You’re in for a delightful surprise the next time you enter the West Tisbury library. Hanging right in front of you just before you get to the stairs is an enormous, gorgeously carved, sharp-toothed creature. This fierce dragon was brought to life by sculptor Robert MacGregor 50 years ago.
As MacGregor explains in a recent interview, in 1973, a gang of young hippie carpenters was contracted to renovate a Queen Ann Victorian house in Makonikey. The lead carpenter commissioned him to carve a weathervane for the tower to present to the owner upon completion of the project. The commission was no easy feat.
“I had to look for a piece of wood first, because it had to be pretty big. I went to some specialty lumberyards and couldn’t find anything the right size. Then I was walking at the base of the Aquinnah Cliffs, and a huge beam had washed up, made of mahogany,” MacGregor says. After cutting off a five-foot section, he swam it down the beach in the water and got help loading it into his Volkswagen bus. “I will never forget getting it home, which was a campsite, and making a studio with a piece of plywood between trees to make a bench. It took me three months to make, and I worked on it every day. Normally I would have just gone to the beach and run around naked.” With a $1,000 commission, he figures it came out to about $3 an hour.
MacGregor didn’t sketch out the design first, but instead, he says, “I got the big chunk of wood on the ground and picked up an ax and just started hacking at it. The thing about sculpture that I like is that you don’t have to see the whole thing first. You just have to start carving away, and with what you have left, you start to visualize something.”
The creature is hollow inside, and MacGregor had to work it perfectly symmetrically so the sides would match. He splayed the tail in the back to catch the wind. He gathered the teeth from a shark’s jaw that he discovered on the beach, and incorporated pieces of scallop shells and iridescent abalone shells for the eyes.
“The irony was that when the guy finally gave it to the woman at the end of the job, she looked at it and said, ‘I don’t want that on the top of my house,’” MacGregor remembers. “I don’t know if it was the aesthetics, or it just alarmed her … but she declined it. As it turns out, the contractor ended up trading it to a dentist in exchange for dental work.”
For a time, the dragon was exhibited at the old Santander Bank, hanging right over the vault, which, as MacGregor remembers, made for a strange sight when you drove by, as it was lit up at night. He continues, “Then, I’m not sure how, but it ended up disappearing into one of the carpenters’, Joe Grillo’s, woodshed for 50 years. When I ran into him and asked about it, he told me that pieces of the tail were broken, and asked if I would fix them.” MacGregor agreed if, in return, Grillo agreed that he could exhibit the piece. MacGregor set about the repairs to the tail, finding similar wood in his studio that he carved, attached, and stained to match the original. “Oddly, performing the repair returned me seamlessly to my original state of mind in 1973,” MacGregor says. “It’s like life is more like a loop than linear.”
Shortly after the commission, MacGregor, who had first come in 1969 as a self-described “young hippie guy in his Volkswagen bus,” became part of an art collective. “James Taylor owned this building across from Crane Appliance, that is an empty lot now, that we ended up renting from him for really cheap,” MacGregor says, adding, “About 25 of us turned it into studios and an art gallery back when things were collective. We had a café and dances to promote the place. I paid $40 a month for a live-in, year-round studio.”
Asked about his title of the piece, “The Wiley Old Worm Hisself,” MacGregor says, “Back in those days, I was doing a lot of psychedelic drugs, and it just came to me that it was this kind of chthonic, primal image of the serpent spirit, and there is a lot of mythology about that kind of image of a snake, or a dragon or worm. So it has some historical precedent.”
He particularly likes that, just as when it was displayed at the bank, his phantasmagorical dragon is in a place for everyone to see … and it’s well worth the trip to get a peek at MacGregor’s imagination at work.
Robert MacGregor’s “The Wiley Old Worm Hisself” is on view in the West Tisbury library during regular business hours.
