For a long time I thought this piece was lost. I did it when I was living on Calle Colina in Santa Fe, right before they put me in hospice. I wanted to make one for each of the kids, because I wanted to leave them something of me.
As I was going into hospice, the Santa Fe Reporter ran a story on me titled, 'Almost Six Feet Under.' They put some pictures of me in with the caption, 'Gib Singleton is going to die. So will everybody else.* Well, I was in hospice, knocked out on morphine, and my friends all figured I wasn't coming back - because that's what happens when you go to hospice, right? So they came over to the house and hauled a bunch of stuff away, including a lot of my waxes.
So, I figured they were lost. And, you know, when that kind of stuff happens you just have to let it go and move on. Hell, I was grateful just to be alive. Then when we were starting to work on my first book, From the Earth, Paul Zueger said he wanted to add a section called "Works in Progress'. And that's when he reminded me that he had come down from Denver to see me in hospice. And he had saved and stored this piece and a few others for me. Well, I was thrilled, man. It's a damn good little bronze, and it's important to me. In fact, I'd like to have one for myself as well as for each of the kids.
It shows me at work in my studio, using a hammer and chisel to carve the face of Christ face into a block of stone. It's a self-portrait of me sculpting the image that's been with me most of my life, and that I've been working on in one form or another for the last 50 years. I figured that was as representative of me as anything I could do.
The image of me is maybe at about age 65 or so, and I really like it. It kind of reminds me that I was young once, too.
- GIB SINGLETON