Waynesword, Mid-Summer 2009
Tribute to My Beloved “UNK”—Paul Perras of Avon, Ct.—Sculptor and Artist Extraordinaire, Upon The Month of His 78th Birthday…
(Allow me to take a temporary break from writing about the vagaries of the weather, the landscape, and the mentality of the real estate market in upstate NY— I’d like to concentrate on a man who has been a great influence on my life, albeit usually from a distance—my late father’s only brother—Paul Richard Perras. He was always “Uncle Dick” to my siblings and me, but in his shows and public persona, and to any of his own friends, he went by “Paul Perras”—enjoying the fact that he then shared initials with the phenomenal Pablo Picasso… )
Photo by Lisa Perras Gordon, July 12th, 2009—
I dub this pic, of me & my Unk:
“Three Heads Are Better Than One”
Wayne Perras & Paul Richard Perras, posing with the first sculpture he ever
worked on, in 1959—a granite cobblestone from the original streets of Hartford, Ct.
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To see him now as a gingerly-walking, painfully-thin man, with his neatly trimmed white beard and close-cropped sandy-gray hair, is not to get a sense of how robust he was at the zenith of his working career, 15 or 25… 35 years ago, especially. Until bone cancer cruelly invaded his ribcage roughly 11 years ago, he was still devoting each full day’s energy to his non-stop sculptural pursuits. In addition, he was teaching art and shop skills to the fortunate students under his tutelage at the Renbrook School, just up Route 44 from wherever he resided—first in Simsbury, then a bit west in Collinsville, and these past 10 years in Avon.
Wayne, and son Daryn Perras in back, with Indigo Gordon, “Unk” aka Paul Perras, Lisa Perras Gordon, Ry Gordon, and Bella Perras at Unk’s house in Avon, July 09. Photo by Scott Gordon, July, 2009
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Due to the rigors of worklife, travels, and demands of our own family routine—catering to three school-aged kids from 11 to 17 now, with a myriad of activities between them—our trips to central Connecticut from upstate New York have been too infrequent in recent years. We had an extensive visit in 2006 with a grand family reunion and some time with him on his own turf back then, but had only exchanged emails or phone calls since. He had lost 20 or 30 pounds since we last saw him, it seemed, and a casual observer would never guess that this man used to manually hammer and chisel away at monoliths of white marble by hand, seven or eight hours a day, in his prime. He always took great pride in being one of the last avatars of his art form intense enough to perform Michaelangelo-like tasks in this atavistic manner—though later on, by the mid-1980’s, he had moved on to using a pneumatic propulsion system to drive his chisel—still no easy task to handle when chipping away at Vermont marble. By that time he’d already sculpted all manner of hardwoods—ebony, Brazilian cherry, lignum vitae, coco bola, & walnut among others—and marble was what seemed to obsess him.
This small marble sculpture at his home studio is one of the last of his marble pieces Paul Perras has in his own possession…some are in an un-displayed collection at the New Britain Museum of Art; others have been sold or donated elsewhere. Even this scaled-down prototype of his
“Eagle-Con-Eagle” motorcycle series probably weighs 30-40 pounds.
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This photo of one of his large marble masterworks is now in a private collection in the San Francisco area. The original weighed about 500 lbs.—28” long by 10” thick by 24” high.
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Egyptian-styled cat in Brazilian cherry, & truncated torso in marble co-exist on Unk’s shelf, separated by an operable wooden jackknife.
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He hated the fact that much of the so-called “Modern Art” that was prominent in his lifetime was minimalist in nature, requiring virtually none of the effort he put forth, whether he worked in marble or hardwood, clay or metal. He used to have a bumper sticker, I believe, that said “Minimum Pay for Minimal Art.” He resented, to some extent, the fact that lesser lights—pop artists-- were far better rewarded than he had been for what they produced, but his primary objective was never monetary, nor income-driven. More than anyone I’ve ever known in the art world, my uncle was motivated by a more timeless and supernal quest—he knew his works would outlive him, and that the creative process which drove him each day was justification enough for his devotion to his craft.
He was never a truly big man—always lean, and maybe 6’0” at most—but he appeared robust and Herculean to me in those days. Part of it was projected by his legendary full beard back then—a reddish-brown mass of facial hair so thick he used to store his drawing pencils in there, so he could amuse us (and the friends we brought to see him) by making a great show of pawing through his beard to extract his writing implements in dramatic fashion, whenever necessary. My younger sister Lisa still pantomimes that routine for people, delighted in the memory of it. And although his protean art form was largely carried out in private, he would always put on that sort of theatrical display when we made our rare pilgrimages to see what he was working on. He would love to spend an hour or two pontificating on his latest projects in his resonant baritone—which I’m sure came in handy during his two-dozen years of teaching at Renbrook, though I never saw him in that role. Sadly, his voice now is diminished to a relative whisper, due to a botched surgical procedure during the early stages of his bout with cancer, when one of his two vocal cords was irrevocably snipped. I miss hearing his booming, confident voice as much as I miss that huge, bushy, mysterious beard. 
3 Types of Wood, +Bronze, and Marble—a small section of Paul Perras’s past work.
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His small, sequestered home of the past decade is still festooned with the remnants of his prolific work life—a few paintings from his Santa Fe phase, numerous amazing pieces in wood, metal, and his smaller stone pieces—but the largest signature pieces are all gone—dispersed to friends, relatives, patrons, or the New Britain Museum of Art, which has promised a proud display of his work someday, though presumably, as my uncle glibly joked, it will likely be a posthumous exhibit, “unless it happens real soon.”
Two Wings, or curved Bird Heads, or Eyes? Look closely—an Imbedded Finger as the “spine” of the piece, so to speak. This is carved out of lignum vitae, a South American hardwood known as the hardest and densest in the world.
Part of the poignancy of seeing my uncle at this point near the end of his life is that he used to regard the subject of Death as taboo, something he would not even consider or speak about. Now it is worked into the conversation in a matter-of-fact, slightly rueful, manner. There is no denying it anymore for him, and his friends and relatives see it, even though there is supposedly no active cancer, or other rampant disease, in his body—his body understandably wearing down even while his mind is still active and artistic and strong.
Their truly “Great-Uncle” Dick—known to others as Paul Perras—instructs Miles and Bella Perras (seated) in some arcane fact about malleable geometry, Aug. 1, 09.
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He has used up much of his physical life force, as it were, with all the exertion he has expended on his art and on living his life to the max in devotion to his various crafts. The other sad thing to us as family, but a good thing from his perspective, is that his works are no longer all (mostly) together in one place as they used to be (he used to call himself the biggest collector of Paul Perras’s art work, but that was a couple of decades ago…). His marble pieces, those that demanded the most of him, physically, in his prime, are almost ALL elsewhere—all the variations on Female Forms, and the Anvil series, and the Ankh variations, and his Eagle-Con-Eagle expositions---including a masterwork of about 500 pounds that was shipped to purchasers in San Francisco-- plus his revealing view of the lovely body under the Virgin Mary’s robes—all those major works are either in the New Britain Museum collection, or private hands. They will likely never be all in one place as we saw them at his one-man show at UCONN in 1978, or in his home with longtime soul-mate Bette Friedman on the Farmington River in Simsbury, or back in his Wethersfield barn/studio space when we used to go visit him in the mid-70’s, when he was just creating most of it, more every time we visited, shortly after returning from a nine-year stint in Oaxaca, near the southern tip of Mexico. It was there he truly forged his art, and indulged his true temperament, and left the bourgeois American routine behind. He worked on his art on a daily basis, living simply with his girlfriend at their hacienda for “pennies a day” as he would later say. He went almost a decade without anyone telling him he could NOT be an artist, or that he really ought to work a day job, or had to pay bills like the rest of his generation had seemingly opted to do. In his absence, we loved him for that defiance of status quo.
My mother, Bless her, regarded him with total scorn in those years. She railed against his lifestyle whenever his name was brought up. She claimed he was “the black sheep of the family”—that he was “living off a woman” (who seemed to shrug off such commentary, by the way-- Lucy was cool back then…), he was not “making a living” doing what he did, and was not someone we should look up to… which only made us more intrigued. If he was the Black Sheep of the family, then why couldn’t we be Black Sheep too? That’s what I was thinking; I can’t vouch for my siblings. Since then, however, during the past decade, late in both of their lives, she had taken a softer, more appreciative approach, to the life he has lived—even buying some of his pieces to disseminate among the rest of us—which proves that disapproval can be overcome, even over the course of forty years or more.
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The painting in the back was a view of Unk (aka Paul Perras) back in the late 50’s, early 60’s, when he had the look of a beatnik, but not the affectations. It was painted by a guy who shared studio space in an orchard in Old Wethersfield, before he went to Oaxaca. The barn on that property where he later worked is being turned into the Wethersfield Center for the Arts, on John Buck’s Farm.
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When he first returned to Connecticut from his spell in Oaxaca, at roughly the same time I was getting done with high school, we were fascinated with his transition to full-time artist. He lived in a portion of a barn in an ancient orchard down near the river in Old Wethersfield, with cars whizzing by a hundred yards in the background, along the elevated highway. Massive canvasses of a friend who shared the space in that era were stacked against the wall, and some were tucked away in corn cribs alongside the main barn, he had produced so many. Jerry LePage was the guy who painted, and I think was also a jewelry artist, and though we never saw the other guy during the brief times we were there, we thought of the two of them as leftover beatniks, though my Uncle himself never once used that word, nor aspired to be one. He was not fond of rock, blues, or jazz music like we were, or like a beatnik would be, and he had missed the hippie thing altogether, though in Mexico that’s probably what the locals thought he was. He never claimed to be part of any movement but his own, in fact, and that’s what we liked about him, and what my mother did not.
This photo, from our 2006 visit to his studio, shows my Unk (Paul Perras) as a spry 75 year old guy, instructing Daryn & Miles Perras-- his grand-nephews--in the theory & fine art of operating a wooden camera he had carved. Note Daryn with short hair, and Miles with long hair, the opposite of 2009’s looks.
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From that same 2006 visit, Miles holds a laminated sculptural replica of one of Unk’s favorite pets of all time—the legendary Dachshund Fledermaus, a long-time member of the Paul Perras household in the Farmington River Valley, west of West Hartford, Connecticut.
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A view of Paul Perras’s laminated wood tribute to felines, a Panther ready to pounce. This piece is now in the collection of his most supportive sister, Arlene
Perras Fagan, of Cleveland, Ohio.
Since he first saw it, the Panther was one of Daryn’s favorite pieces—here he challenges the creature to a face-off, back on our 2006 visit
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After years of working as an X-ray technician, then studying to become a Chiropractor and doing that for only a year, ending a purportedly boring first marriage to a female military officer, and disappearing to a distant land for a long time—he had come back a fully committed artist. I don’t recall what he did to make money in those days, but he didn’t seem to need much. Doing what he wanted to do with his artwork is all that seemed important to him, pretty much for the rest of his next ten years, till he took his “part-time” job at Renbrook. From 1973 to 1998 he was prolific. While some of his great pieces were worked out as prototypes in Oaxaca, most of his best and most ambitious production occurred during the quarter-century between the age of 42 and 67. Only the bone cancer after that age slowed him, or I know he would be still pounding out projects till 90, as his heroes Pablo Picasso and Henry Moore, had done.
Even with most of his major works dispersed to friends, relatives, a few valued collectors, and the New Britain Museum (in storage, I’m told), there is enough remaining on the premises of his home studio to prove what he has accomplished during his life.
Unk started painting a lot circa 1996 during a trip to Santa Fe, when he was in his mid-60’s already. Above left is one of his canvasses from that period. Below that is one of his modified anvil/snail pieces (?) now in the collection of his sister Sueand brother-in-law Frank Reischerl. To the right is his classic reworking of a vandalized Virgin Mary, revealing, in velvety marble, the woman underneath.
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He has taught me perseverance of artistic vision, and the stubbornness required to persist in one’s work, whether fame or fortune are forthcoming or not. I’ll love him forever for that attitude more than anything.
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Unk grows pensive in his favorite reading chair while conversing with my wife Melinda, with many of his remaining pieces in the background, plus a caricature of him, above his head, by his friend Annabelle. Avon, Ct. 2009.
My Unk never had a child—much less multiple children-- of his own and thus had more time to indulge his art to the extreme, to the point where it consumed him fully every day, just as kids do for diligent parents. His works became his offspring, so to speak—perhaps none more symbolic than the image below: cryptically entitled, “The Boy in the Box.” Someday, when it is no longer painful to him, I may tell the story of what that piece meant to him, as he related it to me not long ago.
There is so much more I could say about him, and his influence on my life, but for now I will just publish this short piece on my own website to begin with, and hope that when people google his name from this point on, they will not merely come up with a Canadian sculptor, or a hockey player who happens to share the same moniker. He himself is one of a kind. and a specifically American version of an artist named Perras, whom I have been proud to call “Unk.”
Front view of “Boy in the Box”—an encased marble piece from the mid-70’s.
A side-view of “Boy in the Box” – pressing against the confines.
Unk gives us the thumbs up as we depart from his place in early August, 2009.
Copyright 2009 Wayne Perras
All text & pictures by Wayne Perras except as noted
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For a more comprehensive view of the sculptural works of Paul Perras, especially the marble pieces, you may click the following link, courtesy of the Picasa Web Album of Betty Friedman, used by permission:
You are invited to view Betty's photo album: Paul Perras
