Bill Epton

Bill Epton, Biography of an Object-Maker Birthdate: 02-08-36 Wewoka, Oklahoma

There are no prizes, honors or grants, just trophies of my own making.

Twice a Bachelor, first in Philosophy and in then in Painting, I went to New York City seeking my fortune; found frustration and started making objects – like the String Flag, an example of Pop imagery and minimalist construction that could be unfurled for instant demonstrations.

I did the Chess Set for Multiples Gallery (1966) Bill Epton . First Chess Set , 1958 or 1959 (age 21) “I realized that real chess players could play forty games blindfolded. They didn’t need a damn chess set. staunton design or whatever-it didn’t make a difference. So I just made the basic symbols on the stones, and I carved them with the dentists’ tool actually.. The chess pieces, the stones, came (after 1966) mostly from Riverstone, Maine.There was one beach with all black rocks, one beach with all red rocks …... there are some white beach Riverstone, too.The leather gathering pouch was part of the plan from the begining “

Marcel Duchamp bought from Multiples Gallery .and exhibited the Epton chess set “I.remember there was also exhibited certain works that were given to Marcel Duchamp, including (Max Ernst) and Merrit Oppenheim’s “eat the queen, Duchamp” which I liked (especially) because she baked a half a loaf of bread in the shape of the queen of hearts, (she said) “Mange la Dame, Duchamp”. The exhbit was called “A Cheque” which is the French for Check/Chess (?) at EastSide Gallery (in NYC) . Bobby Fisher was playing the Russians, Spasky, the first match. The reason for this DuChamp sponsored exhibit was to raise travel money for the American Chess Association.

I married Carolyn Brady in 1967 and we had a son Alexander in 1978. 1967 WEDDING Al Carmines of Judson Church officiating… at a wooden Dutch barn on Prince street near the Bowery where Carolyn and Bill were living. At the conclusion of the wedding festivites there was an Duchamp inspired spontaneous Epton happening : Bridesmaid for Carolyn in Bill and Carolyns wedding wearing a paper dress – provided the opportunity for a reversal of DuChamp’s big glass-”Bride is laid bare by her groomsmen”. In this case the Groom ripped off the paper dress of the Bridesmaid.. therefore” the bridesmaid is laid bare by the Groom” .

NEW YORK CITY ART -before fall 1968

THE LAMP ( portrait of Carolyn-perhaps – from found objects) ” that may be the first one( Epton sculpture) that was ever done, for the sewing dummy, came home, and it got the lamp for a head or bouffant, and it got a leaf, a fig leaf for a crotch. Which Cleansed it.(the fig leaf came later). ... it came home in two loads on top of the volkswagon, or in the volkwagon…and it got together when it came out of the volkswagon…it simply sort of naturally came together.Well maybe it is a vision of a female by a male too. I am not sure if I picked up the sewing dummy or the head. My guess is … Carolyn must have picked up the head. But it has been a part of our living room ever since.” Page 1

Christmas present for Carolyn 1964 Paper Mache painted block encasing multiple strands necklace made up of New York City subway tokens (heshi style).

The Winged Victory wax candle -the form for the mold was sculpted by partially eating an apple resulting in Nike of Samothrace Candles).

Statue of Liberty/Coke Bottle -small plastic sculpture multiples to be used as substitutes for religous dash board ornaments

hand painted cards sets (?)stevens should try to photo?)

A “what will go through the US mail” Package/mail Series . One was a wire edges only box—-empty space, with clear tape label, it did go through the mail,,, etc.

German Sheppard /wolf Head car fixture- attatcned to the back window of Volkswagan Beetle, on springs moving with the variations of movement of the car- head bobbing up and down in parody of current fad : head bobbing , white fluffy puppies whose eyes lit up with the brakes in the back of big American land yaychts.

Car fixture to dangle from mirror parody of Chili Peppers , in Italian neighborhood. Bill Epton version -a red middle finger.

Car fixture fixted to the steering wheel holding a fake wooden cigarette (painted as lit ) so that while driving it could be seen that one is smoking. Also, wooden cigarette butts in ashtrays, cut glass containers offering wooden filter cigarettes.

Plastic Pot Plant (1967), which was manufactured in Hong Kong and sold by mail order.

I did some art criticism on WBAI-FM in New York and came to terms with Pop Art and Subject Matter.

String Flag -for instant demonstrations ( also ? as-homage to Jasper Johns flag 1955)

1968 commercial American flag – picnic table cloth- altered so that the stars are sinking

PIG and the PANTHER PIN

1968-1974 After going back to school for a Masters in Art History at Washington University, I taught art history at University of Missouri, St. Louis, and began my self-definition as an artist by crossing Folk Art with Fine Art SAND CASTLE FIVE ROOM HOUSE SUBURBAN BLOCKS LAWN DOG Lawn Dog ( cement yard sculpture of dog defecating , in place of little black boy with ring, or pink flamingo’s )

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SAINT LOUIS GOLDEN ARCH While in Saint Louis- Bill made a simulated tourist fold-out set of”post cards “36 VIEWS OF THE ARCH (St. Louis) in FUJI CHROME COLOR as in reference to 36 VIEWS OF MOUNT FUJI A fold out tourist postcard package, photos taken in one day ~~every third of an hour~~ Epton: “I had scouted it out and knew what it was”.

SAINT LOUIS ARCH (wooden chain ~~carved from a solid block of wood into a chain-a folkart tradition~~ in the old days in Scotland young men must carve these chains for their intended – to hold off- getting married) ” the trick there is to carve that chain collapsed. And then stretch it out. . When you draw it on the piece of wood. its like a puzzel.. Well there was a welded version as well…. So I drew it in the collapsed version, and it expanded when it was welded…. I’ll take a folk art prototype, and try to do my own version of it. So I try to cross folk art and fine art, to see what I come up with.”

Also I did Peacepipe for Wounded Knee and Ball-Bearing Woman, knee-jerk reactions to current events. PIPES ” It’s a series in a sense, except that each subject came up independently, separately, years apart.” PEACE PIPE FOR WOUNDED KNEE-”knee jerk response to current events” The first one was the peace pipe from Wounded Knee, which was done while I was still in graduate school, and it showed at the museum in Washington University.

C’EST SI, C’EST UNE PIPE ” This is the one that looks like it’s in a clarinet case— So things come in cycles as it were.C’est si, c’est un pipe. [ that’s a reversion or reworking of the version of the surrealist painter Renee Magritte. He said “this is not a pipe” [Ceci n’est pas une pipe] it’s a painting of a pipe of course, that looks very much like a pipe. So I made a pipe, [that says] this is a pipe; this here is a pipe.Things go in circles, I guess.

LEAD PIPE “Here is a pipe and it looks like a lead pipe. It’s done that way with a fingernail file…..the threads of the screws in the pipe were done with that in mind, and with just vibration…......” . CORNCOB PIPE (ARE THERE TWO DIFFERENT PIPES DISCUSSED HERE?) ” That was(nt) the first one I guess. The first one … was the meerschaum pipe (it) was just carved out of a piece of pipestone that I bought as meerschaum. Normally it would be a corncob, because it was called a Missouri meerschaum, corncob pipes were. But this one’s really meerschaum, made to look like corncob..

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SMOKING GUN (before 1974?) The next one was the smoking gun after RJ Reynolds, I think it was, confessed to an interoffice memo recognizing that they knew that cigarettes were addictive.Well, it should have had cigarettes in the barrel. It’s a six-shooter. But as it was a smoking gun in the sense that a pipe is to be smoked….......(.except that it was talc used in the making of the smoking gun that’s blown out of the handle of the gun ..) But….. a smoking gun is a term that’s used for anybody who’s caught red-handed. And the cigarette companies were caught red-handed with the memos and so I made that gun to commemorate their statement .

BALL BEARING WOMAN ( portrait of Carolyn, PERHAPS ) sometimes called- The Venus of Bolton Hill - ” The Venus of Willendorf. That’s the ball bearing woman. And it turned out that in Baltimore I was able to cast this ball bearing because it was exactly the same size as a ping pong ball in plaster. The hard part was keeping the balls down when you submerged them under water, because they would tend to float, so you had to hold them down until the plaster got hard enough. The idea was to keep all five of the balls in touch with each other so you could work the balls at the breasts and through the belly and drive the buttocks. ...... I remember waking up …..and saying I know I can make a female. So I learned how to keep the balls submerged as I cast them, and to carve it down. It was different from Michelangelo, who said there was a figure in every piece of marble that he ever saw, in that I knew there was a figure because I had cast in there and I had to find it-that was it. Those were made for the museum; those were mounted as it were, in St. Louis.

1972 summer- Epton in El Rito New Mexico with broken left arm… LANDSCAPE ON INSIDE OF JAR painted inside out and backward a scene of El Rito front poarch onto the interior of a gallon pickle jar- as flour jar, with non-dominant hand.( B&R need to photograph )

VIETNAM SERIES * (date verification) Epton painted his first VietNam painting (with non-dominant hand)- Hippy girl (blue with multiple Shiva like arms) giving the Peace/victory sign) sitting naked in crosslegged meditation pose on inflatable floating red with stars cloud-the ultimate weapon- over a scortched earth of Vietnam and man and woman Vietnamese farmers in pointed straw hats, hands clasped ~~heads bowed….(need photo-from Stevens -then no need for this discribtion OR use Bills polorized version?) Bill~~” I Remember that one- one side of her hair that looks like George Washinton and the other side looks like Abraham Lincoln thats true… A Duchamp special—Well he just called a photograph that he made of a piece of scrreenwire that he had shaped to look like Washington and Lincoln…. I guess …a background piece..there

ARTIST RENDERING OF THE ULTIMATE WEAPON HOVERING IN POSITION, UNARMED AND PUNCTURE PROOF ” I made this post card for Richard Nixon which was called the Artist Rendering of the Ultimate Weapon Hovering In Position, Unarmed and Puncture Proof. There are several /( many) versions of the VietNam painting-? – leading to the post card to Richard Nixon ....there are others ? Photos page 4

CHRISTMAS CARD SERIES Epton: First card appears with a child and no one knew there was a child (well there wasnt one). The Next year we used my Father’s law partners house ..a big house with columns and it has five kids and a big dog.. in St. Louis.” (were there not several steps,we remember a build up of extra kids then the full on cast of 5? followed by realistic ones with Alex) “For the first one we went to a suburb -to a new house, they had lights on inside so it looked occupied. So we were walking up the side walk and this kid was trailing along ..maybe one of us had a hand on the child . Somebody took the picture and we had this rental house behind us. We borrowed the kid.” *( starting with Carolyn and Bill holding on to a Child ,not their own, though on commercial photo slot Christmas card (faked family grows year by year, expedential additions of many more children – progressivly bigger houses, kids all ages,and dogs.)

CHENILE BEDSPREAD OF NEW MEXICO LANDSCAPE *73 or 74 New Mexico landscape- painted 3 deminsional pinon and juniper bushes, painted on plain white, 3D chenile ,a folk craft bedspread.(see quilted landscape)

1975 – 2000 taught at Maryland Institute (Sculpture and Art History? ) Acting Head of the Sculpture dept. 1999 and ?

Teaching at the Maryland Institute College of Art for 25 years (from 1975), I learned the traditional techniques of sculpture;

casting a bronze medal for Patty Hearst, Citizen Tanya (1975)

a polished bronze of Arnold Schwarzeneggar,POLISHED BRONZE OF ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGARR, Physical Culture (1976).

Folk themes continued in other media, where the medium becomes the message: Figure Built Like a Brick Outhouse (1980)

We have had a summerhouse in Vinalhaven, Maine, since 1973. There the work seems based more on local craft: Laced Lobster Fish Net

Quilted Landscape ”..... when Alex was born,(1978) actually; a kid’s quilt. [The pattern] was taken from some aerial photographs, of a county in Maryland (that was) used to sell property … they said “do you want this with the creek on it or trees,” stuff like that…. The biggest fun with that was going around Vinalhaven to the lawn sales and then buying a pair of corduroys and cutting them up because you wanted the courduroy because you had a plowed field you had to do; so that was the biggest fun of all of it was buying this cloth with all the Vinalhaven ladies there buying for their quilts.”Interviewer: So it was a Vinalhaven experience-~~“-that’s true~~-... Well, I think it was from Arkansas because my father would say as we’d drive into Arkansas from Oklahoma which wasn’t very far but a long way if you count the detours, “It looks like a quilt doesn’t it on those hills.” And I’d say, “Sure Dad, sure.” And then later on I would have to make one. page 5

TIED FLIES “There’s (the) tied flies. Well I asked some guys at a hardware store how they tied a fly. And they said “well you have got to send off for some..” And I said “send off hell, I’ll just find some.” And the real problem was to get them without squishing them, cause you just slap them. I don’t think I slapped them out of the air, I just slapped them against myself. And the idea was to tie a fly, and to say, this place is occupied, buzz off buster.As if there was some territoriality amoung mosquitos.”

STYROFOAM COOLER (1978) carved out of Maryland white marble. Interviewer: Well, wait a minute, that’s not exactly folk art. It’s everyday stuff. [So] why marble?Epton: I am not sure. I am not sure, except that it has to do with debasement…. De-base-ment. Of something or other. A fine art idea into a folk art kind of trash. So fine art should NOT BE Separated from folk art. Everything has got some kind of double meaning like that. But it’s (Epton art) very often to see what happens if you cross a fine art with a folk art…...... ..... I was working on the coolers at the time, which was an imitation of Styrofoam, and they had made some bits for the drills that had diamonds and they were like [koora?]saws and so they made wonderful (little) holes…

In 1981 I took a sabbatical year, first to teach at the University of Lancaster, England, and then to Pietrasanta, Italy, to learn some of the language of the marble industry. Carved two more Ice Chests out of Carrara marble….....

Back in Baltimore, I carved a number of styrofoam packaging forms in marble. Finally down to marble chips, I carved Styrofoam Peanuts.

PHONETAP Tapped Phone for the 10th anniversary of Watergate out of Carrara marble. 1981/82 Bill: That was the first of the power objects as it were,...called Watergate. It was a watergate, sort of, it was a slow leak, it dripped. ...”

VIEW OF DELFT- AFTER VERMEER- ” Those plates are an attempt to recreate Johannes Vermeer who actually ran a bar in Delft and was a painter but apparently never had (anything) to do with Delftware. But I was in England until the 5th of October and we said what are we going to do? Might as well go to Holland then. And we went to Amsterdam, and from there we took the train to Delft, looked around and saw Johannes Vermeer and I went back to England and I made this Delftware from a mold that we got. You had to spin the clay then inside a mold, a plaster mold…. Sort of like porcelain anyway-a white ground. That was early attempts in Europe to imitate the porcelain in China that was imported. A couple of hundred years they tried to imitate it and they finally got it right, by trying but first there was New Yorker ware and then there was Italian stuff-Majolica…” I had(as reference) that painting of course, Johannes Vermeer’s View of Delft. I did my imitation…... after Vermeer .”. page 6

Carved a Tree of Liberty (1984) Vinalhaven out of a dead elm in front of my studio that has become a local landmark.

STATUE OF LIBERTY/COKE BOTTLE (note earlier dashboard ornaments) “For the first time, I made a sculpture on the grand scale. 11’ tall and I made the model at 1” equals 1 foot…. (during the carving…..And there was one woman, and I love(d) this because it gave me a chance to rest my arm, who came down (on Vinalhaven – a tall dead tree stump in front of the house being sculpted) and said ” I guess I lost because it looks (like) a Statue of Liberty Lady, from the front and I never saw that. My mother did, so I insisted that it was a Coke bottle and she insisted that it was the statue of libery.( it couldn’t be both of course! )” From one side it looks like that, and the other side it looks like a coke bottle. You can see around it, you can see the whole thing. ..(there was) a whole group of people who lived up our road that did not like it ,but it had become a landmark. And there were three or four fishermen that surrounded me at a wedding and they said “listen, you made that coke bottle, right? ” “yes” . And it scared me to death. They said” Well, dont worry about it”. And I said Okay, I won’t. I promise. ” Sculpture. SCREEN SCULPTURE background… Another series that I did, and that was kind of a series, the screenwire, and that was thought up by a lot of art history. re: window screen folk art tradition in Baltimore… Somebody had made a movie about the screens of Baltimore, where they had painted the screens and not allowed the globs of lead paint to stop the screen holes, the squares of the weaving, ..... it let light in, but you couldn’t see out, ....it still offered.some .privacy…..” re:ideas for screen wire pieces….. ” Everybody claims to be the” body “behind them, but the truth is, it was a research project in a sense. What I was trying to do .. was holographic drawings, where you could see it was memory and time involved. And so you sort of made it up in your head. As you shifted or as you blinked, or looked out it with your left eye or right eye or something like that. And I had recently found a bunch of drawings of those, they were sort of studies for the….. ...Screenwire.(pieces), and they were transparent. That is to say you could see the hands on the backside of the breast or the buttocks. I was really surprised at that myself. and ?does this fit? here,perhaps not”..... But one tried to draw three dimensionally always, getting the backside of the arm, and all that. So you tried to do that, and you tried not to just make it a physical imprint of the piece on a piece of paper. Tried to get some liveliness in it…....re:making the screenwire pieces ”.....it takes about a day of standing on your head and not making a decision, but deciding, nonetheless, that the arm has to go there to take up extra screen. Took me a long time to figure out that a female was an hourglass shape, so I would pre-form the screen and then the males were more toroidial., the males were basic truncated cones really. Tapered from top to bottom. .....and The first day was spent trying not to make it wrinkle in the screen, and the second day was spent in finalizing some stuff and sometimes you could get back into them on a third day, but sometimes you’d just have to throw them away. page 7 That’s sort of the underdone one, but I kind of got there before I realized it.I mean to say that I didn’t spend as much time on that one, cause the final folds are not very deep. But once you get one in there, you don’t change it, so that’s the end of it. That’s either the second or the third day Zip Me or Zip Me Honey- but you cant call that honey anymore]. Is it the one who has the arms twisted behind the neck and behind the, she’s trying to grab the zipper at the top. Now clearly I had to draw the hands from the other side even though I drew the figure from the front, I drew the hands through the figure, because it was an important part of the pose. Pinocle – a male… Pulling up her Stockings.. ” I guess the title is (is not?) important on that one. Well, it seems the purpose of the whole peice is the similarity of the ScreenWire to Stockings -the moire between the two…... ” In the Jeans/ genes ? need to go find more from tape1,2 or 3…...... others? BUT during the 1st sabatical.it sounds like-.. we have this following comment -sounds like these pieces were started earlier that ‘81 then? ”.somebody in Britain had seen the slides of these things up North, in one of the universities that I showed in, taught in. And he went back to London and said hell I can do that,” so he hired a bunch of models and he did that. He had a hardware cloth problem, because it was a lot harder to do than screenwire, and then he shipped it to New York and they sold it.And then in that same gallery we found some gal who had knocked off one of Carolyns’s paintings tooThey said they don’t care if it had been done first by somebody else, just what sells is what counts.

re: some of the pieces( titles): CYA.  Cover your ass.

I began to carve an international series of terrorists bombs in about 1986: two Pineapples (GI term), Molotov Cocktail (Russian for mallet) and Granada (Spanish for pomegranate-grenade).BOMBOTANY SERIES Bombotany. It’s a word I made up.re: the Grenada)..... I remember that there was a piece of granite that was red that was cast off on Mount Royal avenue, and that was just used as a doorstop.(—but not red enough he says later…) That is a pomegrenade… in Spanish is called a grenada. You may have to look at the mirror in the bottom of the plexiglass box to see the grenada on it…..the word for both an island and for the granite pomegranate, and for the handgrenade.re:the Pineapples….And these pineapples were the same kind of thing. They were pineapples, which were what the GI had for a nickname for the pineapples that he threw at the Japanese. Handgrenades. And I think it was a welcomer, or a symbol of good fortune or something like that in American painting…. Well if you’re going to do something like this, you’re going to spend a lot of time at it, and you’re going to spend a lot of time thinking about it, as you spend time trying to fix it up, dress it up. So you might as well have something to think about while you are at it, so you get to talking to yourself all the time…....re: teaching) At the same time I was leading classes in carving, trying to give away these ideas, but it didn’t happen. I don’t know if anyone did take it up. Except somebody did try to make some cherries, a cherry pie out of cherry woodre: a bomb that .. looks like a Benedictine in brandy, or a B&B as we used to call it. But it’s not, because it’s just got green paint, dipped in hot wax page 8 Lead Soldiers, modeled after famous photographs. DEAD LEAD SOLDIERS ”.. It’s in the pun almost, “dead lead,” Thought about as tin in Britain, where they came from, they were a little bit smaller… these are like three or five inches. And of course the only place I could get dead ones was in the history books of photography. Because when we played with them, we would (have) said, okay, pretend I am a new guy, and we would just stand up the guy, whether we were a cowboy or an Indian it didn’t make a difference, and we would be a new guy. So you never got any dead ones. Which was the story about war, as far as I could understand….”. ” I … make them out of wax to start with. That’s why they are so general. General as (Did not want )to make them very precise -with mouth, and nose, and the eyes and everything to show as such, but it was kind of generalized, cause I wanted to back up a bit ….from the closeness to the photographs….”

I cast a set of Dead

Then in 1989 I made some model tankers after the Exxon Valdes, one with a limerick on it and the other built of Legos, Ship in a Bottle filled with oil and saltwater. There was a young lady from Valdez Who worked for the corporate striptease She cleaned beaches with bleaches And petrochemical leeches And won the award of the golden fleece

THE VALDEZ IN A BOTTLE.

“The parts are Lego. And I first dropped the part that kept it bottom side higher, which is lead, and it broke the glass of another bottle. And there is a secret to this, the way it was made, which was alligator clips and a chain on the end of a welding rod, all welded together, so I would take the piece in with an alligator clip and pull the chain and release it once it was stuck. And the secret weapon is that the edge of the bottle itself was something you could push against to get the lego to stick together…So for building the ship in the bottle, you had the bottle as the anvil as well as the tool that carried it. And that’s how that came about. And then I had to get this surface between the saltwater and the oil, and that is real oil and real saltwater. I had to show it up as some greenish stuff so I has to put watercolor through it. (Its the) ocean, the sea, and the oil was pretty much that color, kind of amber”

I Carved a Banana Republican, fully armed, out of a two-tree trunk. BANNANA REPUBLICAN ” It was a double icon image of ... Coatlicue -the Aztec Goddess of life, death and rebirth.) As American industrialists began to sell their product abroad, finance the wars, I got into the action by making the Banana Republican. Banana Republic started off as a company that was reselling war material for expeditions to Inca City ….(?) page 9

re: backgroung for the piece…an Epton collage….” the birds from one of the comic strips..~~I’ve forgotten which~~ that showed the bird with an American bat.- Kamakazi bat- that said “dressed by (American Republic-) Banana Republic” and ” One of the pieces I had photographed up in the studio(in Maine) was a double eagle and I had carved it all together until it fell apart when I brought it to Baltimore to my home. It pushed off in the compost pile, off the truck, and it fell in two. Then I realized it was two trees grown close together or three maybe. And I had to bolt it together with a four-foot threaded bolt and some washers at one end-at both ends actually-and then it was tightened up, and as it was tightened up the two sides came together…”.

Started a series of Fig Leaves (1990) for the embarrassment of the National Endowment for the Arts and a bronze Jockey Strap (1991).

FIG LEAF SERIES (maybe needs a bit of reference about use of fig leaves…....by the Popes to cover Greek and Roman nude statue’s genitals- for probrietys sake…) plus More info about this series from Bill or just let the photographs stand…of course! Bill’s comment “the pope(’s) had it by the tail and knew it!

GROIN VAULT -KEYSTONE (fig leaf series) There is one of those I would like to do again, and I would like to do it large. There is a part of a gothic vault, and it’s called a groin vault…)and re: to the existing granite keystone with carved fig leaf…. ” It’s a granite piece that I have not finished yet and it was supposed to be finished by a Groin Vault …. (cut up into stones- I decided finally with a saw- so it would fit togather nicely and this center peice (the key stone) would be “The Crotch of God in the Groin Vault, covered by a Fig Leaf of course. ” Refering to a Fig Leaf peice :” It’s probably bronze. So I would very often grow the leaf, coat it with wax and cast it in bronze and in that case it looks I probably welded it some. ” Everything has got some kind of double meaning…. like that. But it (Epton’s art )is very often to see what happens if you cross a fine art with a folk art. Like the folk phrase of “boob tube.” And that’s (done in) fine art materials… the boob tube was both in bronze and aluminum. And I had to learn to weld, and I had to weld well enough to get the two halves put together. Everything else was done on top of a real tv tube. The boob tube was just a bunch of clay on top of a dead television tube. And of course I had the tube out of the box, that’s the reason I had the back end of it, and the aluminum one is just as fine as the bronze ones, it’s just not the same thing to cast, except that wax was used in the lost wax process.

THE BOOB TUBES

SEA SHELL HEAD PHONES ” The kids at school (Bill students at Maryland Institute of Art) were wearing them (headphones ) and they’d say “keep on talking, Mr. Epton-believe I can hear you” and you could just hear their earphones going Ahh -thump, thump, thump…. Well, I’d say turn that off to listen to me.” Epton did wear the sea shell head phones to school once. page 10

MARBLE HEAD -after found styrofoam sunglass or wig model ” I found that in the street—I didnt know what that was used for – a styrofoam head crotch marks for sunglasses …..”

TV FOOTBALL ” Bamboo TV antenae on a wooden football helment with ...copper water pipe- (guard)easy to braise it, and change the color as if it were Bronze …...... “

J. S. BACH BOX….A found object altered by Epton (lots of things like this, just not around?)

EPTON’S TOPIARY PROJECT OF SEURAT’S SUNDAY AFTERNOON ON THE ISLAND OF THE GRAND JATTE

In 1993 I took a sabbatical to the South of France. My goal was to sell the French on the idea of a Topiary Seurat in boxwood for the island of Jatte in the Seine. The first part of the pitch was a set of Seurat figures, Twenty Castings in aluminum packed in a salesman’s case. The second part was a set of Twenty Armatures for the topiaries at one fifth scale. Couldn’t sell the French anything.

” I made the forms for her (the standing lady with the umbrella and little dog in foreground of the Seurat painting). She was the standard for the measurments for the whole project. Iron forms, 2 meters tall, counting the umbrella, which could slip out of her hands. Alex and I drove in to Paris and we installed her temporarily on the Island of the Jatte. I remember that the Secretary for the Arrondisment (must check -this sp?the correct word ?) said ” I know you, I know who you are-Don’t Come Back! THEY DID NOT UNDERSTAND POP ART at All in France!

HAT STAND/self portrait of Bill Epton, ...as his father,HICKS EPTON dressed in suit and tie, etc.sometimes called: Agent Orange ( Vicky was looking at placement on page ~~pictures and comments – The Hat stand and the Lamp -side by side on the page~~-Bill- should the peices be grouped chronological strictly ?or like this idea -something that might go togather for other reasons?) “That’s the original Mr. Epton. He was a little bit shorter than I was. And I admit to a certain likeness there, family likeness. That was Osage orange, which is a wood that was found in Oklahoma, Kansas, and Texas, and was originally planned to be [the] first barbed wire because it had four-inch thorns on it and was guaranteed to keep the goats out and the hogs in if you wanted it to; This one [Hicks Epton] has a hole bored in the left hand. The right hand is extended to shake hands, and the left hand can be carrying a cane or a briefcase or an umbrella-whatever-because he was always a businessman.(and lawyer). He wore a hat similar to the one I replaced on the head there. .... it lives near the entrance to the house and it’s a hat stand ….”

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(what are some of these, should they all be shown? where do they go in terms of the chronological order?)

Bill: Lena Horn. Yes. string around the finger, a string etc…..(what is this?)

APPLES (bronze)

FLINT ARROW HEADS -HEARTS, SPADES, DIAMONDS AND CLUBS (also Hand Made Bows and Arrows )? THE KAYAK

ZIPPER HANGER refering to the zipped hanger- “that I think of in terms of learning how to sew. she (Carolyn )said this is stupid; it doesn’t even work. It was supposed to be a Moi_bius strip, so the idea was what would happen to a clothes hanger if you sewed it together through its full length to another one, so it’s two clothes hangers as one, masquerading as one.

Cast IRON CAPTAINS CHAIR (disquised as wood-with a painted faux wood finish -date? this a reference to Baltimore folk art ?)

CARDBOARD VALISES (date -title, etc?)

REFRIGERATOR MAGNET PROJECT Unfinished refrigerator game… Non- alcholic or Alcholic magnet caps, or European or Domestic…..?(photo of Bill’s fridge -to include just some of the resust of Bill’s constant making of objects)

A re- filled toothpaste tube, crinkly used toothpaste tube filled with plastic foam.(stevens can photo)

THE THREE DEMISIONAL PUZZEL (this may be out of place in terms of time and magnitude? ” I thought of the space of the world as being A B and C and I thought o the space of a three deminsional puzzel as being a head and shoulders- two different ~~separate~~ pieces that fit togather as parts of a Jigsaw Puzzel. And I try to make that A B andC in planes from each section where you didn’t cut it in the middle too small, it fit back togather just right so it didn’t fall apart, there’s a narrow gap that is just right. AND /OR use… “Bronze and Aluminum Puzzels both of which were made (from) styrofoam cube which had been sawed out with a band saw and ~~(it’s) a jigsaw puzzel from one side then there is the other~~ one that’s positive an one negative from Three different angles and so the question was could you get it with out any significant pieces falling off being irrelevant or could you get it with more successive pieces all about the same size….... ”

Bill, and Alex - what have we forgotten that has a photo?

page 12

CAPITALISM, IRONIC ORDER I.Carved a column out of marble that looks like my metal trash can; called it Capitalism (Ironic Order) 1996. (this trash can’s column’s capital classified :Greek Ionic order ?) The whole point was to satirize, “iconisize” the whole idea of Capitalism ….of capitalizing on the sales of … that stuff… digital equipment….... .......the largest the piece of sculpture I moved out of the studio (it) was fifteen hundred pounds, and it was an iconic version of the trash can, that was the Macintoshes. So it became the recycling bin of course. And somebody asked me ‘well what order was it?’ Actually, it was a student that said Ironic, and I devised that as the title of it. Post-facto. But it was a trash can to start with, and I had to make it a little bit larger to make it look right, somehow. So I added about nine iches to it, and I had them copy it.at Jonathan Attalier (sp?) And then they copied it by putting it on a lathe, and turning it very slowly, and reading the infra-red dots, where it existed in space there is a red light that hit the piece. And once they got the ones and zeros in the computer, they could enlarge it by nine inches one way, the tall way, and it would proportionally enlarge it by three or four inches the other. So they enlarged the whole piece out of a better piece of marble than I had. Course I had to make the marble opaque, so some of it I had to paint white, as it were. It was all white anyway, but still, some of it were transparent crystals, so I had to make it white, so it would reflect the light, so they could carve it. They still got that data somewhere, so they could make another one.

“POWER OBJECTS”—CELL PHONE ” Because everybody had one on. And in fact the first time I wore it [his sculpted one] to school, I said I would wear a piece of sculpture all along, and damned if my boss (friend and head of sculpture at Maryland Institute Art Benson)didn’t have one on-a real, working cell phone. I think they were just power objects as it were.. It was an assignment I used to give to the students to carve and I remember one lady had come into the school in September with these very hot boots on-and they were really hot-and she would come in and take it off, take one of them off, always the left one I guess and start carving it in wood-elm I think was what they had free that year, and she carved a boot-let me see if I can remember what the name of it was a Frye boot. They are power objects in the sense that they were four-sided or six sided and [?] manufactured in multiples. ......., and I think I got the term from African sculpture, where they were doing elephants and stuff like that as power objects, clearly, sculptures of them as power objects. And I had this idea that you could make power objects in our culture, including Frye boots and stuff like that.”

BASEBALL PITCHERS (these were made – when?) ” ...... that was the last time that the Orioles won the penant in the American League, and I was listening to that on the radio, and the Pirates beat them in the World Series when they won the penant.(1989) (It was) the first thing I tried to do that after I got the Parkinson’s disease, I could still manipulate, I could still draw things…... ” I think that a part of the input was, the fact that I would say “look at this pitcher by Manet” and then they (the students) said “that’s picture Mr.Epton, picture” and I think it was my accent that was the problem.. ......maybe .made them (the Pitchers) in defence….” page 13

re: the Pitchers…. Well originally it was done in clay, and it was held in casted, because it was casted the first time and the porcelain … came out sort of sloppy and floppy, and you had to turn them upside down, and I should have taken a clue of that, because my first nine pitchers all went in the slump. The same, because they were all standing on one leg, because the other leg was up in the air, and so I had to fire them upside down.. re: using photos ?”....the image was something that I had in my head I guess. So I just tried to draw it as complicated as possible, as simple as possible, to get it out of a two piece mold. A plaster mold, that’s what I made. ... two piece mold. I have been thinking about doing again, I cant do it anymore. I can’t. I tried.”

CLEMENTINE ” Oh my darling, Clementine. She is lost and gone forever, dreadful sorry Clementine. Oh my darling, oh my darling, oh my darling, Clementine. Rosy lips above the water something like that, and her shoes were number 9. That was the last one I did- the two Clementine boxes.Now that is a (?) form. I didn’t want to get my feet all gunked up with that stuff, so I had to make an inner mold, which is like a dentist’s mold, like he makes of your mouth, everything is stick-proofbecause it’s wet. It’s exactly number nine, cause my feet are number nine. And the students were just thrilled to see me, well they said “let’s see you tie that knot again,” on my shoes, because they imagined some kind of Velcro thing, or a rip stop. They didn’t know that somebody still tied their shoes or boots. But these are great because it’s good to stand with them, and you get a very broad basis of understanding that way.”

MEMORIAL GRAVESTONE CARVINGS I finally started a legitimate business carving memorial inscriptions in the granite ledges of Maine. ” The biggest problem …. I got one sponsor that had six gravestones-carved out at the factory out of bluestone that they make (or used) in Brooklyn for the pavements, the sidewalks. And the reason they couldn’t use it (for anything else) is because you couldn’t carve it in the old days. It would dull the chisels, but nowdays we’ve got chisels that are carbide. And they are fortunately guided by the left hand which was the first hand to get this palsy, this shaking palsy, the resting palsy (the Parkinsons). But it would still follow my command. I would tell it to move and just tap, tap with the right hand and guiding the chisel with the left and so I thought I had it made. But then I can’t do that any more either. So, I’ve got five of the six original gravestones finished. As it turns out, most of the people were living, except the original ones- Elliot and his wife Joan Tower. ... he had a Nikon that was his symbol…..... I had to carve that circular center which was the lens but (it) turns out that most of that dimension, though it seems quite big, was really the shadow, the umbrella that shadowed the lens. And the next one I did was his wife Joan Tower’s, who preciptated this whole business by getting her gravestone carved. She had a little rose that was given her by Elliot on some occasion and it always blooms on that occasion, her birthday, maybe,,,, So that was just an art drawing-...,to re-draw that horticultural drawing and to carve it. And from then on it was the matter of getting the living to agree on their own epitaphs which was really hard to do. So I had three living people then- Elliot was a dead one and Joan was a dead one , so I didn’t have to argue with them….....” page 14

We retired to Manhattan on 8 September 2001. Pre 9/11,

I built a model of the WTC Twin Towers for storing CDs

TWIN TOWER BUDDHA submitted a drawing for the WTC replacement based on the cliff-carving of the Buddha at Bamiyan, destroyed by the Taliban. - The last drawing I did….... the Buddha that was destroyed by the Taliban and that Buddha had a balloon that said it was unarmed and puncture proof as imagined as a replacement (monument) Architecture for the contest the New York Times was having for a replacement for the World Trade Center.

For the Objects Show at A.R.T., NYC (2002) I carved a number of soaps from soapstone (of course): Soapstone, Ivory, Lava, Dial-Dali and Stone-Soup. .. “lava.” That was the hardest one of course because it was easy to break. I had assigned it to my students and I finally, since nobody took me up on it, I decided well I’ll do it myself. Dial was Dali, and for a Spanish-speaking person who was a dyslexic Dial-and it says Dali on the other side. Stone Soup was the last one I did. And that was out of a slated stuff. .This is repeating stuff not in a series but in a cycle-the pipes. The pipes keep showing up again and again…... the word “soup” is inside out or mirror writing…..Well, it’s not logical but there it is.

The latest thing I’ve done is an illustration for Stephen Hawking’s book, The Universe in a Nutshell, (English walnut, of course). The universe is a “Brane” inside, or grey-matter (made of plumber’s epoxy, 2004).”

I’ve been around so long, much of what I’ve done has been knocked off. Traveling shows leave a trail of look-alikes. And the titles seem to be genetic material. Conceptual Art propagates. Publish and Perish. .”...... I was trained to be an abstract painter, and then pop art came along, and it seemed to be the freedom of everybody. Sort of a declaration of freedom, not to try to paint out the faces, if you ended up with faces or something, but to paint them in.”

and ...where could this go?

re: Influence of Pop Art ( ....OR Conceptual Art?) ”..... because it is a play of image and word that goes throughout the works(Epton’s). I think that that would not have been possible in the abstract expressionist mode, which we were all brought up in.”