Evening Telegraph (First Edition)
Workshop hit by ‘city’s most cultured thieves’
A SCULPTOR says he’s been the victim of “Dundee’s most cultured thieves” after a half-completed wax bust of Virginia Woolf was stolen from his workshop.
Steve Paterson, 49, says the sculpture of the early-20th Century author was taken from his premises in Coldside.
Having been alerted by staff in a neighbouring business that the workshop had been broken into on Monday, Steve did a quick check to see what was missing.
“I think the fact the place was so untidy might have been to my advantage,” said Steve, who has been self-employed for the past 20 years.
“There are some expensive tools in there — vacuum pumps, compressors, that type of thing — but all that I can see is missing is this bust of Virginia Woolf.
“I think they came in, saw the state of the place and felt sorry for me. I’m not the tidiest of workers and, if I’m honest, the place looked tidier than before the break-in.”
Steve, who lives in St Mary’s with wife Kathleen, said he had decided not to report the matter to police.
He said: “Apart from the damage to a couple of locks, and Virginia’s head, there’s nothing to report.
“The bust itself would be worth about £375 when it was finished — that’s what it would make as a commissioned piece — but the state it was in, as a lump of resin, it’s basically worthless.
“If I do end up getting in touch with the police they are going to have to put out a release saying, ‘Police Scotland are looking for a thief with impeccable taste’.
“After getting over the initial shock I’ve really just been laughing about it.
“There are busts in there of Jimi Hendrix, JRR Tolkien, Frank Zappa — it’s just left me wondering who this huge Virginia Woolf fan is.”
Steve said his business, Steve Paterson Sculpture, had made a range of pieces for different clients over the years, including sculptures of popular DC Thomson characters The Broons and Desperate Dan, but at the moment he was working almost solely on busts for both private clients and art galleries.
He said: “If the thieves are reading this, I’d like to say, ‘thanks for not stealing my expensive stuff’.
“But really I just want to know what their attraction to Virginia Woolf is.
“There are other works there that are at a later stage than the one of Virginia. There’s one of the Manchester City goalkeeper Bert Trautman — it’s finished. I’d be gutted if that had gone but they obviously weren’t football fans. It could have been a lot worse.”
Virginia Woolf was one of the foremost English modernist authors of the 20th Century, with literary works including the novel A Room of One’s Own.
She drowned in 1941, aged 59, having been a central figure in the Bloomsbury Group of intellectuals in London during the early part of the 1900s.