Crucifix comes to life under the careful eye of Pungo woodworker

By KRYS STEFANSKY

The Virginian-Pilot

JIM BROCKMAN learned to carve with a knife and a bar of Ivory soap.

"It was during the Republican convention that nominated Eisenhower," he said. That was 1952, and he was 6 years old.

His grandfather was a carpenter with a shop in his backyard in California, Pa., and Brockman lived there off and on and grew to love working with wood.

Now Brockman's own workshop stays several inches deep in sawdust and wall to wall with planks, chunks of salvaged wood and bits and pieces of carvings. The shop and the tiny house he lives in are on a dirt road in the maritime forest near Sandbridge in Virginia Beach.

He lives a simple bachelor life with regular jaunts into the Virginia foothills to hike, camp and flyfish. He smokes cigars that he lights with a propane torch held inches from his beard, enjoys owning a decent stereo system, has a cat. He drinks port, drives a truck, likes old tools and apparently never throws anything away.

Brockman turns out historical reproductions and specialty millwork. He helped with the restoration of the Governor's Mansion in Richmond and in Norfolk at the Hermitage Foundation Museum and Freemason Baptist Church. Over the years he's moved from ordinary carpentry, remodeling and cabinetry to more artistic work. Self-taught, he restores and repairs duck decoys and carves things of his own – sinuous white swans with looping necks and bodies smooth as silk, prancing carousel horses with wild manes, forest animals, occasional pieces of furniture.

The more unusual the request, the better.

"I don't like to do jobs that I know how it's going to come out. Generally, I like people as subjects, but I didn't think there’d be commercial value in selling carvings of people nobody knew."

Then, in August, Brockman received a request: Come look at the Basilica of St. Mary of the Immaculate Conception in Norfolk. Make a carving, a replica, of the crucifix hanging in the small side chapel.

Make it look as much like the original as possible, down to the wave of the hair and the placement of thorns in the crown on Christ's head. And make it greater than life-sized.

Could he do it? Could he do it and finish by Dec. 8?

Brockman's client was Saint Patrick Catholic School in Norfolk. Charles V. McPhillips, an attorney, is chairman of its board of directors. With the school in its second year of operation, he and his siblings decided to give the crucifix in memory of their parents, Vinnie and Ann McPhillips. It would hang in the lobby.

The deadline, Dec. 8, was the anniversary of the burning of Norfolk's Saint Patrick Church in 1856. Afterward, some said the fire was set by people who disliked the church's Irish Catholic congregation; others thought it was because blacks were welcome at the church.

Whatever the reason, Saint Patrick's burned to the ground that night; in the morning, only three walls were standing. The crucifix was the only religious artifact that survived the flames.

Two years later, a second church, named St. Mary's, was built on the same spot, and the scorched crucifix was rehung inside the new, magnificent, gothic-style basilica.

Giving a replica of this crucifix to the new school, the McPhillips family felt, would let the spirit of the burned church live on and remind the children who see it to turn away from feelings of retaliation or hatred, and think instead of those who went before them to build the Catholic church and faith community in Norfolk.

Brockman examined the carving, measured it, photographed it and committed it to memory.

Then he went back to his little house in the woods, his ramshackle shed, his stereo and his cigars.

He had 12 weeks, give or take a few days.

Photographs distort images, so from the beginning Brockman took that into account.

Using an overhead projector and large graphing grid, he sketched a basic outline, then a scale drawing. He made templates and carved a small version, one-quarter of the original size.

He’d done similar small crucifixes for other churches, but this time he fretted that the miniature looked like a Viking, not like a Palestinian Jew.

Nevertheless, he started on the full-sized version. The figure would measure about 6 feet 3 inches tall, a span to make it look impressive while still appearing to be life-size.

Northeastern white pine was his choice of material. The original had been carved in France of a solid block of pino wood – a type of evergreen – but over the years, with changes of weather and temperature, the torso of Christ had split down the center. So Brockman decided that laminating his own work would be better, with hollows in the chest and head to allow for expansion and contraction.

He glued the slabs together. Then, with a chain saw, he shaped the rough human form.

It was hot this past September. Mosquitoes buzzed around the clouds of cigar smoke he exhaled as he worked.

And anxiety began to gnaw.

"I’ve never done a life-sized figure before. It's difficult," Brockman said, just a couple of weeks into the project. "The angle makes it difficult to look at. There's a certain amount of cutting by faith."

As he worked, he looked for inspiration by tuning into Christian radio stations and playing CDs of Gregorian chants and medieval dances.

And he struggled with what to call the carving.

"I’m not at all comfortable referring to it as an ‘it’ or a ‘thing,’ " he said as he studied it one day late in the month. The figure, at this point, was on its back in a semi-recline.

He started work during a dry spell of weather, but Brockman started to think about building a roof over the project. He tacked color photos of the original to the workshop walls, scattered them across equipment. He propped a human anatomy text open to a section on musculature. His book showed a front view of the male chest, but not the back. He leaned a broken, full-length mirror against a wall.

As the days passed, Brockman moved from the chain saw to chisels, from angle grinder to disc sander. He worked outside as warm fall breezes sang through the tall pines.

"For years, I was a real hand-tool snob, but I got over that. Particularly with larger pieces. The important thing is not how you take the wood off but judging what not to take off."

He carved the face from a slab of pine he clamped into a vise, then glued to the skull. Like the original, the head had to appear to strain forward.

He waited to hear from the clients. Would they want several fingers missing from the hands, as in the original? Would they want him to show the chest as having cracked from age? Would they want every hair on the head and beard the same as on the one in the church?

How close would he have to come to the model?

"I’m trying to prepare them not to expect a perfect reproduction, but a good likeness."

As the nights got colder and days began to chill, the rib cage on the figure became pronounced. A cloth took shape and draped around the hips. The right foot emerged from the wood and appeared propped on the left. With pencil, Brockman traced the crown of thorns around the head, sketched eyes, the ears, the hair of the beard.

"The face is still too Nordic," he said, studying the figure in October. "It's also too square. It should be more hollow-cheeked, but I can't take too much off."

Worried about the weather, he built a roof and walls around the carving. The structure took on the look of a creche. He rigged a pulley system so he could stand the figure upright.

When Brockman was puzzled about how to go on, he whittled on his quarter-scale model, experimenting.

"If it turns out to be a bad idea, I’ll know not to do it."

He made the figure slightly less barrel-chested, carved muscles into the legs, defined the rib cage. He thought about the end of Jesus’ life.

"He spent the last three years traveling around the country It isn't unrealistic to show him fit."

Brockman checked again with his clients, trying to sell them the idea that he was making a portrait of the original rather than a replica.

The clients’ answer: It should be as close a copy as possible.

By November, he started worrying about the hair, thinking about the original, nameless carver.

"The hair is the kind of detail you get in clay modeling," he said, referring to the original crucifix. "The guy knew what he was doing."

He carved the arms, studying his own in the broken mirror as models.

"I’m starting to appreciate the downside of being self-taught," he joked wryly.

In the last two weeks before his deadline, he put off finishing the figure's countenance.

"The original has an emaciated face, and if you take too much off, there's nothing left. No spare wood at that point."

So he carved, waited, then took another look at a spot before shaping it again.

"It's always hard, when you get to the point of being happy with it yourself, to go on."

In the week before he delivered the finished crucifix, Brockman worked feverishly, often 16-hour stretches. He built the smooth, pale cross of poplar and attached the figure, now stained reddish brown and lacquered.

To the end, he worried that his work did not come close enough to the original, that his creation would not be well received.

Late on a Thursday night in December, an hour after he stuck the final thorns into the crown, he and a friend loaded the crucifix into the bed of his Toyota Tacoma. The figure lay on its back, feet toward the truck's cab, head sticking out beyond the tailgate. He drove it uncovered on rural roads through southern Virginia Beach, through stoplights in Kempsville, to the church near Norfolk's waterfront

In the parking lot of St. Mary's, McPhillips and several others from the parochial school and the church met Brockman.

"I’m more nervous about this than my own wedding day," McPhillips said as he ran down the church steps and dashed to the side of the red truck. He reached in and stroked the satiny wood. "Look at the hands, the thorns in the crown, the feet, the hair."

He ran his fingertips over the chest, touched the ribs.

Nine men, including Brockman, carried the crucifix through the front doors into the church and set it prone on the stone floor near the altar.

All that was left was to quickly hammer together a scaffold to hold the crucifix upright for the next day's dedication.

The choir, practicing for Sunday, sang on, their voices drifting past the fluted columns, soaring toward the vaulted ceiling.

The men clustered around, bending to stroke the face, arms, legs. Brockman stood aside and watched.

The crucifix was really done.

"To seem so big working on it," Brockman said, with a hand on his own cheek, "it seems not so big in here."

Reach Krys Stefansky at (757) 446-2732 or [email protected].

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