ثاليا

"As described in the Clay to Code to Bronze essay, the sculpture Thalia is inspired by my mother as a young woman around 1950, based on a black-and-white photograph shown there. She was a teenager in the decade of the 1940s in Greece, when the country was overwhelmed by two wars: the Nazi occupation and the ensuing Greek Civil War, ending in 1949. What that must have been like for her and for my father, who was a year older, is inconceivable. There was scarcity of food and a constant threat of violence. As she grew up, she must have carried both her mother’s refugee past and her own wartime childhood wounds. Again, as a sensitive child, I absorbed lessons in habits, worries, and unspoken rules.

As to the sculpture, I hope that Thalia captures some of the likeness but, more importantly, the emotion of the black-and-white photograph. I see the expression as serious and thoughtful, perhaps guarded.

There are many variations of Thalia around the world, in as many as seven countries. Something about her thoughtful beauty touches people."