Voice of the Mountain

Sculptor William Brower listens to the stone and forms landscapes in miniature.

By: Ilene Dube

Staff photo by Mark Czajkowski

In creating this landscape, William Brower imagined a soldier lost in the mountains, wandering in battleshock, recalling a fragment of music by Gustav Mahler.

   William Brower grew up on the flatlands of Alabama and Westchester, N.Y., but all his life the mountains were calling to him. While serving in the Navy in 1945, he traveled to the Philippines. "It was a place I remember as having beautiful landscapes, a place I return to in my imagination," says Mr. Brower, associate professor emeritus of speech and communication at Princeton Theological Seminary.
   Mr. Brower’s mountain dreams and vistas can be seen in the seminary’s Erdman gallery through Nov. 30. Mountain Tops, a solo exhibit of his paintings and sculpture, is a "meditation on natural places, especially where human influence has not brought development."
   Mr. Brower also is a poet: "One summer, / When I was still very young / (Fourteen, I think) / We spent a month in the mountains. / My brother had a headache every day. / My mother cleaned our cabin. My father slept. / I drew pictures, / Mostly of the snow-capped peaks around us."
   Like Henri Rousseau, who worked in the Paris Customs office and used children’s book illustrations, visits to the zoo and botanical gardens as sources for inspiration, Mr. Brower dreams up his exotic locales. "True North," a stark painting of a snowy mountain peak against a dark-blue sky speckled with twinkles of stars, came from his Navy knowledge of navigation.
   "It is ‘True North’ because the peak of the mountain points to Polaris, the North Star," says Mr. Brower, pointing to it and the big dipper. "The two outer stars of the big dipper are aligned so they point to Polaris."
   The reasons the stars twinkle in this painting is because of a little trick Mr. Brower learned from Pennsylvania Impressionists George Sotter, Edward Redfield and Daniel Garber: "When you make stars, you want to go for subtle mixes of faint red, pale blue and pure white," he says. "Clean, pure white is higher in the sky." Using all white stars looks artificial, says the artist.
   Although he studied in the early ’50s at the Art Students League in New York, it was Mr. Brower’s retirement from the seminary in 1993 that provided a real opportunity to explore painting and sculpture. Several years ago, while walking the Princeton University campus, he stopped to watch stonemasons repair the buildings.

Staff photo by Mark Czajkowski

"True North" points to Polaris, the North Star.

   "I noticed large numbers of interesting fragments being tossed into dumpsters. The masons offered me any pieces I wanted from the discard pile," says Mr. Brower, 76. "Frank Yurick, overseer of restoration work, gave me my choice from among hundreds of pieces so I was able to select the ones best suited to my needs.
   "With that, my imagination took off. Mountains and wilderness landscapes had always appealed to me as subjects for paintings. Now it was as if I had been invited to make such images out of stone."
   First thing he did, after hauling his prizes home and turning his backyard into a quarry, was sign up for a sculpting class with Peter "Pietro" Smith at the Princeton Adult School. "Pietro gave impetus to my vision in stone," says Mr. Brower. From Pietro he learned to look at and listen to the rock, to let the stone guide the sculptor’s hand.
   The pieces of rock Mr. Brower was working with were the cutaway portion, the part left over from what the stonemasons carved out. He was inspired by the Japanese art of bonseki — tray landscapes with a distinctive rock as the main feature, often incorporating sand and occasionally miniature figures.
   The sculptor Westernized bonseki, using paint to create areas of snow or grass. "I follow the ancient Chinese aesthetic of doing as little as possible to the stone," he says, referring to his piece "The Court of Jamshyd’s Garden" from the 11th-century Persian poem, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: "They say the lion and the lizard keep/ The courts where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep."
   Mr. Brower found an Arabic-speaking man working at the Whole Earth Center in Princeton to teach him how to write these words in Arabic, then carved it into the stone. A sculpted desert lion, found at a flea market, sits atop the rock.

Staff photo by Mark Czajkowski

"After the Fall (Somewhere East of Eden)" is made from the bones of a pork roast.

   "The ultimate in leaving stone alone is the Chinese ‘scholar’s rock,’" says Mr. Brower. Also known as "gongshi," scholar’s rocks date back to the Tang Dynasty (618-907 AD), when scholars and persons of refined taste began bringing beautiful and rare rocks used as ornament in the garden into the studio.
   "To be pure, it has to be untouched, just as it was found in the mountains," says Mr. Brower, who says he plans to go on expeditions for scholar’s rocks in his next life. "There the eye and the spirit are everything. The hands get into it only for the purpose of hauling the treasure home from the mountains or cave or desert or riverbed."

Staff photos by Mark Czajkowski
	Above, "The River Runs to the Sea." Left, "A Helping Hand" is made from Princeton University stone.

   Prior to coming to the seminary, Mr. Brower was an actor. He got started in summer stock at the Ivoryton Playhouse in Ivoryton, Conn., where he met his wife, Elaine, and went on to a career in New York stage and TV, performing in Ford and Kraft Television theaters and Studio One in the early 1950s. He played alongside Judy Holiday in She Loves Me Not, about a chorus girl who flees the Mob and winds up in Princeton. Mr. Brower played an undergraduate who helped hide her on campus.
   The Browers’ own move to Princeton followed in 1954, when Mr. Brower took the seminary position (he earned a master’s from Columbia Teacher’s College while barely earning a living on stage). As a member of the American Ethical Society, he found himself "outside the mainstream…I was the only truly secular member of the faculty. But I was always treated with great consideration and acceptance in spite of my other-than-orthodox orientation." Elaine Brower went on to found the Princeton Chapter of the Ethical Humanists.
   Mr. Brower found his spiritual source in the mountains, at sea, in space. "The atmosphere of such places makes me feel as close to the ultimate source of things as I ever feel."
   A Robert Frost scholar, Mr. Brower quotes the poet: "‘Heaven gives its glimpses only to those/ Not in position to look too close.’ It’s a feeling that sweeps over you, but if you look too closely and get heavily doctrinal over it, things get more and more difficult to understand. I’m happy to let the mystery abide."
   Mr. Brower says his affinity for mountains, ocean and sky can best be summed up by the words of Robert Henri, founder of the Ashcan School of painting: "Grasp the big things outdoors…the immense power of the sea…the rock standing there."
   In the end, he returns to the words of Frost. "Like the farmer in a poem by Robert Frost, I’d like to get away from Earth a while, and then come back to it and begin over. I use the (Delaware & Raritan) Canal to get away, sitting for an hour or two. My artwork helps me do that too."
Mountain Tops, the paintings and sculpture of William Brower, is on view at the Erdman Gallery at Erdman Hall, Princeton Theological Seminary, 20 Library Place, Princeton, through Nov. 30. Gallery hours: Mon.-Sat. 8:30 a.m.-4:30 p.m., Sun. 2:30 p.m.-6:30 p.m. For information, call (609) 497-7990.