Paul Varga
Sculptor carves a niche in bronze
By Beth Anne Piehl
Photography by G. Randall Goss
For the past 36 years, I have never noticed that if you look at the rungs of a chair, the empty spaces make shapes.
Go look.
See?
While the rest of us are busy looking at objects at face-value, Paul Varga has been concentrating on the voids, on the trapped spaces that create interest and define figure and form. “I immediately look at the trapped shapes,” Varga said. “The trapped shapes are as important as the physical structure.”
That, of course, is why he’s the artist here, and why the long-time teacher’s students in Pellston won awards and recognition regularly for their work — because he told them the secret of where to start.
It’s one he’s known for decades himself. And even in retirement, Varga can’t help but teach; he enthuses on this day about his influences, reading verbatim from an old newspaper article about defining art; reviewing the biographies and famous sculptures by historical artists that inspire him; and passionately pointing out angles for viewing and coming to understand his own sculptures.
“Within each piece,” Varga notes, “I strive to create a sense of balance and harmony by incorporating variations in line and by the interplay of positive and negative space.”
Varga, 58, is a sculptor of the human form. Only sometimes, the sculptures don’t look like humans until Varga gets down on the floor next to one and does a hurdler’s stretch, or curves his arm around his head in pose. Oh yes, now we see it. But he’d never do that unless asked; he prefers viewers to form their own conclusions about what they’re seeing.
“All of my sculptural forms initiate and evolve from the human figure,” Varga said. “Each piece represents a sense of humanity and the individual or collective strength of mankind.”
Inside his Alanson home studio and workshop, Varga begins his pieces with a sketch of a human involved in some sort of action: yoga, gymnastics, running, contemplating. He reduces those sketches down through a series of drawings to basic form and posture. From that final drawing, he molds a maquette (a small statue) from clay or carved in plaster.
Using the 3-dimensional models for reference, each maquette is then carved in wood (yellow birch, black cherry and black walnut), sometimes emphasizing curves for females and angles for males; other times, the sculptures are gender neutral.
Many of his sculptures that are sold are cast in bronze at foundries in southern Michigan and Colorado, to the client’s preferred scale (they’re hollow inside, fyi).
He does not sell the wooden molds, which are smooth as silk from an oil rubbed over their surface, and he prefers his bronzing to be done in a reddish-brown patina that reflects his adoration of all things natural.
Among his crowning achievements is a 9-foot archform in bronze at an area estate (see photo, contents page).Th e outdoor sculpture, commissioned by the homeowners, consists of two independent biomorphic forms that come together in the center, symbolic of two people joining.
“In a final analysis,” Varga writes in an artist’s statement, “the archform is meant to be an anthropomorphic metaphor as a building block of understanding for any peoples, races or nations, to overcome their differences and form a new union together of understanding and peace.”
Even if, as exemplified in Varga’s sculptures, there’s some space between them.
Filling in the blanks
The artist: Paul Varga Workshop/home studio: Alanson
Teaching career: 1986- 2008, Pellston High School art teacher (he began his teaching career in 1973, in other districts)
Sculpting background: Although he finds drawing and printmaking to be rewarding facets of his artistic process, Varga said most of his studio time is concentrated on sculpture. His sculpting work has paralleled his teaching career from the early 1970s through present.
Influences: The greats, if you know where to look: Archipenko, Brancusi, Lipchitz, Maillol and Moore, plus the Cubism movement of early 1900s sculpture.
Art lesson of the day: Cubism, defined — “Form fractured into discontinuous planes.”
Biomorphic abstraction — “Animate forms reduced to essentials.”
View his work
Paul Varga’s sculptures are on display at a number of galleries, including locally:
- Gallery on Main, 4184 Main St., Bay Harbor
- Crooked Tree Arts Center, 461 E. Mitchell St., Petoskey
- Knox Galleries, 175 Main St., Harbor Springs (and the store’s Colorado location)
Out of the area, his work is on show at the Ann Arbor Arts Center, Saper Galleries in East Lansing and TRA Art Group in Troy.
He also designed the Eddi Awards, given to local artists annually during the Crooked Tree Arts Center yearly recognition event.
paulvargabronzesculpture.com