COMMUNITY

 

 

The Portsmouth wellhead and the Abbey Church

Should you run into my younger brother, Jerry, he might convince you that my interest in heavy metal dates back to at least 1970 when I borrowed (long-term, from his bedroom) the album Paranoid by the English group Black Sabbath. My college friends and I liked the song Iron Man which, from the title alone, exudes an explicitly heavy metal connotation, to say nothing of the fact that Black Sabbath was decidedly a very popular heavy metal group of its day. Beyond that one album and one song, my taste in popular music segued quickly to names like Cat Stevens (Yusuf Islam), Joan Baez, James Taylor, Holly Near and many others. Eventually, heavy metal has come to be associated for me with a different meaning: the art of blacksmithing. The blacksmith is a different kind of “iron man.” It is iron-ic, we might even say, that Jerry’s middle son, my nephew, now makes his living as a blacksmith, making the rounds of summer craft fairs, festivals and pow-wows throughout Pennsylvania. I don’t use the word “art” loosely here. All one has to do is take a drive down Bellevue Avenue in Newport to see countless examples of towering Gilded Age iron and bronze entrance gates and fence systems, each a masterpiece of cast or wrought ironwork.

This ironic and roundabout introduction leads us to our first “Artist of the Abbey” for The Current for the 2022-23 publishing year - Mr. Robert Kluge. The Artists series will continue to appear in the first edition of each month, sharing our monthly column space this year with three other upcoming series. Some artists will be well-known to readers, others less so, but the enjoyment and the cultural stimulation with which they enrich every day for those of us who live and work and worship in this extended community are immeasurable. Robert Kluge is a name which may not be familiar to many of our readers, but his ironwork surrounds us indoors and out. First, some background on him. Bob was born in the hamlet of East Meadow, New York, 30 miles east of Manhattan on Long Island. Early on, he moved to Florida but didn’t much care for it and returned to the Northeast where he settled in Newtown, Connecticut. It was there that he met his future wife, Gail, 42 years ago in 1980, and four years later they began to design and build their own log cabin in nearby Morris. Except for the fireplace and septic system, everything is of their own making. Bob said, “We were young and ambitious and this is what we wanted for our first home.”

 

 

Wellhead and lower frame of covering

While engaged in the manufacturing processes for a metalworking plant in Middlebury, he enrolled in a blacksmithing course. The second class was taught by Professor Jeffrey Havill - now our Fr. Gregory - at Brookfield Forges, part of the Brookfield Craft Center. There he learned the basics of starting a forge fire and his first project was to build a fire poker: essentially “Blacksmithing 101,” he says. From there he progressed to the Regina Laudes Blacksmith Shop where he truly “worked his body” with this new version of heavy metal. It was there that he fabricated a candle chandelier and began to feel the urge to start his own business. Fr. Gregory saw it, advised him and told Bob, “You’ve got the talent. If you’ve got the drive, you can do it.”  Bob felt that, drawing on his earlier background, he, “could combine many facets of metalwork, not just blacksmithing, but designs, and so on.” He built a 24’ x 32’ workshop near his home where he continues to do repair work and custom projects, especially for builders and architects, including several in New York City. As we shall see, a specialty of his work lies in metal railings, one of which is in plain view at Portsmouth. Elsewhere, one of Bob’s biggest railing projects was for a client by the name of Silas Kopf, an amazing marquetry craftsman, scholar, and 2008 author of what may be the definitive work published on marquetry. If you don’t know the name of Silas Kopf, you might recognize that of Elton John, for whom Mr. Kopf created a unique marquetry (inlay) piano. Another favorite project which Bob created was what he called “a super-chandelier for some Wall Street folks,” in which a blown-glass artist was commissioned and brought on board to design and fabricate the glass components.

 

 

Bob and Gail Kluge

Closer to home, on the area of grass between the Stillman Dining Hall and the Administration Building, sits a fine ancient carved stone Roman wellhead. It was acquired with funds given by the graduating class of the School in 1988 upon the retirement of Fr. Damian Kearney ‘45 as the Chairman of the English Department. General consensus at the time was that the wellhead did not seem complete sitting there open in its place, and there was a desire to make it look more particular to Portsmouth Abbey. Bob came up with the “heavy-metal” solution of adding a curved iron arch, which presumably would have held a simple pulley in ancient times. The iron arch was to include a Benedictine raven perched within its ironwork, as well as a version of Fr. Peter Sidler’s iconic Portsmouth Cross topping it off as a finial, together with a hook to support a year-round basket of potted flowers. Wellheads of similar age and of Roman design are certainly plentiful and may be seen elsewhere, such as in the British Museum in London, or the one recently-acquired by the Metropolitan Museum in New York City. In July, I saw a rather remarkable and quite large wellhead, also sited in the middle of a garden, on the grounds of the Bernardine Cistercian Sisters of Our Lady of Hyning at Warton, near Carnforth in Lancashire, England. It's safe to say that none are as definitely particular to Portsmouth Abbey as is ours, thanks to Bob. Deferring credit, he notes of Fr. Damian, “It’s a tribute to a great person who’s no longer with us. I hit the nail on the head by keeping it simple.”

 

 

Railing, blended into Belluschi architecture

Now, about that railing on our campus. Simple, too, is Bob’s design for it since it had to blend in with the interior of Pietro Belluschi’s original design for the Abbey Church. Bob says that it all began with the infamous 2003 nightclub fire at The Station in West Warwick, Rhode Island, after which every public building in the state was required to be brought up to code. At the time, the upper gallery of chapels in the church was separated from the main body of the church merely by the single high railing of wood and the wooden kneelers. There were no vertical spindles to keep things in or to protect small children from tumbling down to the main level floor. Bob mentions Paul Jestings, Portsmouth’s former Director of Operations, who said, “I got this on my plate now. What am I going to do about the railings in the gallery?” Of course, he called Bob. With the assistance of Luis Raposo, a skilled carpenter on the School’s staff, they constructed a sample section, a wooden mock-up, which they painted with a powder-coating to match the existing railing. Their mandate had been to create something that would not be a “blockade” of any kind, that fit the distinctive original architecture of Belluschi, needing to be more open than solid, but that it had to be up to code. Upon seeing the temporarily installed sample railing, Paul approved, and many hours were then dedicated to the calculation of the “lots of angles” within the octagonal upper lantern of the church. To glance upwards towards the gallery today, one would never guess that those safety railings are a retrofit, installed after the fact. The vertical metal lines blend in seamlessly with the vertical wooden lines of the board-and-batten motif throughout the church, and indeed the monastery grounds and school campus..

One can see Bob’s handiwork outside the church as well, notably in the railing along the wheelchair ramp between the church and the Stillman Dining Hall. Again, to all appearances it is part of the original plan. And on a recent visit to campus in April, when this interview took place, as Bob and Gail walked through the monastery to a Sunday night dinner with the monks, they stopped to admire the calefactory. Bob noted that the fireplace, the only one in the monastery, needed an iron grate, which he subsequently was able to fabricate. Also noted was that the McGuire Art Building courtyard has a rock wall with an open space awaiting a gate, so it may well be that his work here is not yet done.

The Kluges self-designed log cabin and studio

As for my own ongoing interest in heavy metal, I acquired over the past decades a substantial collection of late 19^th- and early 20^th-century wrought iron fence systems and garden gates from various St. Louis estates. My work as an event planner and designer allowed me to use them as elements in weddings, black-tie and white-tie charity galas, bar- and bat-mitzvahs, debutante parties, commercial photo shoots, and an occasional stage set or film shoot on location.

 

 

The Bob Kluge fashioned fire grate in the calefactory
 

As for Bob and Gail, they can be reached at [email protected] and at Anvil Artistry.