

Sabin was not amused. Not by my chortles and not by the women who could read the words “breast model” but not the words “professional classical sculptor.” He wasn’t titillated, either. This is his work and his work is his God. Sabin was looking for a specific physical attribute and he might as well have been looking at elbows or knees.

He eventually auditioned a few women and chose someone whom I thought was too small for Aphrodite. She is the Goddess of Love, after all, shouldn’t she have a really great set of knockers, full Double-D’s that knock people over?

But of course, he of the exquisite taste was right. Aphrodite was finished and she’s gorgeous, modest bust and all. So maybe there is something elegantly appealing about the less-endowed chest, after all….

fragment-of-aphrodite-hires

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The Art of Life: How and Why to Look at Sculpture by Traci L. Slatton & Sabin Howard

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The Art of Life: How and Why to Look at Sculpture

by Traci L. Slatton & Sabin Howard

My husband Sabin Howard (www.sabinhoward.com) and I are writing a book about sculpture together. He is a working classical figurative sculptor–think Michelangelo–and I am NOT a PhD.

I want to write this book precisely because I am not a PhD. I want to write it for the purest reason: because I love sculpture and it enhances life and I want to share this passion, and its uplifting effect, with everyone. Sculpture is too beautiful, too innately healing, too richly resonant of what it actually means to be human, to be monopolized by a few people with advanced degrees.

I stand for the democratization of art. This is precisely why I have such a strong aversion to post-modern art, which, with its emphasis on ugliness and alienation, has begged to be rejected by the ordinary person and embraced by the few who either 1, make money off it, or 2, get a PhD out of it.

I am here to tell you: art is not dead. Neither is God, for that matter. There’s a burdgeoning movement that is rediscovering both. Beauty, too.

Why do I call this book ‘The art of life’? Simple: when you pause and breathe and take in a sculpture, it brings you back into alignment with your deepest core self. It renews your Self. It deepens your experience of this moment now, of the presence, and Presence, in this perfectly imperfect moment of space-time. And isn’t that the practice of the art of life? It is for me.