Mr. David Cargill
Sculptor
The making of the statue of Mirabeau B. Lamar, the Father of Public Education in Texas, in 1965
Interviewed by Vidisha Barua Worley and Robert M. Worley on 05/31/2023
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Mr. David Cargill at 94!
‘Lamar was essentially a high school almost to a point, and then it was a two-year college. My sister, Barbara, went to Lamar after she graduated from high school and it was just two years at that time. It was in the 1950s. There was a point in the 1960s, one of the teachers didn’t show up at the beginning of the school year. Because I was known in town, the head of the department at that time called to see if I could go out and fill that space. He didn’t know that the man was not coming back till the day before. The school started. I taught general art one year out there. I had always done art for churches. I came home at the end of the year and that was the end of that job. My daughter who was six at that time went to her mother and said, what are we going to do. Daddy doesn’t have a job. My feeling was glad the year was over. Of course, I had the good fortune of doing the head that is out there.
‘The History Department approached me. First, we thought about doing a standing figure. Unless we did something really big, it would not be significant. I had the thought to do a big head. I did all my own cast. Actually, that was one of the first things I ever did. What to do, how to do…It took about six months to make the statue. Just a guess. You have to buy the metal from a smelt. Over the years I have done a lot of casting work. You have a copper pot or something, you can throw in whatever. I used a mixture of silicon bronze…clean metal cast…you can weld the things together with a similar alloy, silicon bronze. They make silicon bronze wires so you welded it. Otherwise, it would show up…some of the metal had zinc and stuff in it, a slightly different color. Some of the early casting, you could see where the weld was, if you knew to look. Just color-wise, a subtle difference.
‘It was a lot of work. Did it just over here at home. Inside this is a wax, which could be part of a piece, done in lot of pieces. Do you see the big square with figures on it? That is about how much metal I could pour in one pour…300 pounds. There are sections, the wax is the yellow part, and all of this is white, it is Styrofoam painted with wax. It burns out and makes a channel where the metal can pour in. It is hard to picture but all of this end up being a big blob of plaster with these being air vents. So, when the metal went into these however I had it. When you heat up the mold, you burn out all the Styrofoam in it. Styrofoam was my own way of doing it. …I grew up in the one-story brick house at the end of this block.
‘I had a new station wagon. The four of us and the new station wagon went out on a freighter out of Houston to Europe and spent from September to May driving around in Europe in my station wagon. At that time in the 50s we didn’t have to get reservations. There was not that much travel. I saw more (European sculpture) in the first half a day in Europe than I had seen in my entire life. Didn’t realize how much was out there. … I started making things when I was 8 years old… I built this whole building myself.’
‘The History Department approached me. First, we thought about doing a standing figure. Unless we did something really big, it would not be significant. I had the thought to do a big head. I did all my own cast. Actually, that was one of the first things I ever did. What to do, how to do…It took about six months to make the statue. Just a guess. You have to buy the metal from a smelt. Over the years I have done a lot of casting work. You have a copper pot or something, you can throw in whatever. I used a mixture of silicon bronze…clean metal cast…you can weld the things together with a similar alloy, silicon bronze. They make silicon bronze wires so you welded it. Otherwise, it would show up…some of the metal had zinc and stuff in it, a slightly different color. Some of the early casting, you could see where the weld was, if you knew to look. Just color-wise, a subtle difference.
‘It was a lot of work. Did it just over here at home. Inside this is a wax, which could be part of a piece, done in lot of pieces. Do you see the big square with figures on it? That is about how much metal I could pour in one pour…300 pounds. There are sections, the wax is the yellow part, and all of this is white, it is Styrofoam painted with wax. It burns out and makes a channel where the metal can pour in. It is hard to picture but all of this end up being a big blob of plaster with these being air vents. So, when the metal went into these however I had it. When you heat up the mold, you burn out all the Styrofoam in it. Styrofoam was my own way of doing it. …I grew up in the one-story brick house at the end of this block.
‘I had a new station wagon. The four of us and the new station wagon went out on a freighter out of Houston to Europe and spent from September to May driving around in Europe in my station wagon. At that time in the 50s we didn’t have to get reservations. There was not that much travel. I saw more (European sculpture) in the first half a day in Europe than I had seen in my entire life. Didn’t realize how much was out there. … I started making things when I was 8 years old… I built this whole building myself.’