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.

By Christina Ianzito
Sunday, May 11, 2008

"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."

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."

Eventually, though, Dee had had enough of the isolation of rural life, and the Monks left the farm for the suburbs, moving in 1957 to the house Pat still occupies in the Hollin Hills section of Alexandria. Until he became a full-time artist in his early 50s, Monk was a busy scientific consultant whose work included researching and developing instruments for early space studies. Dee, daughter of an erudite entomology professor, was a high school art teacher in Fairfax County and an enamelist with gallery space near her husband at the Torpedo Factory.

The children always called their parents Dee and Pat. (Pat is actually a nickname derived from his St. Patrick's Day birthday; he was born Gaines Whaley Monk.) They describe Pat as their main source of parental affection, though it was limited by his consuming work schedule. Dee, they say, didn't offer much warmth. Gammons recalls her mother being "angry a lot."

If there was tension, Monk doesn't remember it permeating his family life or his marriage the way his children do. "I'm a recessive type, in that I tend to back away when there's a difficulty, so it didn't seem that way to me," he says. He was always drawn to Dee's fierce intelligence. They were both honors students, and she was studying German philology when he met her at West Virginia University. He liked her sense of humor, her love of puns. Plus, he says, "she was very supportive of any damn foolish thing I tried to do," and "she smelled good."

When Dee first became ill, Monk would bring her to his studio and set up a work space for her. But she grew increasingly difficult, one friend confides, becoming "rather violent and quite tricky." Consigning her to a nursing home was out of the question. "Would you?" he responds sharply when asked if he considered it. Eventually, his children persuaded him to get an aide to attend to her, so he could focus again on his art. They were worried about his health: He required a quintuple bypass after a heart attack about 15 years ago. Still, Szabo says, her dad was a devoted caretaker.

When she visited her parents last summer, she marvels, her father would follow her mother around with a spoon "to make sure she got enough nourishment."

MONK'S HOUSE IS ABOUT SIX MILES FROM HIS OLD TOWN STUDIO. It's glass-walled and contemporary, filled with and surrounded by his works. The yard is a slightly unkempt sculpture garden, full of undergrowth and piles of leaves, and from his kitchen window he can look upon some of his creations, such as "The Bather," an oversize concrete faucet affixed to a tree above a statue of a girl bent as though washing her hair. On an unusually balmy day, he stares out at her while sitting at the table with a plate of something he's concocted: a mix of rice, onions, oranges, apples and meatballs. "I don't know about this lunch," he says, eating slowly.

He offers a tour. One wall of his living room displays Dee's small circular enamels, while book-crammed shelves bear some of his early wood pieces, including a black walnut sculpture of a man with a hole in his head that was made to rest above the family TV. He called it "The Creature of False Gods." Monk built much of the furniture himself, including dressers with drawers that swing out from a dowel on one corner, for easier access. With the help of his son, Leonard, a 59-year-old mathematician, Monk wired the sink so it could be controlled by piano-like floor pedals: one each for hot, warm and cold water; one to run the garbage disposal, another to open the trash can.

Signs of a curious mind are everywhere. On the kitchen wall there's a small line and "June 21 '01" scrawled in pen. He thinks for a minute why it's there, then remembers: "That's where the sun came in that day." He wanted to see if it would fall on the same spot the next year.

A small office space holds a laptop and three computers with flat-screen monitors. Why so many? "It's hard to explain," he says. "I've often wondered that myself." Leonard, who lives in Massachusetts, helped Monk set up his Web site, but he's learned to maintain it himself. He has a few photos of his family, which has grown to include three grandchildren and a great-grandson, 6-year-old Max.

He pulls out a thick report in a three-ring notebook that Leonard's son, Joakim, a senior in high school, has just mailed him, "Biography of Pat Monk." "He got an A-plus on it," Monk says, flipping through the pages. Buried within the admiring portrait, one part reads: "When Pat was a young father he did not have much time for his kids. As a young man he was tense, busy and absorbed. He was very nice, though."

When Leonard is asked about this characterization, he says that his father began to change in midlife: "He really softened up and warmed up. By the time he was in his mid-50s, he was a different person. And it was almost an act of will; he willed himself to change. He realized that he was too uptight, too nervous about work." Now Leonard flies down to visit his father frequently and calls him "a good friend."

Monk chuckles at his son's pop psychology. He does acknowledge having been preoccupied for years by his responsibilities. "You've got a family, and you've got more of a feeling that you've got to make a living; you don't have any freedom," he says. The move from what he calls "the rat race" of his scientific consulting jobs to a studio at the Torpedo Factory was made possible by Dee's steady income from teaching and the launching of their children off to college and beyond. So, yes, a load was lifted as he shifted his efforts from science to art. But as for his personality changing, he smiles: "How can I tell?"

A NEW LIGHT-BLUE TOYOTA PRIUS SITS IN MONK'S DRIVEWAY, a purchase necessitated by an accident last fall, when the driver of an 18-wheeler didn't see the sculptor's little Saturn and plowed into it. Monk somehow emerged intact.

It helps to have a sense of humor at times like those, and he does -- a quiet one that sometimes emerges at unexpected moments. As he crunches slowly through the dried-up leaves blanketing the yard, he stops at an eight-foot twisted loop of stainless steel. "This is 'The Gateway to Enlightenment,'?"

he says, poker-faced. "You walk through there, and you get enlightened. Try it." And he points out a favorite, a 6-by-9-foot steel depiction of a plump woman seated and bent over to tie her shoe. It's called "Mama Dressing for the Game," And, he adds, "of course, it's the game of life."

Monk paints, too. But, he says, he likes the fact that a sculpture doesn't transport you to another world, as a painting might. Instead, it "intrudes into your universe. The fact that you have to walk around it, and it steals part of your space, is part of the deal."

It's as though, for Monk, creating art isn't a way to escape reality, but to look it in the eye.

And sometimes people give him money for the privilege. The most expensive piece he's ever sold, he thinks, was about $30,000, a wall sculpture for a telephone company in England. A lawyer from Chicago bought that cannonball sculpture 20 years ago for "an absurdly low price like $800," Monk says. Last year St. Andrew's Episcopal Church in Arlington commissioned a memorial from Monk, an eight-foot-tall steel representation of a white oak tree, for about $6,000. Mary Hourihan Lynch, an artist who creates shaped-canvas sculptures on the third floor at the Torpedo Factory, says she has three of his pieces, and "I would have more of them if I could."

Tourists who chance upon his studio are often spellbound by his work. "It's strange," says Monk, glancing around his cluttered niche. "Some people feel sucked into that big ball, right there."

The ball, called "The Center of the Universe," is composed of 2,000 different-size cones of stainless steel that Monk painstakingly welded together over seven months. Mathematically designed, it's precisely two meters in diameter, he likes to point out. The labor-intensive ball is priced at $85,000, though profiting from his art doesn't come naturally to Monk.

"I'm lousy at it," he admits. Szabo still laughs at the time she brought her boyfriend (now husband) Tony to meet her dad at his studio for the first time. While they were there, "this guy came in and said, 'I love this piece, I'll give you $5,000 for it' -- or something like that. Pat's reaction was, 'Well, I don't think it's really worth that much.' My husband about hit the ceiling," Szabo says. "He couldn't believe it. But that's very Pat."

About 20 years ago, Monk started something called the Kula Club for a few of his artist friends, including Belshe next door. The idea, he says, came from a story he read about an indigenous people living in the islands of the South Pacific. "They would acquire status by giving things away," explains Monk, who made up a couple of official-looking certificates on which members promised to periodically give away a significant piece of art to an utter stranger.

"But you know," he says, "it's not as easy as you think to give stuff away. As soon as you want to offer it to somebody, they think, Well, how can it be worth anything if he's giving it away? It makes for an interesting encounter."

The process itself is an art experiment. Unfortunately, Monk says, the club has run out of steam recently. It's been more than five years since Monk has surprised someone with a free sculpture. His works are so large now, he says, "it's like giving away a white elephant." Still, he'd like to reactivate the club. Even though he's hale and hardy, he's aware that at his age the opportunities for him to give away his art -- as well as create it -- aren't endless.

Not long ago, he finished a seven-foot steel sculpture that started out shaped a bit like the skeleton of a branching tree, and ended up resembling a tall open cage with a roller-coaster-like slope on top. Monk says it reminds him of a space vehicle ready for launch. He had to kneel for some of the welding, he reports, and "getting up is a lot slower than it used to be." But he wanted to make the sculpture large enough to suggest that a person could climb inside. He named the piece "Departing Soon."

Christina Ianzito is a contributing writer to the Magazine. She can be reached at cianzito@gmail.com.

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