Sculptor’s Newest Project Requires a Head for Music

Miriam Lutzky of Corona del Mar has been listening to a lot of Ella Fitzgerald while she works lately. She’s also been paying top dollar for some of the early albums of the famous jazz and blues singer, who died in June at age 78. She bought them not for the music, but for the album covers with Fitzgerald’s picture.

Lutzky is a sculptor, and she’s producing a slightly larger than life-size bust of Fitzgerald for Chapman University in Orange. This is her third, and most ambitious, project for the university in the past year and a half. Lutzky’s wet clay sculpting piece on Fitzgerald--a younger, top-of-her-field Fitzgerald from 35 years ago--will be bronzed before going on display. This week I saw the clay piece, and it’s a safe prediction that Chapman is going to love it.

How Lutzky and Chapman got together is an interesting tale.

Lutzky, 57, has gone through careers as a nurse, a professional artist and an interior decorator. It amazed me, after seeing her brilliant work, that she began sculpting only three years ago, in a class at Golden West College in Huntington Beach.

Lutzky happens to be a cousin to Ruth Wardwell, a public affairs specialist at Chapman. But it wasn’t Wardwell’s pull that got her the sculpting commission. It happened this way:

Wardwell was in Chapman President Jim Doti’s office and noticed a seascape painting, surprised it was by her cousin Lutzky. Doti didn’t know the artist; he only knew he liked the painting so much he grabbed it for his office from somewhere else on campus.

Wardwell told Lutzky that Doti had her painting. Lutzky later got the chance to meet the college president following an event at Chapman. She told him she’d switched careers. Well, stroke of luck, Doti told her he just happened to be in the market for a good sculptor to put some busts on display around the campus.

Lutzky showed Doti some of her work, he loved it, and her first project became a life-size bust of George Washington. It’s now on the campus lawn near Doti’s office. It was bronzed from Lutzky’s clay work, as the others will be.

“At the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., I saw all kinds of busts of George Washington. No two looked alike,” Lutzky said. “I decided to model mine after a sculpture by Jean Antoine Houdon. He had actually done a life mask of Washington’s face, so his is considered the most accurate.”

It took her about two months. Adapting Houdon wasn’t that difficult for someone with Lutzky’s talent. Pleasing Doti came a little harder.

“Twice I had to redo the mouth because Mr. Doti wasn’t quite satisfied,” she said with a chuckle. (Those famous Washington false teeth made the cheeks hollow.) “But Mr. Doti’s attention to detail really paid off.”

Next up for Lutzky was a life-size bust of Adam Smith, the 18th century Scottish economist generally regarded as the founder of modern economics. The research was difficult, Lutzky said, because only two known likenesses of Smith survived his era. But pleasing Doti was easier--like the rest of us, he didn’t have much idea what Smith looked like.

The Smith bust also took two months. But Fitzgerald, Lutzky said, is a three-month effort: “Because she’s so well known, I’ve made myself a much harder project.”

She works on the Fitzgerald bust at Sculpture Spaces in Fountain Valley. Lutzky said she likes working there, instead of at a private studio, in part because all the sculptors there draw ideas from one another. The wet clay of the Fitzgerald bust, in fact, kept drooping because Lutzky had so much detail (a microphone, large loop earrings swaying to the music). It was a co-worker at Sculpture Spaces who suggested the solution: creating a Styrofoam base.

Lutzky unwrapped several layers of plastic to show me Fitzgerald in progress. She’s almost finished, except for the hands and microphone. When it was finally free of plastic, I think I broke into a huge grin. It was marvelous.

Said Lutzky: “The music helps me get a feel for what a great singer she was. That’s what I hope to capture.”

Tiger’s Latest Tale: If you play golf or know even a smidgen about the game, you no doubt have heard that 20-year-old Tiger Woods, raised in Cypress, has created huge headlines in recent weeks. He won his third U.S. Amateur title, captured more than $500,000 in winnings in just six weeks on the PGA tour and became the $60-million man by signing long-term contracts with Nike and Titleist.

But here’s one I hadn’t expected: Tiger Woods, journalist. That’s right. Woods had his own column in Golf World magazine this week. He wrote about all the good that has happened to him this fall, and his one misstep: walking away from the Buick Classic, claiming exhaustion, and leaving town right before a 200-guest dinner thrown in his honor.

Woods apologized in print: “I’m human, and I do make mistakes. Missing the dinner was one of them.” But he went beyond a public apology: He wrote personal letters to each of the 200 dinner invitees to say he was sorry.

Drive and Shop: South Coast Plaza mailed entry forms to 45,000 residents for a $5,000 shopping spree in celebration of the opening of the first phase of the San Joaquin Hills Transportation Corridor. About 5,000 residents returned the form. The winner: Albert Howe, 38, a financial analyst, of Laguna Niguel. Howe said he’d spend the money on his family, and “buy a lot of Christmas gifts.” There’s a $10,000 shopping spree coming up in December, in honor of the opening of the entire corridor.

Wrap-Up: Chapman will hold a ceremony Friday at 9 a.m. for the official unveiling of the Adam Smith bust. It will face the soon-to-be-built Business and Information Technology building. There is no date set for the Fitzgerald unveiling, and Doti and his staff have not yet decided where to put it. Somewhere near the music department would seem likely.

It was commissioned to coincide with a $1-million endowment gift to Chapman’s School of Music from Newport Beach philanthropists Dick and Hyla Bertea. They are great Ella Fitzgerald fans.

Jerry Hicks’ column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Readers may reach Hicks by calling the Times Orange County Edition at (714) 966-7823 or by fax to (714) 966-7711, or e-mail to jerry.hicks@latimes.com