Sight Unseen

Gussie Fauntleroy

Sculptor Michael Naranjo senses the living essence of the pieces he creates in clay, wax, and stone

EMERGENCE, BRONZE, LARGER THAN LIFESIZE

Before he touched Michelangelo’s monumental marble sculpture of David, Michael Naranjo had tried carving stone. He thought he had done a fair job of it, for someone without sight and with full use of only one hand. Then, in the early 1980s, he had the moving and almost overwhelming experience of climbing onto scaffolding—built specifically for him—surrounding the 16th-century masterpiece in Florence, Italy. He spent hours running his fingers over the extraordinarily smooth surface of the 18-foot-tall figure, feeling the bulging vein in the enormous neck, the muscled arms, even the tear ducts in the corners of the statue’s eyes. When he returned home to New Mexico, Naranjo was profoundly changed.

“I got a new sense of the stone. I knew there was actual life in these pieces,” the Santa Clara Pueblo sculptor recounted in a regional television special some years ago. “My hands could ‘see’ before, but after I experienced Michelangelo’s work, I had new life in my hands. I could see twice as much as I could prior to that time.” Naranjo brought that added dimension of tactile understanding back to his own artwork, which he sculpts both in stone and in wax and clay to be cast in bronze. The result was an even greater sense of the living essence beneath the surface of a human or animal form—a spirit that continues to animate his award-winning art. Over the years his work has earned numerous honors, including a lifetime achievement award from the Southwestern Association for Indian Arts, which organizes Santa Fe Indian Market.

Gaining permission to touch revered, centuries-old artwork that no one else can lay a hand on is one side of the coin of being a blind sculptor—with a devoted wife whose letter-writing skills and tenacious efforts have helped open many such doors in museums around the world. The other side of the coin: never having laid eyes on Laurie, his wife of 30 years, or his two grown daughters, and the inevitable obstacles—large and small—that come with living day to day and creating art without the aid of sight.

Naranjo’s eyes were fine for the first 22 years of his life. He grew up in Taos, fishing, hunting, exploring the mountains and canyons, and enjoying the outdoors with his nine siblings. Their mother was noted Santa Clara Pueblo potter Rose Naranjo, and the kids often played with the clay that was always around. While the other children made little pinch-pots, young Michael shaped the clay into small animals. There were no sculptors around to serve as role models, yet he knew intuitively that’s what he wanted to be.

PEACE, BRONZE, 16 X 7 X 14

After high school, Naranjo attended New Mexico Highlands University in Las Vegas, NM, taking design and sculpture courses and intending to major in art. But fate had other plans. In 1968 he was drafted and sent to Vietnam. He’d been there less than two months when he and his platoon were caught in an ambush. A grenade exploded, sending Naranjo flying into the air. When he came to, his right arm and hand were badly injured and his sight was permanently gone. Lying in a hospital bed in Japan, the young soldier wondered what he would do with his life. One day a volunteer asked if there was anything he wanted, and Naranjo requested some water-based clay, the kind so familiar from his childhood. With his good hand—fortunately he was left-handed—he rolled the clay into one of the simplest of creatures, an inchworm.

“That’s how it all started,” he remembers, speaking in a soft voice as he sits on the couch in his home near Santa Fe. “Once I made something with the clay, I knew I was going to be okay. I knew I could do it, with time, and there wasn’t anything that was going to change my mind.” Not the discouraging predictions of doctors and physical therapists. Not even the difficult, often frustrating months of rehabilitation and training in things like Braille, getting around, and cooking for himself. Finally, after eight months, he went home to his family in Taos.