A Bang-Up Finale

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Pat Monk's Explosive Creativity

A former Manhattan Project physicist spends his twilight years creating dynamic sculptures in Alexandria.

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The inert ball seems an implausible representation of the tirelessly inquisitive mind of a former rocket scientist turned artist. Few people have heard of Pat Monk, a physicist who once worked on the atomic bomb and now creates massive, structurally beautiful steel sculptures. His business and marketing acumen are, by all accounts, negligible; he makes no effort to trade on his remarkable creativity and drive at such an advanced age.

In fact, he fears being shrunk into the hobbling cliche of, as he puts it, "old fart makes art." But the people who work alongside Monk or wander into his work space can't help being awed by his energy. He still parks his car a half-mile from the Torpedo Factory because he likes the walk; rides a stationary bike for precisely 11 minutes a day; and has produced nearly all of the art that crowds his studio in the past three years or so.

He's been working more than ever -- seven days a week for about six hours a day -- since his wife, Dorothea (known as Dee), died last November after an 18-year struggle with Alzheimer's. There's a new urgency to his creativity these days. "As you get older," he explains, "you get the feeling you have to hurry."

PAT MONK WAS ONE OF THE "DIRTY DOZEN," as the founding members of the Torpedo Factory were called back in 1974. That was when the former Navy torpedo plant, which had devolved into a neglected warehouse, was given new life with a conversion to working artists' studios. ("Dirty" refers to the filthy cleanup work they had to do.) Monk, who'd become an increasingly serious part-time artist through the years, signed on.

His works back then tended to be whimsical, interactive pieces, such as "Weevulyuh the Dragon," so named because the word "Weevulyuh" recorded and played backward sounds like "I love you." The dragon lay quietly on the floor, eight inches high, until visitors deposited a nickel and asked it a question. Then compressed air would expand the dragon's wood-and-naugahyde body and make it puff up, jack-in-the-box style, as it grew to a height of five feet. When Monk describes it in an e-mail, he adds, "The kids and all other visitors loved it (but didn't buy it)."

Now, among the 160 or so artists at the factory, he and four others are all who remain of the Dirty Dozen. He's beloved around here, despite being famous for setting off fire alarms with his welding (until the system was finally made less sensitive and the ventilation was improved a few years ago) and for the noise he makes while constructing his imposing metal works. Mirella Monti Belshe, a sculptor in the studio adjacent to Monk's, says the racket can be "really intolerable to the gentle painters," but "I know this noise comes from a work that's going to be very beautiful." Monk often hosts an informal afternoon tea in his large studio, among his various blowtorches and fire extinguishers, for a handful of other artist friends, including Belshe. Sometimes they'll help him mull over possible names for his latest creations.

His titles tend toward the playfully provocative. The bagel/doughnut sculpture is called "Fully Rounded Lust." Today he's working on a greenish metallic-looking piece, actually made of foam with a faux oxidized-copper patina. He picks it up and holds it in front of him, a big upside-down triangle. "It's called a 'Pubic Triangle,' " he says.

HE'S ALWAYS HAD A BENT TOWARD ART -- whittling and carving wood as a teenager in rural West Virginia and taking college electives in drawing, painting and design. But before arriving at the Torpedo Factory, he made his living as a scientist. He earned a master's degree in physics from West Virginia University, and, in 1942, newly married, he accepted a job at Oak Ridge National Lab-oratory in Tennessee. There he had no time for art. He was working on a branch of the Manhattan Project -- or, as he puts it, "on the electromagnetic separation of uranium." At first, he didn't realize that the point of the work was to build an atomic bomb.

"Being naive," Monk says, "I thought they were going to use it for a reactor to propel battleships." After a few weeks, he heard rumors that the work might be for something a bit more earth-shaking, though, as a junior scientist, he knew little more until Hiroshima. He heard the news when he came home from work on August 6, 1945. "It was quite shocking," he says, "the extent of the devastation."

He thinks the postwar years were a low point, image-wise, for his chosen field, a period when people "began to blame the holocaust in Japan on the physicists." But he's never lost his faith in or fascination with the possibilities of science, nor does he regret his role, however small, in inflicting mass death and destruction. "I've thought about it a lot, and I've decided that [guilt] is a waste of time." America was fighting a "monstrous" enemy, he says, and, "in some cases, you've got to have war."

Monk's youngest daughter, Pam-ela Szabo, 57, co-owner of a software company in Houston, says her father has always portrayed the experience as, "a horrible thing and, at the same time, a necessary thing."

After Oak Ridge, he took a job at the biological warfare lab at Fort Detrick. He and Dee and their baby daughter, Leslie, moved to an 1849 brick farmhouse on 27 acres in Frederick County. He headed the biophysics branch at Fort Detrick, which conducted research related to anthrax and other infectious agents. In his spare time, he poked around the farm with his growing family of three children, built walnut furniture and began wood sculpting. Daughter Leslie Gammons, 62, remembers her father happily showing her where the rabbit holes were around the farm, teaching her the names of trees. "Pat always showed me these things with great amazement in his voice," says Gammons, now living in Arlington and retired from the federal government. "He considered almost everything as sort of a magical thing to understand."