Internationally renown- ed sculptor John Henry Waddell died on Wednesday, Nov. 27, at his Cornville home and studio, after a brief fight with cancer. His family said that he died mostly painlessly, without a long, drawn-out battle with the disease.
“He was at home — that’s what he had wanted — he was surrounded by his family, by his artwork, his oeuvre,” said Amy Waddell, one of Waddell’s six children. The family had celebrated the 94th birthday of his wife Ruth, who he had been married to for 70 years, just days before. “I think he went out exactly how he — well, none of us want to go out — but as he would have wished.”
Waddell was responsible for hundreds of sculpted works, ranging from miniatures to life-size figures to a massive three-story relief called “Rising” that he completed over 11 years and evoked 9/11. His artwork was focused on human figures, usually nude and frequently in motion poses, and were often typified by clear evidence of the human hands that crafted it — uneven textures and imperfections showing human thumb and fingerprints, not smooth surfaces.
Waddell was born Feb. 14, 1921, fought in the Second World War and came to the Art Institute of Chicago on the GI Bill, focusing mostly on painting. There, a classmate introduced him to his sister, Ruth, who became John’s wife on March 24, 1949 and stayed with him until his last days. Waddell had already had three children — Sean, Seamus and Seanchan — with his first wife, Elizabeth Owen. John and Ruth Waddell moved to Tempe in 1957, where Waddell was offered a teaching position at Arizona State University [then Arizona State College].
Arizona inspired Waddell, who became more interested in sculpture as a result of the Southwestern landscape.
“He noticed after a while that he was doing more sculpture than painting, and he attributed it after a while to the light, that was so different here than in Chicago,” Ruth Waddell said. “It was a whole different story here in Arizona, with light.”
Waddell became famous for some of his figure sculptures that came to be displayed as public art throughout the Valley of the Sun. “That Which Might Have Been,” a collection of four adult female figures representing the four girls killed in the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, if they had survived to adulthood, stands outside the Unitarian Universalist Church in Phoenix. The Herberger Theater Center, also in Phoenix, hosts two of his other seminal works — “Dance,” a series of dancing figures, and “The Gathering,” a family walking together.
“There’s no doubt in my mind that he’s been the most influential artist in Arizona history,” said Clark Riedy, an apprentice of Waddell’s from 1975-79 who went on to live and work designing sculpture in Jerome for decades after learning under Waddell. “John could find those characteristics that knit a person together as an individual.”
Waddell and his wife started building their studio in Cornville in 1970 and moved there full-time in 1971. In addition to the workspace and foundry where Waddell created his works, the large complex served as a home not only for the three children John and Ruth had together — Lindsey, William and Amy — but for many sculpting apprentices throughout the years, who came to live and work there. The large complex, nestled in the desert hills at the end of a dirt road, features numerous bronze figures created by Waddell watching over the buildings and the house that Ruth still lives in along with the live-in help that cared for her and John in their later years.
“He loved having classes — of children, or adults — come here,” Ruth Waddell said. “He was always a teacher, and so that happened up here a lot. People came from nearby and far and all over, and he did like teaching. Telling about his work, that was teaching. It was the work on a philosophical level. When it came to describing the foundry, after a while he’d just as soon let someone else teach that. To him the work of creating — that was the work that he was most interested in.”
Waddell’s work was frequently collaborative, not only bringing in the numerous apprentices who stayed at the studio, but members of his family to work parts of the foundry or make molds. He treated his models as partners in his work, often continuing to work with the same model for years of sculptures. Ruth Waddell told of potluck dinners with guests where after eating, “everyone would trudge up to the studio and pose.”
One of the most common models throughout Waddell’s life was of course his wife, who posed for him numerous times throughout their 70 years together, beginning when they first met in art school and continuing until old age.
“I had every emotion you could name about it,” Ruth Waddell said of her experience modeling for her husband. “When you model, there’s a lot of time for thoughts to go through your head. Don’t anybody underestimate the challenge of being a model. Just try it. Holding still is not natural.”
In later years, as Waddell began to lose some of his faculties and stopped being able to sculpt as he had before, he became a muse for his wife, who had mostly stepped back from her own artwork as she served as a partner to her husband. In the last years of his life, the pair would sit in Waddell’s studio while she would paint him, with the light hitting his aged face as he smiled at her. The resurgence in Ruth Waddell’s work inspired by her husband became a subject of a PBS documentary, entitled “Reluctant Muse” that their daughter Amy directed in 1999.
“I knew my mother played a huge role in my father’s life, and made that master apprentice program possible,” Amy Waddell said. “They worked as partners. She was behind the scenes, and he was the glorified artist. He always appreciated her so much, however she didn’t get the accolades that he got. She was the wife, she was the muse, but I knew that lurking in there was an amazing artist. There was a part of me that wanted to bring her out of hiding.”
Until the end of his life, Waddell enjoyed traveling throughout the Verde Valley along with his wife.
“His very last days, when he was not an active person that much or still moving around, he just loved going out in the car here,” Ruth Waddell said. “We just went to Sedona or Cottonwood. The minute we got in the car he’d get this big smile on his face. No matter what else was happening, I kept looking at him. He’d have this smile on his face.”
Waddell’s family intends to scatter his ashes at the site of “That Which Might Have Been” in Phoenix.
