Editor's Note: Sam Gore, a sculptor and an educator at Mississippi College, travels throughout the nation, sculpting clay into the head of Christ or other figures before live audiences. The performances last about 30 minutes and are accompanied by music. Afterward, the audience is free to view, even touch, the sculpture before it is dismantled. Gore stresses the shared experience as the true work of art. ln this article, Gore talks about some of the experiences that led him to this unique ministry.

             I was captivated by his adventures as a medical missionary, including occasional trips by dogsled to remote inland villages and the selfless manner in which he lived his Christian witness. I had a vivid mental image of a man following a dogsled into the hills, leaving behind a village and harbor in which a small steamship lay at anchor.
             My father, a minister, had majored in history in college and was an avid reader. My mother, with sight in only one eye, placed a great value on reading and kept good reading materials for the children. There were our school books, Sunday school literature, and we each had a Bible or New Testament. Among other things in our possession was a small paperback book on the ministry of Dr. Grenfell. Of all my reading, this remained most vivid in my memory. This great man became my ideal when I was a young Christian, having accepted Christ as Savior at the age of eight.
             Over 30 years later, midway in my teaching career at Mississippi College in Clinton, the memory of this story came back into focus beginning with a phone call and a commission to paint a mural in the dining room of a couple in their home in Jackson, Mississippi.
             Until I saw the published material and photographs on their dining table, I did not know what they wanted me to paint. Immediately recognizing the story of the great missionary doctor, I told them, "I already know what I'm going to paint!" I shared with them my childhood reading experience and its lasting impression and influence in my life. The surprise was complete to both me and my hosts, Dr. and Mrs. Raymond F. Grenfell, whom I then learned were members of the Grenfell Association which commemorates the life of their renowned relative. All agreed that my early fascination with the great missionary and their seeking me out could not have been a mere coincidence, but that it was God's plan that I was to paint the mural. God's foreknowledge and guidance, beyond what is humanly possible, was never more obvious and reassuring to me.
              Using acrylics, I painted Dr. Grenfell following a dogsled toward the hills, against a background of evergreen trees, a village, and a harbor, in which a small massed steamship lay at anchor.
               I painted with rapid, excited brush strokes. It was a celebration, a song of praise, for a vivid adult-level experience confirming what I had earlier believed with childlike faith. It was a new experience of who God is, who I am and why I am here, God's existence, and His caring enough to have plans for my life. In reflecting on my family background and the nourishment of my early faith, the scene at any meal was one in which we gathered with our parents with faces washed and hair combed to give thanks. I gave thanks.
               In the first grade, I remember my enthusiasm for art got me into trouble. When the new ABC Coloring Books were issued, I quickly went into action, filling my book from cover to cover and then reaching for the as yet unused book of the boy sitting next to me. While my parents were very expressive about this episode, they were strangely silent when, as a third grader, I charged a can of paint and a brush at the local store and proceeded to paint the back door steps and handles of tools a bubble gum pink. Thus establishing myself as an artist, I was patiently guided by discerning Christian parents who did not equate these acts with hopelessly bad behavior.
               As a country preacher's son, I reached college age by way of farm life, aircraft mechanic, student pilot, Harley Davidson owner, football, basketball, and a brief time in the Navy Air Corps V-5 program at the close of World War II.
               Upon completion of a three-year professional art school program at what is now called the Atlanta College of Art, I felt a personal need to broaden my education in a liberal arts curriculum. I chose further study at Mississippi College.
               Before completing graduation requirements, I was offered the art teaching position and prayerfully accepted. Initially, the department had no students. I prayed that God would send students majoring in art and that I would have something to offer them. As art majors appeared on the scene, I felt the urgency to pursue graduate work, first with a masters degree at the University of Alabama in 1956, and a doctorate at Illinois State University in 1969.
               After completing my doctoral program in 1969, my soul searched for what really matters and what is most important. The Dr. Grenfell experience stands out as a reassurance that the most important things in my life and in my career came neither by chance nor contrivance, but through God's way of doing things. Some time after graduation, I had ordered something I had always wanted--two dozen pure, red sable brushes. I was so much enamored with these precious brushes that when I considered using them, I always returned them to their box and used my old, less expensive ones. I treasured them enough to take them out and just look at them.
               After a few months of non-use, I opened the box and found that moths had eaten the brush hair, leaving only the handles. I felt like weeping yet I found myself laughing at my stupidity. The value of any brush is in its use! The sable brush, the outcome of hundreds of years of specialized craftsmanship, was dishonored. I could see this experience as an analogy of the misuse or lack of use of a personal gift or talent. It can be treasured only in service, in its use according to its purpose. To effectively bury a talent, one only has to treat it as a prized possession, for self-gratification, while the passing of time alone can render it null and void.
                Sculpture, a dormant interest since art school, began to emerge by adding a course consisting primarily of clay modeling. My one-year study of anatomy and three years of figure drawing in art school prepared me to discover what I now do best and love most in studio work. Sculpture, both performance and the art itself, became the talent which I could neither bury nor neglect.
                Laying aside all stylistic restraints and drawing freely from past experience, I discovered I can work with exceptional speed in clay, doing portrait bust demonstrations in less than 30 minutes. My favorite sculptor became Rodin whose work I viewed at length in Paris in the early 1980s.
                From the standpoint of expression and movement, I developed a respect for Hellenistic and Baroque sculpture and an admiration for the work of sculptors in Spain.
                My sculptor friend Kathryn Speed encouraged me to build a foundry. I bought basic foundry components--a furnace, and crucibles--and built a burnout kiln for the lost wax method.
                Alex Ettl, owner of Sculpture House in New York, visited me in my studio at Mississippi College. He watched me sculpt a statue of a nurse, then wrote a check for an endowed sculpture award to be given annually to a student. Before his death at age 93, he endowed a chair of art at Mississippi College.
                Enabled by faculty additions to concentrate more on sculpture classes and foundry operation, my sculpture began to take a new direction. As I occasionally gave classroom demonstrations, I developed the speed and self confidence necessary to stand before an audience. I first began to do performance art at a college chapel program in 1976. I sculpted the Head of Christ from clay, with choral music in the background. This appearance led to the development of a non-studio art form in which the performance and its total effect is the work of art. This sculpting process, accompanied by music and dramatic lighting on a stage or portable platform, proved to be effective as a performing art, a drama, or a "happening."
                My itinerary over some 20 years, and without the benefit of advertising or promotion, has included over five hundred performances in 20 states and three foreign countries. Most performances have been done in the context of Christian worship.
                I sculpt three basic forms: Head of Christ, Madonna and Child, and Multi-Ethnic (three heads representing Anglo-American, African-American, and Asian-American).
               When time permitted, I added an hour or so for finishing touches after the performance and left instructions on how to fire the piece. Finished, fired pieces exist in Chicago, Detroit, New York, Texas, Washington D.C., Uruguay, and Spain.
                I have done two secular performances--a bust of Don Giovanni during the last 30 minutes of the music of the Mozart opera for the Mississippi Opera Guild and the head of Shakespeare with Elizabethan music in the background.
                My studio work is a separate endeavor from the performances and continues as a time-consuming search for form and meaning in clay, bronze, and welded metal.

                Classical Setting

                Several years ago, the Maryland-Washington D. C. Salvation Army asked me to do a Christmas program in Baltimore. Unknown to those planning the event, I prepared taped music with the help of harpist Elaine Barber to suggest the Roman world at the time of Christ. When I arrived at the art museum in Baltimore, I discovered that the large meeting room which had been scheduled for the event was a perfect classical setting, with a perimeter of fluted Roman columns alternating with Greco-Roman statues.
                As I set up my equipment and clay, I saw to my right the statue of Caesar Augustus, the person who unknowingly brought about the fulfillment of the biblical prophecy by his decree. The music, my sculpting of the Mother and Child, and the setting were so complete that it seemed planned.
                In my introductory talk, I shared my feeling about the occasion and the setting and how I felt about being watched by a likeness of Caesar Augustus.
                As I placed my hands on the mass of clay to begin sculpting, my right thumb doubled inward in a painful cramp, a "charley horse." Before an expectant audience, being right-handed, I had no choice but to proceed with my left hand and risk failure. Keeping my right hand behind the clay mass, I left-handedly did the entire Mother and Child sculpture in my regular thirty-five minutes. This was the day I became, or for the first time realized, that I am ambidextrous. I felt that through this experience God reminded me of His presence and that He was saying, "Sam, don't get the idea that you are doing this alone."
                From early in my career, I have kept my promise to let God use what I can do best in reaching out to those who have lost all hope or to those who are deluded by false hope.
                I am determined that my art will communicate Christ-centered values. I am most pleased when even children understand what I do. In short, I will neither hide nor obscure the Gospel. "For if the gospel be hid, it is hid to them that are lost" (II Cor. 4:3).
                With God's help, I reach out to people, preferring that my art be where people live and work instead of enclosed within museum walls. Above all, I dwell on the person of Jesus Christ and affirm the gospel and the peace which passes all human understanding.
                 Forty-four years of hindsight with several hundred successful graduates and a well-qualified, versatile, and Christ-centered faculty, affords a cheerful view of largely fulfilled goals set when I came aboard as a one-person art faculty. Working as an artist and educator, I can see clearly that at every level of difficulty in personal growth, God's grace was more than sufficient.