Pittsburgh sculptor Thaddeus Mosley: 90 years in the woods
Thaddeus Mosley always finds himself in the woods.
As a boy in New Castle, he and his friends played among the trees, then brought the leaves to school so he could tell the oaks from the sycamores, maples from walnuts.
“I’ve always been fascinated by tree branches and the nature of the log itself,” Mr. Mosley said while working in his North Side studio. “But I didn’t know the properties of the wood.”
He knows now. Ninety years old and a well-known sculptor, he knows.
He’s even built like a tree — short, solid and hardened by too many years spent doing things he did not love. He worked for the U.S. Postal Service for 40 years, retiring from the North Side post office near his home in the Mexican War Streets.
“It was drudge work, a means to an end,” he said.
The beginning came at age 28, when he made his first sculptures — fish and water birds carved from a 2-by-4, with legs or stands made of brass or steel. He saw similar pieces for sale with Scandinavian furniture in Kaufmann’s Downtown department store in the 1950s.
“Heck, I can do that,’” he thought to himself.
When he was young, he didn’t realize that art could be a profession.
“I grew up in a poor neighborhood. I never knew anyone that was a painter. I would have liked to have been a painter.”
He could draw. He and a friend, Sammy Jasper, drew scenes from nature in colored chalk on the blackboards. “The teacher left them up till the chalk fell off,” he said, laughing.
In high school, he discovered he had a knack for English, too. “I liked poetry and writing.”
Mr. Mosley graduated from New Castle High School in 1944 and was drafted. He chose the Navy over the Army and was sent with other young black men to Camp Robert Smalls in Illinois. He first worked
on planes, then was shipped overseas, to Guam, art of a stevedore company, loading and unloading ships.
“Very few African-American men went on ships, except as cooks or stewards,” he said.
After his discharge, he enrolled at the University of Pittsburgh, majoring in English and journalism. He and a friend who was taking a studio painting class would visit the nearby Carnegie Museum of Art. Its permanent collection was mostly works by Europeans and Americans; he preferred the Carnegie International exhibitions.
“They had things from Thailand and countries you would never see,” he said.
But his real artistic inspiration came from a textbook. On one page was a sculpture by Romanian artist Constantin Brancusi. On the other was one by an unknown African sculptor.
“That really piqued my interest,” he said.
He graduated in 1950 and went to work for the Pittsburgh Courier, covering high school and college sports. When he was offered a more stable job with better health benefits at the Downtown post office, he took it. He didn’t enjoy sorting mail — dead trees — but it supported a wife and three children.
In 1959, he entered his first juried show, at the Three Rivers Arts Festival. Of the two pieces he entered, the one that garnered the most attention was “Returning Hero,” the figure of a man with what looked like a bullet hole in his head. The hole was a knot that the artist left intact, a comment on the Korean War. Jerry Caplan, a ceramics artist and sculptor who taught art at Chatham University, was impressed.
“You’re pretty good. Why don’t you join the Society of Sculptors?” he asked Mr. Mosley.
He did join it, along with Associated Artists of Pittsburgh and other groups that met at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts. As his confidence grew, he began to work on a larger scale. His largest sculptures are 14 feet tall.
“They’re too big for most houses,” he said, looking out at about two dozen massive works that reach toward the 10-foot ceilings of his basement studio in Manchester.
In 1966, then-Carnegie Museum of Art director Leon Arkus offered him a one-man show. Its success in 1968 led to more accolades. In 1979, he was named Artist of the Year by the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts while still working full time at the post office. He gave summer classes in wood sculpture for 28 years at the Touchstone Center for Crafts in Farmington, Fayette County.
Mr. Mosley retired from the post office in 1992 and in 1997 had another solo show at the Carnegie. He was also the subject of a 1997 book and a 2012 documentary. His sculptures are displayed at the Carnegie, Akron (Ohio) Museum of Art, Susquehanna Art Museum in Harrisburg and Mattress Factory museum on the North Side. The Westmoreland Museum of American Art in Greensburg recently added a piece called “The Cloud” to its permanent collection.
Mr. Mosley says his three biggest influences are American sculptor Isamu Noguchi, Mr. Brancusi and African tribal art. The shapes and patterns he makes with chisels, gouges and a mallet create visual tension and rhythm as he strives to convey feelings of weight and space. Sometimes, the shape of the raw wood inspires him.
“That log reminded me of Matisse’s jazz cut-outs. I call it ‘Dancing With Matisse.’”
One still has its roots attached but has been upended so they dangle like curly hair at eye level. In many of the sculptures, the massive components each weigh more than 100 pounds. They are made to be disassembled, transported and reassembled.
“I must have lifted that a hundred times,” Mr. Mosley says while looking at one piece.
Although he has used this basement space for 16 years, he didn’t get a floor crane until he was 82. Before that, he called upstairs for help from woodworker Tadao Arimoto. When asked if Mr. Arimoto showed him the butterfly joint used to join slabs, Mr. Mosley shook his head.
“I mainly do mortise and tenon joints. Tadao’s butterflies are cut exact and routed. Mine are cut freehand, not perfectly done. I’d rather not see them.”
He uses mostly walnut and cherry wood because it’s less likely to split. He does not stain the wood but seals it with polyacrylic or linseed oil and mineral spirits.
As if walking through a forest, the artist stopped, touched a piece’s chiseled surface and looked up.
“People say, ‘You make it look easy.’ I say, ‘I’ve been doing it for a long time.’”
He plans to keep working as long as he’s able.
“You can’t quit for a few months and try to come back. You’ve got to stay at it.”