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Sunday, November 11, 2001
An angel’s blessing
The wooden sculpture symbolized Marion White’s rise from depression, but was nearly destroyed in a fire last year. After Sept. 11, it was time to resurrect the angel from its ashes...
By Dan Parker
Caller-Times

Michelle Christenson/Caller-Times

With the terrorist attacks still fresh on his mind, sculptor Marion White retrieved his scarred angel from the woodpile and began breathing new life into it.

To anyone who happened to drive through the 2800 block of North Shoreline Boulevard that night, the sight they saw must have been a bizarre, almost nightmarish vision. It was 3:30 in the morning, and a life-size wood sculpture of an angel stood on the deck of the Pier 99 restaurant, burning. Six-foot-high flames leaped from the figure's wings, arms and face. The angel's mouth stood open, as if in mid-scream.
   Firefighters said they never were able to determine how the sculpture caught fire that morning last summer. Maybe someone tossed a cigarette in the hollow base, one fire official said. Sculptor Marion White is convinced that teen-age vandals set fire to it.
   Either way, the fire severely damaged the sculpture, burning away a wing and an arm. A wooden sea turtle and pelican attached to the angel also were damaged.

George Gongora/Caller-Times file photo

At 3:30 in the morning last summer, White’s sculpture of an angel stood on the deck of the Pier 99 restaurant, burning. Six-foot-high flames leaped from the figure's wings, arms and face. The angel's mouth stood open, as if in mid-scream.

   White hauled the blackened hulk back to his home, and the charred remnants lay untouched for more than a year in his yard. Heartbroken, he didn't know what to do with his angel.
   But after Sept. 11, 2001, the angel began to speak to him in a new way.
   White retrieved the scarred artwork from the woodpile and began carving again, breathing new life into the work.
   Today, the redesigned sculpture, titled "Resurrection," is on exhibit at the Art Center for the Islands in Port Aransas. The angel hangs from a wall, seemingly in flight, and it cradles an American flag in its one remaining arm.
   White explains the recreated sculpture like this:

Michelle Christenson/Caller-Times

White continues his passion for sculpting, though now he has his work bronzed. ‘Rose Dolphin,’ along with the redesigned angel sculpture, is on display at the Art Center for the Islands in Port Aransas.

   "Our country's in God's hands," the 53-year-old Vietnam veteran said. "We as a country need to look to God, because God has angels watching over us."White knows all about creating new life from wreckage. Several years ago, he suffered debilitating injuries in an accident that inflicted lingering pain, put him out of work and plunged him into a deep depression.
   He would find his resurrection through art.
   In the beginning
   White has filled most of his adult life with work that has nothing to do with art. He has worked as a civilian aircraft mechanic, carpenter, pipe fitter at refineries, commercial diver and cable television installer.
   On Sept. 7, 1994, while White was installing cable in Rockport, he fell 18 feet from a ladder onto a flatbed trailer below.

Caller-Times file photo

Like the angel he sculpted, White himself once suffered a debilitating physical injury — one that forced him to sell his house. Before the fire, the angel had a stern expression on it face. The reworked version wears a confident grin.

   Two bones in his right leg were broken, and the kneecap in that leg was shattered. The fall also damaged nerves in his back.
   For the next two years, White underwent several surgeries and spent a lot of miserable time lying in his recliner at home, wearing back and knee braces and eating pain pills. Unable to work, he said, he went on disability. Unable to afford his four-bedroom home and swimming pool, he sold the place and moved into a two-bedroom rental house with his wife and three children.
   The pain and his resulting joblessness and financial problems strained his marriage. Those factors played into his later divorce from Rhonda White.
   "When you live in pain, you become aggravated, irritable and most of all, depressed," White said. "This reality - there's no escape. You've got a wife that wants to go dancing, and you can't go. You try to pick up your kids, and you can't because it hurts. These things - they cause turmoil.

Caller-Times file photo

‘When you live in pain, you become aggravated, irritable and most of all, depressed,’ White said. ‘This reality — there’s no escape. You've got a wife that wants to go dancing, and you can't go. You try to pick up your kids, and you can't because it hurts. These things — they cause turmoil.’ The initial carving of the statue was therapeutic for White.

   "When you see everything you worked for going away, your family falling away ... it's hard to get a grip," he said. "It was like I was just in a black hole. You don't know what you're going to do or how you're going to do it or how you're going to survive."
   "He couldn't do very much," Rhonda White said. "He would sit in his chair, and it took a toll on our relationship. He wasn't able to (do) all that a father usually can do, being outside and going to the park and stuff. I guess sometimes I couldn't see that."
   Turning point
   By fall 1996, White had reached a low point. He had fallen into a deep depression because he couldn't work and had to depend on disability to pay his bills. He worried about his future.
   Sitting in a chair in his garage on Thanksgiving Day that year, he absent-mindedly picked up a razor knife he had used in the past to cut dry wall.
   Then he spotted a 6-inch chunk of mesquite firewood lying on his workbench. He picked the wood up, put the razor knife to it and started carving. He'd never carved a piece of wood before, but he felt compelled to do it that day. He didn't know why.

Caller-Times file photo

White continues to sculpt and carve from wood. ‘The only way I can protect my art is to transform them into bronze,’ he said.

   "That's a moment that's so hard to explain," he said. "Like if you were going to jump off a bridge and, standing on the edge, just before you jumped, you changed. And then, the rest of your life, you knew what you were supposed to do. ... No matter what gets in your way, you know what you're supposed to do, and that is what my art is to me."
   Working single-mindedly for several hours, he turned the wood over and over in his hands, cutting and punching at it with the knife. He ended up creating the likeness of a redfish from a shapeless piece of wood.
   "It was real rough," he said. "But you could tell what it was. I sold it to a friend. Then I bought it back."
   In the coming days and weeks, White carved more and more sculptures, and he became obsessed with the pastime. He got better and better, but he didn't take any lessons or read any books about woodcarving.
   In the five years since he began sculpting, he's created hundreds of sculptures out of mesquite, mahogany, ebony and other kinds of wood, some of it driftwood.
   His works have ranged from 2-inch-long mesquite frogs to a 6-foot-6-inch blue marlin carved from a hunk of walnut he found on the beach at Padre Island National Seashore.
   "It's what I know," he said. "I used to spend a lot of days fishing at the beach. Used to go every day."
   White still doesn't make a full living at woodcarving. He hopes to someday. But he doesn't do it for the money. He does it to relieve his pain. The injuries he suffered several years ago still send jolts of pain through his body - except when he's carving wood.
   "When I'm doing the art, I'm not in pain," he said. "I'm so focused on what I'm doing, there's no pain."
   He has won more than 30 awards at art shows throughout Texas.
   "It's the mystery of God," he said. "When he touches your life, all things change. I can look at a piece of wood now and see something in it and actually bring out what I see."
   Seeing an angel
   In summer 1997, a neighbor told White that the wind had blown down an aged willow tree on the neighbor's property. The neighbor offered him wood from the tree, and White hauled away two large pieces of the tree trunk and deposited it at his wood shop. He let it sit untouched for several days.
   "I just kept looking at it, and looking at it, and looking at it, and then I saw it," White said. "I saw the angel, and I saw the turtle, and I saw the pelican."
   White spent hundreds of hours whittling away at the willow. At first, he did the work at his shop and then he moved the piece to Pier 99, where he chatted each day with restaurant owner Mike Astin, a friend.
   White worked on the sculpture at the restaurant every weekend and any free moment he could get during the week.
   He sculpted the angel emerging from the ocean, holding turtle eggs and flanked by a sea turtle and a brown pelican.
   Tourists who regularly visited Pier 99 always stopped to take note of White's progress.
   "I can't tell you how many people would have pictures taken with it, because it was such an interesting piece," Astin said.
   White put in about three years of work on the sculpture. It was the biggest, most involved work he had yet produced, and he was only about a month from finishing it.
   Changed expression
   A security guard and her children staying in an apartment near Pier 99 were among the first to see the fire. They doused the flames with a hose, fire extinguisher and buckets of water.
   Astin called White, and White immediately drove to the restaurant.
   "I felt my heart just go. Oh God," White said. "It was devastating. I couldn't hardly breathe. ... It was like a death in the family."
   He hauled the blackened remains of the sculpture home, and he left it alone for about a year. He didn't know what to do with it.
   Just one week after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, White found himself standing over the angel, staring at its charred skin. He heaved it off the scrap pile and set it on a table.
   "I just sat there and looked at it, and I said, 'You know, this could be really something.' "
   White used a weed eater to whack away much of the charred wood, and he worked with modified hunting knives to carve a new wing for the angel. He removed the pelican and sea turtle that had been part of the sculpture before. He placed an American flag in the angel's remaining arm.
   Before the fire, the angel had a stern expression on its face. The reworked version wears a serene smile.
   "It says something," White said. "It says everything's going to be all right."


Contact Dan Parker at 886-3753 or at parkerd@caller.com

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