Master sculptor Sabin Howard designed, created, and sculpted A Soldier’s Journey, the sculptural heart of the WWI Memorial installed in Washington DC next month

KENT, CONNECTICUT, UNITED STATES, August 6, 2024 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Master sculptor Sabin Howard designed, created, and sculpted A Soldier’s Journey, the sculptural heart of the National WWI Memorial to be installed in Washington, DC next month.

In January 2016, Howard, along with architect-in-training Joe Weishaar, won the global National WWI Memorial design competition. They beat 360 international teams for this honor.

Weishaar had the inspiration to set a relief inside Pershing Park, thus preserving the park as a functioning urban park. Weishaar carried out the re-design and renovation of the park while preserving its original lines.

Widely known as America’s Michelangelo, Howard was tasked with designing, creating, and sculpting the WWI Memorial relief. He immediately set to work photographing models in his studio. He hired actors out of Brooklyn as well as his friends and family members to put on original doughboy uniforms; he put his daughter, his wife, and various actresses in period costumes. He posed them on a platform elevated to provide the proper perspective for a heroic monument.

Over the course of the year, Howard took more than 12,000 photographs. Sometime in the middle of this intensive process, Howard began to use the ‘burst’ function on his cell phone camera to capture an entire movement from its inception to its completion. He then could choose the single photo from the grouping that best told the story, and the emotion, of the action he wanted to depict.

These photographs were rendered together to make a narrative. Along the way, Howard drew the scenes to work out the composition.

The early renderings were a jumble of figures and dead soldiers. After 25 iterations, Howard came up with a compelling narrative of a doughboy leaving home, heeding the call to arms, leading the charge into the chaos of battle, suffering the cost of war, and returning home, transformed but victorious.

Howard’s final version is both a breathtaking story and a masterful design composition. As he shared with Fox 5 News, “I had to completely transform my identity as an artist to make something that was visceral and would really be accepted by the populace.”

Discussing the narrative with his wife novelist Traci L. Slatton over breakfast one morning, he was excited to learn that he was re-creating the classic Hero’s Journey.

Slatton told him, “Joseph Campbell wrote extensively about this myth that recurs throughout cultures all over the world. The hero hears a call to adventure and leaves home, endures challenges, experiences a crucible wherein he or she is transformed, and finally returns home, changed, with a gift for his culture.”

Howard called his final design A Soldier’s Journey. He included women and children in his design, reasoning that families also bore the brunt of war when their loved ones were called away to battle.

Seeing humanity as ultimately interdependent upon each other, Howard intertwined the figures. The sole separate figure is the Shellshocked Soldier, who gazes directly out at the viewer in anguish. The doughboys who survived the War to End All Wars would never be the same, nor would the world.

The Shellshocked soldier is flanked by nurses lifting fallen soldiers. These nurses are battlefield angels who embody healing.

After designing and drawing the composition, Howard sculpted in his studio with assistant sculptor Charlie Mostow for four and a half years to bring the relief to completion.

The Illumination Ceremony on September 13, 2024 at 6:45 pm will be live-streamed and covered by National television.

Rebecca DeSimone, Esquire
Sabin Howard Sculpture LLC
rdrosebud@gmail.com
Visit us on social media:
X
LinkedIn
Instagram
YouTube
Other

The First 11 Figures from Vision to Bronze