Carving Forms

By Vince Basehart

February 29 -- You could be forgiven for assuming artist Lolita Sapriel’s sculptures were stolen from the old Getty.

The figures she creates resemble the great treasures of antiquity. Camels, tigers, lions, winged figures, medusas and other human forms of tawny and pearl-colored marble populate her gallery. Think ancient Cairo or Damascus.

There is a slightly unfinished, raw character to her forms. It’s easy to imagine discovering them on a dig in Egypt beneath a blazing sun.

She’s a sculptor, and a psychotherapist who has been practicing in Santa Monica for decades. And yes, her name really is Lolita. She’s as dark-haired and pretty as any Nabokov fantasy, with an intellect as sharp as the tools she uses to carve forms out of marble.

Picasso went through his blue period; Sapriel is definitely in her female phase. When the Lens visited her seaside home recently, besides the other forms, there was a small army of stone women taking residence in her gallery. One of them was made of marble so white and translucent it appeared to glow in the sunlight pouring through the windows.

She is currently at work on a female form made of 40 pounds of red-streaked Mormon Pearl marble.

“I have been compelled to continue to follow this (female) form and see what I can do with it,” Sapriel says.

Her current phase is something of a return to her roots. Her first piece of sculpture was a reclining female made of clay, created in the West Hollywood studio of artist Mike Paul. Up until that time, at the age of 18, her only piece of sculpture had been “a little totem pole made of balsa wood” constructed in grammar school.

It was at Paul’s studio that she soon became a serious artist in clay working under the ad-hoc tutelage of an intimidating mentor, an intense man she remembers only as “Vito,” who had the same looping moustache as Salvador Dali.

This awakening to art occurred on the cusp of the ‘70s, and you get the sense she really walked the walk. A photo I saw of her and her younger sister looks like they stepped out of a commune.

She quickly became serious about her work, and by the mid-‘70s was using the classic “hidden wax” method to cast pieces in bronze. She often gave her bronze pieces the greenish patina so common to ancient sculpture.

She worked in bronze for about another ten years until she made the switch to marble. It was a challenging time for her, requiring a totally different approach both materially and psychologically.

“When doing bronze, you first build a form out of clay or other material and you add to it to create shapes," she says. "Sculpting out of stone is the exact opposite, finding the image hidden in the stone and removing material, much like working from a negative.”

She saves time by blasting away at the big block of marble with an air-driven hammer to get to the basic shape she will refine. By the time she’s done with a piece, however, it is as smooth and shiny glass. One sculpture typically takes six months to finish.

“I am drawn to the act of digging into the stone to unearth forms and meaning,” she says. “The forms elicit memories which help me access my own creativity.”

By the way she speaks it’s hard to tell if she’s a sculptor, a psychotherapist or an archeologist.

She insists that her practice is totally separate from her art. “Therapy is about being of service to the psyche of others. Art is about getting in contact with and serving my own,” she says.