Sept. 11 Monument Sculpture to be ready in Time

Post Star 8/27/2011

Wilton Sept. 11 monument to be ready in time for anniversary

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WILTON -- When officials with the Wilton Fire Department received a long-awaited piece of the former World Trade Center, they weren't exactly sure what to do with it.

So they took it to an artist.

Michelle Vara, a sculptor in the town for 25 years, went to work on the twisted section of a steel I-beam the department had requested roughly four years ago.

"They said, ‘Use your judgment. Make it a sentence. Make it a statement,'" Vara said.

The sculpture - and the metals she added to it, each with its own meaning - will be displayed at the firehouse on Ballard Road in time for the coming 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.

It's smaller and less controversial than the towering metal sculpture Saratoga Springs officials recently backed away from displaying in front of City Hall.

Vara, who operates 6 Ballard Road Art Studio Gallery, said her piece has a different feel. She said it's one of "positive retrospect," and that she was drawn to the unity she saw after the Sept. 11 attacks.

"Some really awesome things came out of an awful event," she said. "The camaraderie of human existence is mind-blowing - how people took care of their neighbors."

While most of the metal in the sculpture was deliberately rusted by Vara, one piece was not: a piece she bent into a circle. It stands out with a silver shine in the sculpture.

"The circle represents unity, how everyone came together and how people worked together - people from all walks of the Earth," she said.

One of the legs is wavy and inconsistent with the others, which she said represents the questions that remain unanswered about the disaster.

Firefighter Ray Bailey, who requested the piece of metal years ago when he was the department's president, got a glimpse of it for the first time Friday.

"I think it's wonderful," he said. "I think it's very expressive, and I think she did a good job conveying the energy and the emotion."

He said it was a meaningful coincidence that, after waiting years to find out if the department would receive the metal - and then a few more to actually get it - it arrived just months before the 10th anniversary of the attacks.

When it's put on display, the department plans to incorporate a multimedia showing of a decade-old project called "Through the Eyes of a Child," Bailey said. It consists of letters written by young children of firefighters in the department reflecting on the attacks shortly after they happened.

Many of the children who wrote those letters, Bailey said, are now firefighters.

Posted in Local on Friday, August 26, 2011

Sculptor to bring new life to old metal

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Michelle Vara says she enjoys when a piece fights her to "get the conversation out." An artist for more than 35 years, Vara, of Ballard Road Art Studio in Wilton, says metal sculpting is not only her job, but her life.

  Grinding, cutting and pounding pieces into shape, she welds them together, working to express "a flow and dimension beyond words." The rigidity and resilience of the material is why she chooses the medium adding that once the metal is "concurred," it is soft and subtle enough to convey deep meaning to a variety of audiences.

Integrated into many of her sculptures are items with a history: A hammer used for years by a stone-mason friend who has passed on, an egg basket whose owner simply adored her chickens, a piece of keepsake glass saved for years and brought from one continent to another. Vara says she enjoys not only the hunt for the piece, but the story of the piece, and by integrating these items they lend "new life to a new project."

  Vara is constantly sketching ideas for projects. Her library contains more than 3,000 sketchbooks of concepts, some realized, many yet to come to fruition. She says her ideas never end because the world starts anew every day.

Exploring Gray

Funny- The color of weather influenced my direction as an artist at this time.


  My style is normally very colorful but in this time I have explored the grays brought on by February. The white in color has stimulated 8 new painting.  My first thought of exploring the interiors of expression using little or no color was that it would be confining and limited to me.  But quite the opposite happened I found it freeing and intoxicating.  I started and I didn’t want to stop.

So you painters a fun thing to try is pick a color and stay within its values.

Thanks!

Thoughts as an Outsider Artist

I have now spent 2 weeks in NYC, the question multiple times was raised-


“How do you perform your technique being you don’t have a degree”.

Scholars who think all is learned in a controlled paid enviorment have appalled me.

This has left me to examine- Is it possible that a degree has blinded your free thought?

When you get a degree do you stop the quest for knowledge?

With that degree do you stop choosing/ thinking/ feeling for yourself?

I am an artist with that I spend every moment of my time creating and educating myself for the next opportunity to manipulate reality by creating art. I apply fine craftsmanship and quality to find pride and importance in achieving the finished piece. My life of experience, labor and long hours should be obvious though my art and the visual statements made. It to me is insulting to hear that a degree is the end of learning or the only way to learn. One must know how to work in order to accomplish. The process should never end till death. An artist needs to be all things for dimension of art and thought to flow from the soul. Education is a daily practice of personal enlightening thought and action for out come. Radically different than a scholar who passively looks and judges. The artist puts them self and their thought out in the public, exposed. These process alone a difficult task. Then we artist are expected to be excellent writers, managers, accountants, social lights, blogers, shrinks and more.

To then be judged by the ones who don’t do!

I ponder and take online classes for the scholars to except me into their art world.

Yet I am left wondering what will it be next that I have not done for there liking.

I flounder to maintain the time to create and feed my creative process and struggle with what I am told I should be in order to achieve success.

All of this to re-acquaint my identity-

I am my vast bulk of work.

My achievements.

My successes.

My failures.

I am an Artist!

Look/ see/ feel the work.

I am an Artist!

Respect me.

I am an Artist.

React to the work.

I am an Artist.

My degree is My Work.

I am an Artist.

Whose art world is it really?

The one who lives it?

I am an Artist.