Sculptor carves out his own unique place in the art world

NORTH READING, Mass. (AP) — Jack Vasapoli’s home and backyard are his museum.

His work is everywhere, mostly sculpted in wood, preferably pine. But there are bronzes, too, and figures detailed and delicate enough for mahogany.

Inside and outside you find Vasapoli’s nontraditional take on the totem pole, celebrating fantastic frogs, raccoons, storks, American eagles, Russian bears, dogs, cats and human faces.

A bust of his wife features Vasapoli’s own face peeking out from the sweep of hair on the reverse side. Faces popping out of the most unlikely places, even backyard trees, is a Vasapoli trademark.

Brightly colored, round-mouthed fish swim suspended from the trees. Pan, the Greek god of nature himself, stands watch over the lawn, fingering his flute as an enormous snake coils about him.

Anyone paying a visit to this still-life menagerie will have to negotiate the dragon soaring above the walk of his North Reading home.

Inside is a life-sized, 150-pound bronze of a rhesus monkey, an ill-fated commission from Vasapoli’s days in San Francisco. A musician himself — sax player — Vasapoli has indulged an obsession with the great jazz musicians by rendering several in pine.

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“I like pine,” he explains, “because it’s easy to carve and then it hardens so well.”

Walk into his home and the greats are all around you, as if awaiting a signal to wail the blues.

Very little of his art, Vasapoli will tell you, has sold. He’s offered work, at no cost, to major museums, including the Smithsonian, and been turned down. All of which is surprising because his carvings are highly accessible, fun and commercial.

He can do the work, Vasapoli says. In fact, even at age 66, he can’t stop doing the work. “Once I start,” he says, “it becomes an obsession.” But he hasn’t had the public relations skills to market it.

Meanwhile, like so many artists — “I was drawing from an early age” — Vasapoli has had to do other things to ensure that the only wolf at his door is made of pine. Originally from Melrose, he developed his passion for sculpting under the tutelage of his high school art teacher Paul Squatrito.

“When someone believes in you,” he says, “you perform better.”

Even so, he wasn’t oblivious to the difficulties of earning a living as an artist. He studied biology and chemistry at Suffolk University in Boston and initially pursued a career as a teacher, working in Hillsboro, New Hampshire, and then locally as a substitute.

He married the former Joyce Quinlan, who has North Reading roots, 42 years ago. The pair toured Europe for eight months in a converted Volkswagen camper, reaching Morocco just as the Arab world was roiled by the Munich Olympic massacre of Israeli athletes in 1972. Joyce, a blonde, encountered a lot of hostility, but Jack, of Sicilian heritage, could pass for a native.

Later, the pair went to San Francisco for eight years, where he was caretaker for an animal-loving Norwegian immigrant, Dr. Reidar Wennesland. “I took care of his monkey,” Vasapoli says.

Traveling in exclusive circles, Wennesland had friends like poet Allen Ginsberg.

It was the doctor who ordered the bronze monkey, a tribute to the sacrifices made by the creatures on behalf of science. Casting it cost the artist $5,000. Then, at the last minute, the museum meant to display it, the Oakland Museum, was ruled out because Wennesland wanted to keep it.

Vasapoli turned down an offer to have his work compensated by Wennesland in installments. Instead, he took his monkey home to North Reading where he and Joyce began a family, raising two sons.

He joined the family business, Family Opticians in North Reading. He now works at Northeast Eyecare in Danvers. “My father was an optician. And my brother was,” he says. “So they brought me into the business.”

More recently, Vasapoli ran into hard luck marketing his jazz musicians, figures carved from trees in his rural backyard. He was told famous artists often own the rights to their own images, making it inadvisable for anyone to buy, for example, 8 feet of Myles Davis.

Such a setback might have daunted some, but Vasapoli continues carving. Only this time he’s concentrating on mythical creatures — thus the dragon. Despite the creativity required for such works, the artist notes that the tree has a lot to say about how a given sculpture works, as the image must work with the limbs that nature provides.

Even more important than the say-so of trees has been the support of his wife. “She’s been fantastic,” he says.

Her forbearance was even more important regarding his music, performing with his band, The Swamptones, for the past 22 years. That can involve late nights.

For the future, Vasapoli might try marketing his carvings online. It’s something he hasn’t even explored up until now. Some of his pieces are on display at the Onset School of Music in Wakefield, too.

“The clock is ticking,” he says. “I’ll have to start unloading these things. . Sooner or later, something’s got to catch.”

Even his jazzmen might be sold by the simple expedient of not advertising who the figures are intended to represent. But even if he can sell the works, well, he estimates that, given the smaller pieces can take up to two full work weeks to complete, they will net a return of only a few dollars per hour.

Which, Vasapoli makes clear, does not really matter. “Because it makes me feel good when I’m doing it,” he says.

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Information from: The Eagle-Tribune, http://www.eagletribune.com