David Moser of Maine's Thomas Moser Furniture Family Discusses his Enduring Passion for Sculpture

Dr. Lisa Belisle: Hello. I'm Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to, or watching, Radio Maine. Today, I have with me sculptor, artist, and man of the world. He told me I can call him master of the universe or something like that. David Moser, good to have you with me today.

David Moser: Thank you, Lisa. Had I known you were going to use that against me, I may not have shared it.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: I don't even know if I got it right. Was it master of the universe or lord of all creation, or…

David Moser: It's a little bit of all that. I generally keep that to my home life. I expect my daughter to call me that, but it doesn't work very well.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: Well, I think it's good to have high expectations of yourself.

David Moser: I think it is. If you don't have high expectations for yourself, who else would have them for you? You have to advocate for yourself.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: That's right. And I should say, for people that are watching, you were saying this in the most kidding of tones. It wasn't like you were actually suggesting that we should call you that.

David Moser: Right. Right.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: To set that stage. Okay. There's only one way to go from here, but tell me how you got into sculpting.

David Moser: I didn't get into it at a moment in time. Working with my hands has been something I have been doing since a child. It wasn't a wholesale shift from one career to another, or from one material to another. It's been something I've always done. It occurred to me that I could have brought a small mug that my mother has, which I gave to her when I was eight years old. I made a little clay mug and I put on a caricature face. It was a head that I fashioned into a mug. I'm sure it was part of an art class in preschool or primary school. I know I was eight, whatever grade that is. And then, to show the contrast of how this mug morphs into what I'm doing today, as an object example of how honing one skill just takes a lot of time, because I am not a trained sculptor. My background is in economics. So as a sculptor, I come at it totally self-taught, organically.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: So you are trained. You just trained yourself.

David Moser: Yes. I am trained. When I was a furniture designer, my father used to think that all of my free-spirited creation was some form of catharsis. And what I had to correct him on was, actually, it's not as much. Perhaps it is cathartic, because from an artistic perspective you have to work out these problems that are recurring in your head. In fact, I learned a new word the other day. It's called perseverance. Perseverance is when you continue to just work and work and work an issue. Generally it happens about two in the morning with me. In any event, it's not so much a cathartic exercise. As much as I was honing my skills, it was onboarding new information. So as a self-taught artist craftsman, I was doing my practical tools in the classroom, but these are real practical examples. So that's actually how I evolved into where I am now vis-a-vis sculpting.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: How did you end up going from economics to furniture designing to sculpting? I don't even know if I have the actual timeline.

David Moser: The chronology is pretty much right. We started Moser furniture in the early seventies. We were very crafty, and by around 1983, which is when I went off to college, it was in the middle of Reaganomics. So I was very much a part of the whole Reagan period. In fact, I even joined the Adam Smith club, a young Maine venture capitalists club. I had the power suit and the yellow tie. That was enjoyable for a while. But you can only deny your passions for so long. Although that's how my college career went, I was a fish out of water. It was something that I attempted to do, like I could get rich quick, and then I realized that there was more to life than just making money.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: Where did you go to college?

David Moser: I went to college at Northwood out in Michigan. I was introduced to Northwood by Margaret Chase Smith, who was a trustee there. So I got my associate's degree there and I finished up here in Maine at Orono.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: I'm certain that people of our era will recognize Margaret Chase Smith as a name. But for those of us who might be a little less far along the path, tell us about your relationship with Margaret Chase Smith.

David Moser: Margaret Chase Smith was the first woman senator that the country had. She hailed from Skowhegan, Maine. Every senator, congressman, and president is given a budget to build their library. So when Margaret Chase Smith built her library in Skowhegan, she approached Thomas Moser, and we designed and built the furniture there. And then, by extension, that led me to Northwood. I would have been about 18 years old at the time.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: So it seems like if someone like Margaret Chase Smith says here's a wonderful place that you should go to school, it probably would be a little hard to say no.

David Moser: Well, it certainly came with a lot of merit. It was a raving endorsement, and it was a conservative financial school. So that made sense to me at the time.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: It seems to be an interesting contrast, the Reaganomics side of David Moser and the craftsperson/sculptor side. I'm sure that there are conservative artists, but I haven't met a lot of them.

David Moser: Yes. And I don't know why either, because it seems paradoxical to me. An artist is generally free-spirited, free-willed and individualistic with respect to how they view the world, and yet so many artists seem to be collectivists. So there's the paradox. How can you be an individual and yet be chastised if you don't follow the group? So they're also followers. They're both the same. And I find that very interesting, because I don't believe I'm a collectivist. I do believe that I follow my individual passion, my individual belief.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: Is that something that your family encouraged you to do?

David Moser: I would say that we had a very competitive family. So maybe that's why I have a bit of a recalcitrant streak in me. I had to defend my position constantly, which is something artists have to do regularly, because there's art in all of us, right? We're all artists. The real successful artists are the ones that are doing it for a social purpose. There is catharsis in art, clearly. But if your intention as an artist is to inform the social landscape, then you have to be a good persuader. It isn't just the quality of your art, it's showing the idiosyncrasies and the merit behind why this art should have a voice in the social narrative. And so, you can be a great technician, and I kind of feel I'm more of a technician than an artist.

David Moser: You can be a great technician. You can fashion material together really well, but if you can't weave a good story, and if you can't be a good persuader, then the art really only just stands for you and doesn't have any merit or need to be called out or identified by the greater population. I think of Andy Warhol, right? A soup can. A soup can, really, that's art? No, that's not the art. The art was in his ability to persuade a bunch of people who are collectivist-thinking that that's just how art has some social merit.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: There are so many things that you just threw out there that I feel like we can latch on to. The first, I think, is this idea of being a technician. What I hear you saying is you can create something that is technically well done and it may not actually have that additional something that draws people toward it as something worthy of note.

David Moser: Yes. I would say that on the continuum of artistic development you should never stay static. Because as soon as you start to stay static, you entropy. You start to decay. So my particular art, with respect to figure, has kind of reached its apex with the work that I currently have. I don't think that I need to prove to myself that I can execute really well, figures that are anatomically accurate, but the only way that I can convey spirit, attitude or intent is by posturing the figures. So my father likes to call this one The Supplicant. I had mentioned this earlier, I think to Kevin in another discussion, about how, if you take a look at all of my work as a collection, the narrative emerges.

David Moser: That artistic narrative, the thing that I'm trying to say, can only really be seen in the totality of all of my pieces together right now. Because of their form, their posturing, the supplicant, even by the name, begins to bring into focus the emotion, the feeling, that catharsis I had mentioned earlier. That's how I am, that my catharsis is manifested in the collective figure posturing of my pieces. But I say that I'm at the apex of it because I don't need to make another good figure. I've done that. I now would like to go on that journey of artistic expression. Because I'm self-taught, all right, okay, I've got to this point now. How do I use the forms as a manifestation of my mental cathartic narrative?

David Moser: If I was a writer, I'd be able to put pen to paper and I could tell you exactly how. And I'm not self-deprecating, but I have an angst and I have feelings of inadequacy and all those things. Even now, I kind of wonder why people are even interested in looking at the things I do, because it's not like I went to Rhode Island Institute of Design and studied for eight years and got an MFA or whatever those are. I didn't toil for years and years studying anatomy. I was just unable to do it. So having said that, there we are at this zenith. So what I want to do now, not that you have asked, but what I'd like to do is to approach future figurative pieces with a more overt sense of expression.

David Moser: And perhaps more abstract. As an author, the general practice is to write, rewrite, write again, until you take an entire paragraph and you can narrow it down to a couple of sentences. Well, as a sculptor, I want to do the same thing. So whatever the feeling that I want to evoke, I want to do it in a more subtle form and in a purer form. And then, I wish I could paint. I can't, but in the medium that I've chosen, vis-a-vis clay, I think I can achieve that. I'll still use a kind of anthropomorphic form, but I'm not going to make it so anatomically accurate, because a lot of people can do figures. Few people can persuade and evoke emotion.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: So looking at the Supplicant, what type of catharsis were you working on with this figure?

David Moser: I feel like I should have a couch instead of a chair right now.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: You brought it up. I wouldn't have actually gotten there unless you put it out there.

David Moser: As I said earlier, it's a sense of angst. Maybe a sense of despair, a sense of loneliness. There are a lot of darker things. The one I'm working on now, she's floating off, but she's got a hand on the earth, a kind of mortal savior.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: But isn't that really okay, and actually pretty wonderful? The idea that you are embracing your own vulnerability and exposing your own significant interactions with the world in your art.

David Moser: Yes. I think that it takes a lot of courage to do that. Not that I'm any kind of courageous hero or anything, but a lot of it, and that doesn't just apply to art, that idea about exposing one's inner thoughts and beliefs is true across the spectrum, whether or not it's art or design or business. Anytime an innovator comes up with a new idea, they're opening themselves up to tremendous criticism. And I'm actually kind of used to it, because as a furniture designer, I know a little bit about having to defend one's creation, not so much on the business side. I was really fortunate as a designer that pieces that I did resonated with other people, and they actually wanted to live with and be surrounded by my pieces.

David Moser: So there's a correlation between art and your ability to persuade, and design and your personal ability to persuade. An artist owes really nothing to anybody other than to him or herself. I'm doing this for my reason. I'm saving time on the couch, basically, by doing this. I'm really pleased, but I'm only pleased if you like my work. But if you don't like it, that's okay, because you don't have to share my inner catharsis. But as a designer, it's entirely different. And I actually have a fair amount of resentment towards artists, architects, designers, interior designers, who design for their own hubris, and without regard to the way in which it impacts the built landscape. So a designer, it goes back to defending oneself.

David Moser: Now that you've created an object, you now have to persuade an entire infrastructure and shift a paradigm. Shifting a paradigm is not as easy as one would think, because when you onboard a bit of information, it's a very indelible moment. That's exactly how the world is forever, until an innovator comes up with another idea and wants to shift the paradigm a little bit, and people are very resistant to it. So designers, unlike artists, owe it to the organization and the community to be persuaded to understand the validity and the practicality and the efficacy of either a new way of doing as an innovator or a new way of constructing as a manufacturer. So it's not like I'm not used to pushing the boundaries and convincing people of changing their position.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: Tell me about this idea of coming from a competitive family.

David Moser: Well, hmm.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: In what way was your family competitive? How did that end up being a part of it?

David Moser: Well, I can sum it up by saying that we had a very authoritarian father and four boys, and that's the end of that. When you have that much testosterone in one room, and of course I'm the youngest. So in geology it's called sublimation. The larger entity rises at the top and then everything else gets sublimated below it. Well, as the youngest, in the hierarchy of family structure, generally it gets sublimated to the more dominant siblings. So I had to assume very unexpected roles. The youngest always has to be a little bit more flamboyant to gain attention, becomes a comedian to gain attention. These are all roles that most clinical psychologists understand are inherited in family structure, the lone standout, of course, being a single child.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: Well, I'm interested in this, because in my family, and I'm the oldest of 10, it's been suggested that our family has a certain amount of competitiveness, but I think it comes out in a different way. It just seems like everybody has wanted to do well. It's just expected that we do well, and that we are all striving for excellence in our respective fields. And I think, because being in a family of 10 is not that different than being in a family of four with boys, there is this kind of jostling for position, but it's really trying to understand your own identity within the construct of the group. And I find that really interesting, because I think all of us believe that we are truly individuals, or want to be truly individuals, but most of us are really who we are as a result of the context that we evolve in.

David Moser: Well, that is absolutely true. And it doesn't surprise me that you're the oldest, by the way.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: Oh, but you should meet my next sisters down. You would think they were the oldest, and they're twins.

David Moser: So maybe they had that going, they had a twofer deal against you.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: But they're excellent. And I think that it is interesting, because for you, it actually kind of pushed you to really claim your identity early on and really work toward who you are. You kind of went the straight path, but then you said, no, I want to be who I am. I'm going to keep doing this design work. I'm going to keep doing this artistic work. And it might not feel that great at the time, but as a result of the struggle you get to the other side, and it seems like it's been very valuable for you.

David Moser: Well, I think nature finds a way of balancing itself out. There are oftentimes that I wish I wasn't a creative. I don't know what it's like to work in a cubicle at an insurance company, but I've got to imagine, I don't even want to, because it sounds so disparaging if I say, if you can tolerate it, how liberating it must be to say that, no, I'm quite content. I come to work at nine, I leave at five, process these papers. If you have the constitution for it, how liberating that must be. But to have a constant yearning to do things, I can't sit still. I've got to be making things. It's vexing, it's exhausting.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: Yes. And I think you're right, that it would kill you in a different way if you were in the cubicle doing the insurance claims, which for some people is really a great way to live their lives, but for you and your particular personality and disposition, yes.

David Moser: Well, I admire those people for their ability to do that. If I was put in that position, I honestly don't know how I would get through my life. So I admire them for that. And I am so incredibly grateful for the life that I've had. That I stumbled into a family that builds things, builds furniture, builds buildings. That I was able to have a lovely wife, who's supportive, who in herself is a creator and a builder, not in the art world, but she understands the courage it takes to build new things. So I am incredibly grateful that my immediate universe around me is set up to allow for creativity and innovation. And the creative build process, I just came off a job. We bought an investment property down in the Caribbean. My wife championed the property and she now manages it. But if not for that, I never would have been able to build a house in the Caribbean. Someone once said that the unexamined life is not worth living, and I am all in.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: Absolutely. And, like you, I would never want to live a life different than the one that I have. And the ability to spend time examining one's life is actually a privilege of some sort, I think, because there are a lot of people who find themselves in places where they're so worried about just basic survival, that it's hard to take the time to step back. So I think you're right to find yourself not only the son of somebody who is an entrepreneur who created a new and different life, older brothers who created a sense of competitiveness for you, and then now to be with Pam and her contribution to your ability to keep doing this. It can both be incredibly challenging and also really perfect for the person that you are.

David Moser: Yes. So ask yourself, I'm 57 years old, how much was by design and how much was by chance? Those are good questions. And another thing I'm very grateful for is having lived in a place in time that allowed for perhaps more design in one's lifestyle and less chance. And I'm not sure how much that's going to go into the future, but living in rural Maine at the time that I did, I would say maybe 80% design and 20% chance.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: Do you think that people are longing for that now that we've gone through this digital age and people want these touch points, the solidity, the space?

David Moser: Yes. They wanted it before. They wanted it before the COVID. We all want to be recognized as having lived in some way, and some of us get to leave a more lasting impact of our existence. Some of us can only paint graffiti on a wall, but all of us have that. So it's huge, it's a human need. It's a manifestation of consciousness that I was here, and maybe I only do it as a cave painting, but I was here. We all have it. Fortunately, in the art world, some of us can create a lasting visual remembrance, some of us don't want to graffiti the sidewalk. But for those of us who are in the middle, they can procure those things. So they can pick and choose from a cornucopia of fashion, style, design, which one best represents their belief system. So if they were able to build a piece of furniture, they were able to sculpt a piece of sculpture, these are the things that I identify with. So we all have it, and some of us have to acquire it.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: We started this conversation joking about the master of the universe idea, and I've actually kind of become convinced that really what you're saying is you really have designed your life. So you've kind of created this mastering of your own universe, which is not like you're trying to master other people. It's that you want permission, you've given yourself permission to have a life that you designed on purpose. Do you think you're doing that for your children?

David Moser: No, I'm doing, well, I guess I don't know anything else to do.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: I meant, are you also doing it for your children?

David Moser: No. If I were doing it for my children I would be much more disciplined. I would be a better role model for my daughter. I only have one daughter. I'd be a better role model for her, as my father was for me and my brothers. We learned a work ethic. We learned to sacrifice one's own desire. When I hear you put it that way, I feel like I'm perhaps too selfish, that I'm not maybe working towards a greater good. So when I was a kid, we worked as a collective. We worked as a family, as a collective unit, and there's a lot to be said for that. And I wish, in many ways, and I'm not alone in this, because again, if you worked as an insurance agent, you're not bringing your kid to work.

David Moser: But I wish that perhaps I yearned for those days of working in New Gloucester. It was an old shop that we renovated. And we all had our roles, either sweeping the floor or stacking wood, and then later building furniture and building showrooms and whatnot. I felt like I was kind of a part of something. So I'm not trying to be a role model for my daughter. If I were, well, I'm a role model in a way, find your own path, but I'm not a role model when it comes to teaching her the responsibility of working in a group and owing something to other members in that group, working in a collective way. Artists, unfortunately, are a very lonely bunch. Designers are not lonely at all, but artists are very lonely. So I'm not sure where I'm going with that whole thing with Sabine, but it would be nice to give her a common goal.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: Well, how old is she now?

David Moser: She's 15.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: I suspect it's similar to my own children, who are now almost 21 plus, and they're going to come up with their own goals. So what you're doing is you're providing the environment, the ecosystem, the media, and that's all we really can do as parents, right?

David Moser: Yes. Role models. You do the best you can to guide them along. I want to talk about how that's made.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: I would love to hear that.

David Moser: Yes. So I brought some show and tell. Let me first of all tell you the origin of how I came up with this form. So Pam, have you ever heard the artist Seal's "Kiss from a Rose"? She's Seal's number one fan, and this is an homage to her and to the artist. So there was an album cover. I think it was around 1994. It appeared on an album cover, something like that. And of course it was two-dimensional. So I picked up a lot of cues from that, and that's how I got the idea for this pose. And then what you do is you start with this. It's actually clay.

David Moser: Well, it's actually plastilina, it's not clay. So plastilina is an oil base and it never truly hardens, but it is highly malleable. You buy it in these chunk forms, and through a process of hand work and tools you can fashion it. Now, I generally don't work with a lot of tools when I'm working with clay. And the tools that I do work with are very rudimentary. I should have brought some of them, but they're like sticks, and they're bent steel, and then maybe steel with a wire wrapped around it, which is how I get the texture. And I'll tell you something that's interesting about working with clay, is that there's such an immediate connection between what's going on in your mind and what appears in your ultimate work.

David Moser: And I think the same is true with paint. Either you have a pallet of paint and you slap it on the canvas and there's a direct connection, save the medium of the brush, that's an active stream of consciousness. Well, clay actually works in much the same way. It responds in real time. As a designer, I've never actually worked on the computer. I know how they operate, they're necessary, they're another tool, but I don't want to spend my time learning the computer, mostly because it's an interference. If I had to think about what button to click, what F1, return, control, delete, I would have forgotten what I was thinking about. So I love the immediacy and the free flow of thought, to the expression.

David Moser: So you start with clay, which is around an armature. There are five steps in bronzing and it takes a lot of patience. And if you ever want to make a small fortune as a sculptor in bronze, start out with a large one, because it is really costly. You start out with a positive, the positive is in the clay. So now you've made this sculpture, then you make a mold, and the mold is rubber and then there's plaster and what's called a clamshell. It comes apart in two parts, the mold is made, and now you've got a hollow cavity. And in that hollow cavity, you then pour what's called the lost wax. So we're all familiar with lost wax. And the reason that it's called lost wax is because it's literally going to become eviscerated when put in the kiln.

David Moser: So now you've got the mold, and you pour into the rubber mold the wax, and you get something that looks like that. So that is lost wax. And then the wax gets dipped in silica, and it gets a consecutive bath of silica, until you get a shell that's about a half an inch thick. The silica shell then gets put into a kiln. The kiln is brought up to about 2,400 degrees in temperature. The wax melts away, it's lost. And then that leaves a void. Now you've got a silica shell, hardened, empty. And so much of this hasn't changed since the bronze age. You'd take a crucible full of molten bronze, and you bring it into where you've put the shells. Now, the shells are in a box of sand.

David Moser: And out of the crucible you pour in the molten bronze, that then falls down through all these caverns. And this is not an actual example, because if it were, it would have what's called gates and sprues. And that allows for air to evacuate, and would take care of air pockets where the bronze can't get in because of what's called angle of incidence. Now you've got the bronze, and it's got all these sprues on it, and it's very crude, and you've got to cut those off. Then sandblast the thing, and weld all the joints back together. Again, this probably had eight or nine different molds, and they all had to be welded together, sandblasted again, and then more artistry, because wherever there was a weld, then you've got to go in with metal tools and resculpt where the joint was. That would have been uniform with clay, but now it's interrupted with a weld. So you resculpt that, and it's really hard, because now you're dealing with bronze, not clay, and you've got to do it in such a way that there's no weld joint visible.

David Moser: And then finally you can apply the patina, which is a potash. This happens to be liver of sulfate, but there are other patinas that you can put on there to give it color. And not only give it color, but there's more artistry involved in the patina process. It isn't like you are just painting it on and you have a uniform surface, but in the application of the patina, you want to be conscientious about tension and slack spots and whatnot. So you've got to apply that and be mindful that there would be tension on the knee cap, and then there's tension on the skull, and this is called your occipital bone, and that's got to be polished off. And then that's finally how it's done. And then it's a process that hasn't changed much in a thousand years.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: How long does it take?

David Moser: Months, months, months, a long time. I wish I were a painter. I really do. Painting would be so much easier, and I'm not going to take away from the technical side of it. But once you get the canvas and you get the paint, you've only got a few processes you have to contend with. And there are a lot of processes involved in bronzing, and now you've got something that weighs 85 pounds and you can't even move it around.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: But my understanding is that this piece has actually already been sold, and sold to somebody who has another one of your pieces. Is that true?

David Moser: I've kind of lost count. We haven't sold a lot. There are only 20 that we're going to sell. And I think we've sold one. This would be the fourth, one of 20.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: So my point is that people who have an affinity for your work tend to continue to have an affinity for your work. So all of the work that you put into it, all the time that you put into it, does on the other side end up producing benefit, it seems, for people who really enjoy the pieces that you create.

David Moser: So I would go back to that idea about collecting things that reflect who you are. So anyone who has an affinity for my work, I would say that we would probably be kindred spirits, because that means that he and I, she and I, we look at the world the same way.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: Well, I appreciate your willingness to go a little deeper into your background, but also to share information about the way that you do your work. It's been a broad-ranging conversation.

David Moser: Thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: I've been speaking with sculptor David Moser, who obviously has many different talents, and I encourage you to look at his work on the Portland Art Gallery website, or really even better, go to the Portland Art Gallery, because there's nothing like actually being in the presence. To be here with this piece, I think it does something different than just seeing it on the internet. So I appreciate the time to speak with you, David, today. And I wish you all the best.

David Moser: Thank you.