Northshore magazine showcases the best that the North Shore of Boston, MA has to offer.
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I N - D E P T H 66 SEPTEMBER 2019 be cast in alternative alloy metals. No two pieces are exactly alike. The products come back as tabletop and giftware items. "The pieces look like silver and polish like silver that could be put on a table," he adds. Recently, the company has added ceramics back into their offerings, and Updike designs in the this medium as well. After the death of his father, writer John Updike, in 2009, Michael experienced a tectonic shift in his artistic awareness. He set out to commemorate his father's life in a meaning ful and also aesthetically unique way. But first he had to learn the intricacies of gravestone art. Already he had experience carving in granite and marble, but slate required another skill set. He explains, "You have to carve in a totally different way." Scouring yard sales, he found discarded pieces of slate, on which he practiced "to get a feel" for the different stone. He learned three-dimensional v-cut lettering from a carver in Rhode Island, which creates crisp little valleys and allows you to read inscriptions as light passes over the stone, "just as the Romans did," he says. Natural pigments embedded in the slate break the constancy of the gray coloration. Updike never adds paint. However, he does make a few allowances and will use gold or silver leafing to accent pieces. "In my art I do make death heads and winged skulls as a nod and recognition to the early folk artists of New England," he says. "I can tell a carver's style and feel. We won the American Revolution but looked back toward the neoclassical influence in creating gravestones, instead of the pagan skulls and wings with so much personality. Now you have urns and weeping willows, which are stagnant." When he was confident enough of his skill, he carved his first intricate gravestone for his father, to be erected as a memorial in Plowville, Pennsylvania, where the elder Updike lived as a teenager. His ashes are interred both there and in a cremation garden behind a church in Manchester. "He feared death so much that I had him smiling, and I gave him a death head—or winged skull—so he's happily ascending to heaven." Beneath the date lines are various ways he wrote his signature. On the back of the gravestone, Updike carved an early poem written by his father. It's positioned beneath "a giant crow coughing up telephone poles at the bottom as it goes along." He adds, "As I understand it, the poem got rejected by The New Yorker. But when he put together his first volume of poetry, it was included." Soon a commission followed, after the death of his father's friend; subsequently, he realized he had found a new métier in memorial art. "It's very exciting for me," Updike says. "It takes me to a wide-range gamut of emotion, because I can suddenly be working with a parent who lost a child, or I can be working with very ironic people who want to do their e WOMEN'S FUND of Essex County 17 TH ANNUAL GRANT AWARDS LUNCHEON OCTOBER 17, 2019 11:30 AM - 2 PM NEW LOCATION DANVERSPORT DANVERS, MA Creating change together. The Women's Fund of Essex County changes the lives of women and girls by funding programs that offer demonstrated results. We identify the point of intervention that truly changes these women's futures. TheWomensFundEC.org/awardslunch The Women's Fund of Essex County is a field of interest fund of Essex County Community Foundation GUEST SPEAKER Lauren Hersh Founder & National Director of World Without Exploitation JOIN US