Perhaps best known for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial's Three Soldiers and The Creation Sculptures at Washington National Cathedral, sculptor Frederick Hart's great love as a child was drawing. "I drew pictures in my notebooks instead of paying attention in school. One of my mother's favorite stories is her memory of giving me a spanking for drawing a naked lady"Ña sweet irony when you consider that Fredrick is now viewed as a champion of the classical human form.

Born in Atlanta, Georgia, and raised in South Carolina, Hart admits that, "Southern culture by nature is very romantic, and I've carried a lot of the romantic viewpoint into my adult life and work." The word romance, hackneyed and vulgarized as it is, expresses less inadequately than any other term the kind of charm offered by poets, novelists, painter and sculptors who emphasize passionate love, or mysterious and supernatural experiences, remote and exotic places, extravagant characters and heroic events. Consider for example Hart's epic work, Ex-Nihilo (Out of Nothing), at the Washington National Cathedral. According to Hart's biography, "The sculpture consists of eight larger-than-life size figures emerging into existence from a 21-by-15 foot Ôprimordial cloud,' as if by a dream. . .He envisioned a great allegorical work which would evoke the heroic struggle for awakening and consciousness." Likewise, Three Soldiers, which was added to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in 1984 to mollify critics who felt that Maya Lin's original design was too unconventional, offers profoundly realistic animated character compositions. Moreover, there are numerous other works such as Transcendent and Echo of Silence that emphasize passion and mystery, themes found throughout Hart's catalogue raisonne.

Hart's studies originally focused on drawing and painting between 1960-66 when he attended the University of South Carolina, Columbia, the Corcoran School of Art, and the American University, Washington, D.C. But when Hart was 23, his interest shifted: "I wanted to do a sculpture head when I was about 23. Sculpture is really just drawing with weight and volume and gravity and mass and form. My first work was a portrait head of a girlfriend" Ñ a decision that reflects the romantic spirit destined to rise in his work. In 1966, Hart began an apprenticeship with the Gianetti Studio of Architectural Sculpture where he was discovered by veteran Italian stone carver Roger Morigi. As Morigi's apprentice, Hart worked with the master as a stone carver for the Washington National Cathedral. He toiled much as the stone carvers of medieval Europe, fashioning decorative elements such as egg-and-dart molding in stone from the architecture's drawings. Then he graduated to the more highly skilled labor of chiseling ornamental bosses, specific reliefs and even whimsical gargoyles.

In 1971, Hart left the Cathedral to work in a private studio, where he began sketches for the Cathedral's international competition to commission the design of a series of "Creation" sculptures for its main facade. In 1974, Hart was awarded the project that was finally dedicated in 1982, two years before the entire facade was complete. In addition to Ex-Nihilo, The Creation Sculptures include The Creation of Day, The Creation of Night, Adam, St. Peter, and St. Paul. For Hart, the Cathedral work is still the most "thrilling period of my career. It is an enormous work with so much weight and splendor. It was a constant inspiration." Both this Cathedral work and the Vietnam sculpture are reflections of Hart's life-long crusade to pursue the techniques of the Renaissance masters. In the wake of an era in American art that celebrated abstraction and deconstruction, Hart's work has served as a beacon for the classical masters who studied, celebrated and idealized the lifelike human form. Hart has been rewarded for his diligence. Since 1982, his career has soared, encompassing everything from an appointment by Ronald Reagan to the Commission of Fine Arts in 1985 to a private ceremony in 1997 with Pope John Paul II where Hart presented his Holiness with The Cross of the Millennium.

Hart's work at the Washington National Cathedral also fostered a more literal romance. It was during the project that he met and married Lindy Lain. "She posed for the cathedral work. Everybody thinks she poses for everything I do now because so much of my work looks like her." Mother and Child, for example, "actually is my wife, but when I work, my ideal woman always emerges in my mind. In my mind's eye, Lindy is the ideal woman, so I guess images of her continually reemerge in my work." It is enough to make wives across the country envious.

Besides his wife and family, Hart's Muses rise when he is "challenged by an idea that I want to place in a cultural context. . .I spend a lot of time doing quick thumbnail sketches in clay. They may sit for a year or two on the shelf, but things come out of quick study. I just did a study on Kosovo. It's a woman holding a child and holding her arm out to protect herself and her child from the violent hurricane. I'm often affected by current events. This piece also embraces the recent tragedies in American schools. There's nothing more powerful in human nature than the protection of the young."

Working out of his 1,000-square-foot studio with a 30-foot skylight enriched ceiling, Hart takes a sketch from the shelf and looks for "someone physically compatible with that idea. For example, when I was doing the Three Soldiers statue, I was having a difficult time with the Black figure. I was visiting someone in the hospital, and I saw this young fellow, 19 years old, who had the perfect face. I snagged him. His mother was there, so she didn't think I was a pervert, but I'm sure they wondered what kind of a nut I was." And like most portrait artists, Hart also struggles to bring a subject's personality into the work. When he is creating a portrait he uses photography, but he also makes use of a plaster life mask. Yet even plaster is often not sufficient: "I just did Strom Thurmond. He always has a mischievous gleam in his eyes that I really wanted to capture. You're not going to get that gleam from a plaster mask. Usually, I pick up on whatever strong qualities exist right away. Then it's something I cultivate in my memory. . .I make it grow like a plant."

While Hart's monumental sculpture may go through a process of a sketch to lifesize clay model to plaster cast to stone or bronze, Hart's more intimate pieces tend to be created in clear acrylic. This unique, patented process that took Hart almost a decade to create and master, has perhaps made Hart as famous as the Three Soldiers have. Hart started experimenting with acrylic in 1971 while he was still working on the Washington National Cathedral. "The acrylic work came out of the cathedral work. . .I started thinking about bronze embedded in an acrylic block. Then I wondered what would happen if I did acrylic in acrylic. I thought perhaps you could change the surface, you could make a surface that would appear and disappear. It took eight to 12 years to reliably replicate the process in an edition for a gallery. . .I guess it's become my signature."

Hart begins an acrylic sculpture just as he would a bronze or stone work, by beginning with a clay sketch and seeking a live model who embodies his vision. When the clay model is finished, it is cast in plaster, which is filled with a liquid monomer and a plastic resin. The mixture is heated to 200-250 degrees Fahrenheit. After cooling, the sculpture is removed and the exterior is sanded with many grades of sandpaper, then buffed and polished. The result is a breathtaking image that offers transparent and translucent optical effects, securing Hart's reputation in America's art world.
In the wave of his success Frederick Hart often gathers with a group of like-minded artists, poets and philosophers at his estate in Virginia. The group calls themselves the "Centerists," and they share a vision of America's return to a classical aesthetic. In 1999 Hart is finding hope for the future of art in America. "Across the country a lot of the great traditions are still generally held in contempt by many people in the art world, but there are those who are committed to the idea of reviving and renewing the arts based on these academic traditions. Portrait painters are included in this group just by their nature. . .I think we are on the edge of a great renewal of the arts."


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Jennifer Hebblethwaite is the literary manager for the Horizon Theatre Company in Atlanta, Georgia, and a freelance writer and dramaturg.