THE WORLD
TAKES NOTE OF ABSTRACT SCULPTOR UCF'S JOHANN EYFELLS, WHO TURNS
MOLTEN METAL INTO ART, IS SHOWING HIS WORK AT A PRESTIGIOUS
EXHIBITION IN VENICE.
Orlando
Sentinel
Published: Sunday, September 12, 1993
Section: ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
Page: D1
By Mark Vosburgh of The Sentinel Staff
Long ago,
in a faraway land of icy peaks and a lava desert, a boy wondered
why his father was content to paint landscapes and sell his
art for modest sums.
''Is it wrong,'' the artist asked his son, ''to want to make
the world more beautiful?''
Years later, in a place warm and lush, the son left a profitable
profession for the love of molding molten metal into abstractions
as cold and coarse as his homeland.
To his dying day, the painter wondered why.
''He resented in certain ways my so-called abstract tendencies,''
the sculptor said of his father. ''He was never quite sure I
had embarked on the right road as an artist.''
This summer the world took note of Johann Eyfells, avant-garde
sculptor, University of Central Florida art professor, onetime
architect and the son of an Icelandic painter.
Invited by the government of Iceland to represent his island
birthplace, Eyfells is exhibiting samples of his work at the
1993 Biennale art show in Venice, Italy.
Running from June 13 to Oct. 10, the show features artists from
49 nations, including the United States. Marcia Vetrocq,a University
of New Orleans fine arts professor and Biennale patron, likens
the show to Olympic events. ''For a given artist to be invited
to represent his country is a great honor and a considerable
opportunity,'' said Vetrocq, who critiqued this year's show
for Art in America magazine.
Though unfamiliar with Eyfells' work, Vetrocq said artists representing
small nations may deserve more consideration than they get at
the Biennale.
''It's like the Olympics in the sense that Guam may have a luge
team, but it's not likely to get the attention,'' she said.
''Iceland may fall into that category.''
For Eyfells, the international recognition is perhaps his crowning
achievement as an artist, which he contends he has been for
all of his 70 years.
''It never occurred to me I would become an artist,'' Eyfells
said during a interview last week at his home near Oviedo after
returning from the Biennale. ''I always imagined that I was
an artist.''
At UCF, Eyfells' reputation as both sculptor and teacher was
established long ago.
Maude Wahlman, a UCF art professor and former chairwoman of
the art department, described her colleague as one of the people
she admires most in the world.
''He is an internationally recognized artist and has been for
many years,'' Wahlman said. ''I think the awareness of how great
his reputation is is just slow in coming to Central Florida.''
Rob Reedy, current chairman of the art department, said Eyfells'
24 years in UCF classrooms also have left a lasting impression
on the art world.
''His students continually come back or call and ask how Johann
is doing,'' Reedy said. ''And they al÷ays menôion that their
experience with him in the classroom affected them in a very
positive way ever since.''
When the artist in Johann Eyfells first emerged at age 18, he
was wearing boxing gloves. In the ring, he combined abstract
tendencies with the speed of a middleweight to produce what
he considered to be his first artistic creations - four knockouts.
''I think boxing helped me realize, in a reassuring way, that
I had an ability to create,'' he said. ''I never felt I was
conforming to the coaches' suggestDons. I blways felt I was
ÀtQally alone and free to do what I wanted.''
But re gave up boxing for a knockout named Kristin Halldorsdottir.
An Icelandic model and dress designer, Halldorsdottir considered
fighting to be uncivilized. They married in 1949, and remain
together today.
Eyfells' art took a new and lasting form - a granite rendering
É • of a bear - at age 22, when he was studying business administration
at the University of California at Berkeley.
Iceland typically sent its young men to the European continent
to study. But with Europe ravaged by war in 1946, Eyfells' father
sent his two sons to the United States.
An artist at heart, Johann Eyfells arrived at Berkeley with
instructions from his father to choose an academic field that
would prepare him for business.
As a compromise, he eventually abandoned the study of business
administration, and in 1953 earned a bachelor's degree in architecture
from the University of Florida.
Years later, he also gave up the lucrative life of a draftsman
and architect to avoid having to tailor his creations to the
commercial whims of customers.
''There were too many compromises,'' he said. ''Too many limitations.''
After earning a master's degree in fine arts from UF in 1964,
Eyfells took up teaching in Iceland and Florida to support his
life as a sculptor. His wife has given up modeling and designing
in order to paint.
Eyfells sells his art, but not for the kind of prices that would
permit him to do nothing but create.
''I hate to talk about prices,'' he said. ''It is so difficult
to be realistic.''
The hair that laps over his shirt collar is graying, but the
body remains as lean as that of a middleweight and the hands
are meaty reminders of an artistry in the ring.
He otherwise fits the stereotypical image of a professor in
his dark blue shirt, even darker blue tie, slightly rumpled
brown slacks and scuffed brown shoes.
Sweating over his fiery hot metals, he always wears a necktie.
''What it means,'' he said, ''is that the artist doesn't have
to be strange or conspicuous to create.''
The point is a subtle one, for he begins creating well before
dawn and always by himself.
His studio is his back yard. His back yard is a scrap heap.
Aluminum window frames, cushionless deck chairs, scorched railroad
ties and a water heater litter the untrimmed lawn.
''The neighbors,'' he said, ''do not complain.''
Delivered in bulk by scrap dealers and melted in oil-burning
furnaces, the junk metal is transformed into mammoth cubes,
triangles or spheres that often share the earthy hues and the
coarse textures of Iceland's volcanic landscape. ''People who
know my origin invariably imagine lava flows and molten rock
have influenced my sculpture, but I doubt that,'' he said. ''I
have a feeling that if I had been born elsewhere that similar
artistic manifestations would have developed.''
Eyfells calls his work ''receptual.'' His definitions of the
term are nearly as dense as the sculpture that it describes.
The sculptor once wrote: ''Receptualism is a neologism that
designates a conceptual approach to an art form that is born
of an intense and critical interest in the nature of the fragile
reality of minimal distance.''
Even his wife of 44 years, and his colleagues in art and academic
circles, admit that some of Eyfells' abstract expressions aren't
always easily grasped.
''It is at times quite difficult to follow him,'' said UCF art
professor Margaret Skoglund. ''Sometimes I feel he is speaking
a foreign language. But that is what makes the end result, art,
so fascinating.''
Said Wahlman, the former art department chairman: ''Because
he is a philosopher and coming up with new vocabulary for seeing
and thinking about art, you really have to open your mind a
lot.
''That's why he is such a good teacher, because he doesn't try
to make his students be like him. Instead he helps them to find
themselves and their unique contributions. That's the hardest
kind of teaching.''
Fifteen years after his father's death, the graying sculptor
paused to wonder whether the Icelandic painter would have been
impressed to have seen his son's abstract tendencies at the
1993 Biennale.
''I think he would have just accepted it,'' the sculptor sighed,
''as evidence of a rather disappointing emphasis in the art
world.''
