A Bang-Up Finale

As a young physicist, Pat Monk helped build the atomic bomb. Now, at 87, it's his creativity as an artist that's exploding.

"THOSE LOOK LIKE BLOOD CELLS!" exclaims a brown-haired boy to his friend, a set of parents in tow. During a visit to the Torpedo Factory Art Center in Alexandria, they are standing in front of a seven-foot, bagel-shaped object constructed from 1,500 two-dimensional steel bagel shapes pounded into various curvatures and welded together.

"Hello," the two boys, about 12, say politely to the artist, Pat Monk, who's wearing a red plaid vest over a beige plaid shirt, jeans and loafers. He has glasses, snow-white hair and, if you look closely, a hearing aid.

"We're wondering what you based this on," the brown-haired boy says.

"A doughnut?"

Monk smiles and says. "What do you think it is?"

"A doughnut."

"You must be from the South," says Monk, who is 87, always low-key and often quietly wry. "It could be a bagel, you know."

The boy looks thoughtful.

"Have you studied geometry in school?" Monk asks. "No? It's called a torus. T-O-R-U-S."

"Oh look, a brain!" the friend interrupts. They all look up at a nearby shelf, where there sits a life-size sculpture of a brain on a spike.

"That's my brain," Monk tells them, with a mischievous smile.

Actually, he explains later, the brain is a remnant from an earlier work called "Blow Your Brains Out," a copper cannon with a pile of concrete cannonballs next to it shaped like human brains. This leftover brain is a kind of souvenir. "I tell people it's mine. I didn't have any trouble getting it out, but I'm unable to get it back in."