Modern Michaelangelo

There are lots of street merchants over by the Suzhou Museum.  They sell tourist stuff, mostly.  They will carve you a stone "chop" with your name in Chinese.  Or they will sell you silk scarves, or lacquer jewelry, or pearls or T-shirts.  They look forward to the busloads of tourists that come filled with people in search of mementos to take home. 

In the cold weather, the tourists are more scarce.  The vendors still have to make a living, though.  They sit outside all day in the damp cold, clutching their hot water bottles and drinking gallons of hot tea. .

There is a sculptor, shown above, who is always camped out directly across from the main entrance to the museum.  He works in clay and appears, to my untrained eye, to be pretty good.  I first noticed him last summer.  He always had a line of young couples waiting.  The girlfriends would sit in the chair as the artist's model and the boyfriends would stare on lovingly and coo at them during the 20 or 30 minutes required for immortalization.  During the slow periods, he would crank out a bust of Barack Obama or Brad Pitt from a photo, just to show the passers-by that he was A-number-one quality.  After all, if he can make a good looking Obama from a passport-sized photo, then imagine what he can do with your true love in the flesh.

The photo above shows the sculptor in February.  On this particular day, it was damp and it was misting and it was about 35 degrees outside. (2 degrees if you're Celsius kind of person).  My fingers were numb and I had kept them in my pockets during the 30 minutes that I had been outside.  Yet he was sitting, bare-headed, with his fingers stuck in wet clay for the whole day.  Like the Lion in Winter, he was taking whatever prey that could be found on a cold, cold day.

In this particular case, his customer was a young man.  He payed for the artist to sculpt the bust of a young lady from a photograph on his cell phone.  I'd like to think it is his girlfriend away at university.  Or maybe a gift for his wife on their first anniversery.  Who knows.

But regardless, I think it is pretty amazing that this guy can sit out in the weather and make art from the images on a cell phone.