This bust of my father, Hrand Saxenian, was created over a period of two years. Each Thursday, after teaching my high school classes, I would drive 90 minutes to my parents house in Concord, MA, bringing dinner and my sculpting tools. After dinner my father would sit for me late into the evening, while my mother cleaned up, read and went to bed. Uncomplaining, meditative and then opening up, he would respond to my questions. How did that poem go? What about that complicated situation with his friend? His experience in the Pacific Theater? His life’s work trying to promote emotional maturity in leaders, to better humanity? His first son passed away at the age of three; he could not save him. How did he get through that? My father struggled during my childhood; now he was calm, supportive and present. I would drive back home, arriving after midnight, feeling alive.

Hrand Saxenian was selected for the Marilyn Newmark Memorial Award at the 86th Annual Awards Exhibition of the National Sculpture Society, Brookgreen Gardens, South Carolina and was awarded second place at the 2011 Biennial Show of the Connecticut Society of Portrait Artists, Old Lyme, Connecticut.