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English Sculptor to Give Courthouse Fountain Just the Right Touch
“Not a single reply,” exclaimed Robert Ooley, an architect and founding trustee of the Santa Barbara Courthouse Legacy Foundation.
“We put out RFPs (requests for proposals) in local papers and in museum publications around the country, looking for a sculptor, and we didn’t get a single reply.”
The requests went out in 2007 requesting expertise in “partial to complete replacement” of the Spirit of the Ocean fountain that greets visitors at the Santa Barbara County Courthouse, 1100 Anacapa St. A line drawing of the fountain accompanied the text.
“Partial to complete replacement” has since changed to complete replacement of the 80-year old fountain and statue. The statue, which has embodied the spirit of Santa Barbara with its ode to youth and temperate climes (the figures are nude), and to Santa Barbara’s close ties to the sea, is easily the most troubled and troublesome piece of artwork Santa Barbara County has ever dealt with.
Completed by Venetian sculptor Ettore Cadorin in 1927, the sandstone sculpture was fixed and patched starting in the late 1940s. While no records of the work have surfaced, in 1979, when pencil-sized holes were found in the piece, the evidence was there.
A two-year restoration was finally kicked off in 1982 with the fountain rededicated to the public two years later. But conservators knew then that they were addressing only cosmetic changes. Nearly annual conservation efforts have taken place ever since. Then in 2004, the conservation specialists reported to the county that failure of the stature was imminent.
“You just can’t find someone with these skills through an RFP,” said Ooley, who has spearheaded the preservation and restoration efforts at the Courthouse since 2000 when he saw that a concentrated focus was required. “Sculptors of this caliber aren’t watching the papers. They’re busy on big projects.”
It was Santa Barbara mason Chris Scott who recommended that Ooley contact sculptor Nick Blantern. An Englishman, Blantern had lived in Santa Barbara for five or six years and had recently finished 2½ years as lead stone carver at Ty Warner’s new home along Channel Drive.
“In England, you specialize in one type of stone,” Blantern explained. “I was in Bath, so I specialized in limestone. But in America, you have to expand to all kinds of stone.”
Blantern has not seen much of an apprenticeship model in the United States. “Sculptors are taught on site in a studio or quarry,” he said.
Affable and easy, Ooley took to Blantern immediately. Blantern’s experience ran through several Montecito estates, restoration of San Francisco City Hall following the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, and a 35-foot carved fireplace for the Great Room at the San Francisco Zoo.
But just as important to Ooley, Blantern “is unassuming.”
“I’m constantly telling artists and architects working on the Courthouse that they can’t leave fingerprints,” he said. “They’re here to restore, not make a name for themselves.”
Leaving the West Coast after the Warner project, Blantern moved to Cleveland, which happens to sit on the largest sandstone deposit in the world. Ooley contacted him there and he agreed to take on the project.
For the new fountain, Ooley planned to reopen a sandstone quarry in Refugio Canyon, the source of the original stone. The sandstone is of the Coldwater strata, older and harder than the redder Sespe or the pale Vaqueros sandstones. The task would be onerous. Environmental review would be needed. Roads rebuilt. Neighbors appeased.
Blantern “came out and went out to the (Refugio) quarry (with Scott and Ooley). There’s lots of stone already cut in the quarry, but it didn’t really have the bed height needed for the project,” Ooley said. The bed height is the vertical distance between veins of discontinuous materials. “You want a clean piece between veins,” he said.
He also explained to Ooley that a quarry, to surface blanks of the size needed for this project, would have to be active. They would need to be cutting blocks and moving them aside until they encountered the right blocks of the right size and consistency for the Courthouse project.
The men went in on a Saturday. Ooley had a bad night; they now had a sculptor, but no stone. Where to find a 100- to 200-ton pile of sandstone blanks of the right size, consistency and strata?
The next day, Scott and Blantern, at the invitation of Oz Madars, owner of La Patera Ranch above Goleta, drove with Madars to the upper reaches of the ranch where a dragon’s teeth jawline of Coldwater sandstone is exposed, jutting nearly vertically from the mountain.
“Scott could tell,” Blantern recalled. “I’m relying on his experience, and he knows.”
Two large boulders, side-by-side in a jawline of boulders, caught Scott’s eye. From the two, Scott believed, all the required blanks could be carved. Madars donated the stones on the spot.
At a recent event to celebrate the donation, Scott explained their choice.
“Coldwater sandstone gets harder as you move east along the ridge,” he said. “The Refugio Canyon sandstone is softer. This is harder and should last longer.”
Harder, and infinitely easier.
“This stone is on private property, so no environmental impact report is required,” Ooley pointed out. “It sits 20 feet off a paved road so access is simple. It couldn’t get any better.”
Blantern was not able to be there for the “unveiling” of the rocks, which were not veiled at all but sat stolidly in a pattering rain; he was still in Cleveland.
“I’ll be out in the next week or so to start scanning the original sculpture,” he said.
Soon after, he’ll be moving back to town for a time, as they begin to carve a new fountain from the blanks.
For current and historic photographs, and for more on the colorful history of the Spirit of the Ocean statue — its creation, abuse, care and restoration — the plans for a replacement, and the process and personnel with which the county is making the replacement, click here to continue reading “Creation and Recreation: Santa Barbara’s Most Famous Sculpture To Be Replaced” on the Decomposing Santa Barbara blog.
— Noozhawk contributor David Petry is a local historian, author and photographer. Click here to read his blog, Decomposing Santa Barbara, which focuses on aspects of Santa Barbara history that are disappearing.
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