Master Carver’s Work a Cut Above for Church

For three months, Gloria Kubilos has been urging her husband, Charles, to quit fussing over his wood sculpture of Christ’s Last Supper, which will be installed next month in the newly renovated Ojai Presbyterian Church.

But the 60-year-old sculptor remained in front of the three long slabs of Japanese oak that make up the triptych over which he has labored in the cluttered garage behind his Oxnard home for 16 months.

The sculpture was so lifelike that the wood’s grain seemed to resemble veins crisscrossing Christ’s chest while he lifts a chalice to tell the Apostles that they are about to drink his blood.

Still, Kubilos scrubbed nearly imperceptible rough spots with a scouring pad and an instrument that resembled a butter knife in preparation for the work’s unveiling at a 2 p.m. reception today at the Doubletree Hotel in Ventura.

“She thinks I overdo it,” he said, polishing Peter’s knuckle with zeal. “And she’s probably right, but you have to go till you get it right. The slightest change in the surface of the wood will determine whether the figures come alive or look completely dead.”

$100,000 Restoration

At stake is more than the 16-foot-long centerpiece of the church’s $100,000 restoration effort, which began in earnest last month with a “pew-pulling party” and will culminate in October with a dedication.

The Last Supper is Kubilos’ first major sculpture. About 1 1/2 years ago, he abandoned a lifelong career as a mechanical engineer to devote himself to sculpting.

Since then, he has crafted 18-inch bronze replicas of Ventura’s statue of Junipero Serra. The replicas are sold for $3,000 each to raise money for city restoration of the piece that stands in front of City Hall. But Kubilos’ work on that project was voluntary. The Last Supper, whose figures project from a backing of polished wood, is the first commission for the sculptor who almost wasn’t.

As a child, Kubilos dreamed of being an artist, and his mother thought that the budding whittler was talented enough that she kept him in a steady supply of soap cakes. He even studied art--but not sculpture--at Washington University in St. Louis. He applied his talents first to papier-mache figures for parades and later to posters for the Army during the Korean War.

But he concluded that art and family responsibilities were not the easiest of companions and enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, from which he graduated in 1958 with a master’s degree in engineering. The next year, he married his wife, a native of the Mexican industrial city San Luis Potosi, where he was visiting his sister.

Portraits for Wife

Kubilos wooed his wife-to-be with flattering portraits--he even gave one to her parents in exchange for their daughter’s hand.

He gave up his art after their second child was born.

“I’m sure I’d have missed it if I’d had time to think about it,” he said, “but I didn’t.”

Then, 10 years ago, Gloria Kubilos admired a wood creche made for a friend by a Swiss carver. Convinced that her husband could do better, Gloria Kubilos urged him to dig in. Thus was the passion rekindled of the man whom fellow members of the Channel Islands Carvers Guild refer to as “Master Carver.”

“He’s excellent, he really is,” said Wilbur Rubottom, a retired cabinetmaker who is in charge of the Serra restoration project. “I have not seen anything that he hasn’t done exquisitely. I have to frankly say that I wish I had the artistic ability that he has. He’s a natural.”

Once he picked up the knife, Kubilos had trouble putting it down. He carved late into the night and spent many weekends at carving competitions. He stuffed his briefcase with short-bladed knives and a sharpening stone so he could whittle away odd moments at work and on business trips.

“A briefcase will hide a lot of things,” he said mischievously.

Not so the Kubilos house, which stands as testament to the master carver’s obsession. Tiny animal figures rapidly turned in carving contests--rabbits, elephants, buzzards--line the entryway. A sculpture of the neighbor’s daughter stands in a ballet pose on the mantel. Across the room hang wooden portraits of the Kubilos children, and in a nearby cabinet rest postage-stamp-size carvings of their grandparents in ivory.

Houseful of Sculpture

Nary a nook or cranny of the Kubilos living room hasn’t been given over to sculpture. And so it was with Kubilos’ life: Something had to give, and that turned out to be his job with the Oxnard office of ABEX Corp., an aerospace firm where he had worked for 25 years.

“I could see that my real energy was going into art instead of the job,” Kubilos said. But he didn’t hit his personal road to Damascus until he was offered a better-paying job with another aerospace firm three years ago.

“It triggered something,” he said. “I realized I didn’t want another job. I wanted to quit and sculpt.”

By February, 1987, he retired early, trading places with his 49-year-old wife. Having never worked outside the home, she began a career as a court translator. Kubilos tended the hearth.

“He got the easy part,” said Gloria Kubilos, jokingly. “He got the house after the kids are gone.”

Meanwhile, the Ojai Presbyterian Church was gearing up to tackle what the chairman of the sanctuary restoration committee, Don Scanlin, politely refers to as “57 years’ worth of deferred maintenance.”

Dingy gray-green paint darkened the walls. The outmoded red-and-black linoleum hadn’t been replaced since the church was built in 1931. And the burgeoning parish choir, now 55 members strong, had outgrown its seating in the church’s apse.

As part of the overhaul, the congregation was seeking a version of the Last Supper--the story of the first Communion--to serve as backdrop to a brand-new Communion table.

Won Commission

Two months after he retired, Kubilos edged out several other artists for the commission.

“I think he’s going to become very well known,” said Scanlin, “and we’re just happy to have one of his first pieces.”

For the first week, Kubilos ironed out the work’s composition in non-drying clay on small models the size of a steno pad. Another eight months went into working out the composition on a clay model the size of the actual piece.

It took less than two months to arrive at the piece’s rough outline in wood, first with a chain saw and later with a chisel that cut within an eighth-inch of the sculpture’s eventual contours.

For the past eight months, Kubilos has been laboring over that last eighth of an inch, coaxing the butter-colored wood to yield a vein here, a knuckle or sinew of muscle there.

The church’s renovation committee gave only one direction--to replicate Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece--but Kubilos has taken liberties.

Composition, which was complicated by the piece’s long, narrow dimensions and three parts, dictated that the Christ figure hold something. Kubilos handed him the chalice, thus changing the moment being portrayed.

“The da Vinci painting was at the moment when he said, ‘One of you will betray me,’ ” Kubilos said. “Mine is when he said, ‘This is my blood that I shed for you.”

Co-Workers’ Faces

Neither will da Vinci scholars recognize the Apostles’ faces. Kubilos’ former colleagues at ABEX served as models for many of them.

“I wanted a mix of facial types so it would look like a group of different people,” he explained.

For instance, the company’s bespectacled president during Kubilos’ tenure, Jerry DeVillers, served as the model for the thick-jawed Thaddeus, who wears no glasses and sports a bowl-shaped haircut in which no self-respecting executive would be caught dead.

Those who know project engineer Michael Small recognize him in the boyish but stern James the Lesser, although the Ojai resident says he doesn’t see the resemblance.

“I said, ‘I don’t look like that.’ I don’t have a very happy look on my face,” Small, 29, remembers remarking when seeing a study for the sculpture. “But my direct supervisor saw it and said, ‘Yeah, that looks like you. You walk around like that all the time.’ ”

Only Judas is taken from the painting by the Renaissance master. Kubilos figured that nobody would model for the disciple whose name has become synonymous with traitor, but he was wrong.

“Friends have called and said, ‘I would have wanted to be included even if it was as Judas,’ ” Gloria Kubilos said.

Kubilos, who is reticent about discussing his own religious beliefs, didn’t dare base another figure on anyone he knows. His almond-eyed Jesus is a composite of paintings and sculptures that Kubilos compiled from art books in local libraries.

“You really don’t have much leeway on that,” he explained.