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Jacob Lipkin
I met Jacob a few weeks before I actually met Alfred. They knew each other from the old days in NYC and really didn?t like each other. Jacob thought everyone sold out and he was the only ?pure? artist, essentially he was a cranky old bastard and really didn?t like anybody. He?d be your friend if he could bum some pot or booze off of you only till the well ran dry. An old Ukrainian Jew, he looked like he was still the merchant marine he had been when he was younger. He was known as a talented animalist and he was really good at carving cats, penguins, lions and the like. His Biblical/allegorical work wasn?t as strong and all of the male figures looked like him.
I scored points with him very quickly when he came over to my house. He mentioned that he had a couple of pieces in the Philadelphia Zoo, and I went over to my collections of art books and pulled out a used directory of the sculptures of Philadelphia. He was listed in the index and there were pictures of a bear and a group of three monkeys. He had heard about the book but had never seen a copy of it, and he eventually talked me out of it to give to his daughter.
I?d take him out on road trips once in a while, and we had a great time walking around the backyard junk shops I?d frequent in search of material for my Pop-Surrealist work, and we?d roam around trying to figure out what some of the stuff was. I found and old housing for the universal drive of a big farm water pump and matched it up with a piece of Black Cherry wood to make a portrait of him. He gave me a great complement one time, calling me a sculptural version of Mark Twain.
I brought him out to visit Peter Lipman-Wolfe once, who he also knew from way back, and he made a real scene. He made a beeline for the booze and got control out of in a heartbeat.
He had personally built his house and studio when the area was empty, and it was a solid little place. The people that moved in around him over time went nuts with all the noise. He liked to work in Granite and forged his own tools, which were always getting worn out on the stone. Between his hammering on the anvil and the stone there was a constant racket. He had no thought for anyone other than himself, and I heard horror stories about his wife and children in dire straights while any money he made went into buying more stone. There is a documentary done by Phil Katzman on Jacob called From Stone that was released in 1987 and was shown for a while on PBS and the local public access channels. It was shot over a seven-year period so it?s pretty uneven, and Jacob leaves it off with a really bleak pronouncement that people shouldn?t become sculptors.
Jacob was always looking for a dragon to slay, and he was constantly at odds with the town of South Babylon. He wanted his house, grounds and sculptures to become a museum, so he was always annoying the town to make it happen. He?d protest outside City Hall with a poster, ranting away and trying to bum joints from passers-by.
The town finally relented and made a big ceremony about proclaiming him a treasure. Crews came by to trim the trees; they poured concrete pedestals for the sculpture and mowed the lawn on a regular basis. They put a new roof on the house, did all the maintenance and paid the electric bill.
He was still bitching and moaning about everything and smoking and drinking more than ever, eventually pissing me off so much that I stopped coming by. I went to the services after he died, throwing the first handful of dirt on the box of his ashes when they buried them in his yard.
After he died the town found out that they had lost the deed to the property, and everything reverted to his estranged son, Brian. He got in touch me for help selling the work as I had done for Alfred, but all I could do was give him a few contacts if he wanted to donate the pieces.