A visit with old friends

Michael the Archangel

Today we drove to Plano to have potluck lunch with the Encore group from our old church, Kimball Free Methodist. The meal was at the new home of John and Shirley Collier. John is getting more famous by the day since he received the commission to make a memorial sculpture for a Catholic church that was on the edge of the 9/11 disaster. After a wonderful lunch, we drove to the Biblical Arts Center where John's four large sculptures are on display this month before they get shipped to NYC. John gave us a personal tour, providing commentary about each of the four statues. After a general explanation of how he was chosen to do this work, he gave us a simplified explanation of the complicated process that an artist goes through to change his clay sculpture into plaster and then into bronze. Then he revealed some of the hidden little secrets:

• the foundry workers who cast the bronze were allowed to write their names on the back of the board that the Joseph statue is holding;
• the serpent that is being hacked apart by the archangel Michael has a head with ten horns, but the head originally was to go on one of the other statues and became disformed when John accidently put it on its peg too roughly;
• Mary Magdalene is standing like John's mother used to stand;
• Joseph has a mole on his face in the same place John's dad has a mole.