(upbeat music) (drill sounds) - [Cliff] Stir it up.

- [Interviewer] Okay.

- As you can see it's kinda changes a little bit of color.

(upbeat music) You're looking at a raw product.

Very little of it is finished, but we have many, many products and the majority of them from Athena Gardens, I've created and we do have various commissions in bronze and some other mediums that range from wild life, religious, architectural, fountains, benches.

Went to school, got out of school, I have a degree in Fine Arts and I wanted to further that education in classical training.

I ended up in Florence, Italy trying to figure out what I'm gonna do and I stumbled across a little school, Florence Academy Art was the name of it.

I walked up to the director and I explained my situation that I came across the Atlantic, I really wanna learn this.

He reviewed my portfolio and was gracious enough to allow me to study and from there I learned a classical approach to sculpture.

I like to create.

When you create you have a little bit of a signature of your own of what's three dimensional out there that exists in every day life.

It's one of the hardest things.

I like to be challenged and everybody's got different talents and gifts and I felt that I had to pursue it and I've bee blessed with that ability.

We can do wild life.

We can do figurative.

So, we don't really specialize in one thing, but mother Mary Anne, at St. Emma's in Greensburg, Pennsylvania called me and she had some ideas.

(bells ringing) - [Mary Anne] Many people call St. Emma's a place of blessed peace and aspiration.

(singing) We, Benedictine nuns, here at Saint Emma, receive prayer requests from people in 46 states.

We read them aloud.

We follow these prayer requests and they are so very personal.

And then also, we welcome personally here.

The people that come for retreat.

That come to the bed and breakfast, ask us to join into their lives.

(singing) Someone called and said, "I have some money in a fund "that I would like to donate and I would like "to build something in memory of my husband" and we started to see a fresh, this wonderful wall space that everyone sees every time they leave the retreat chapel and go to the retreat house.

Then the question became, what shall we put on it?

We talked about it and thought that the biblical story of the woman at the well really expressed the year of mercy in a very beautiful way.

So we called Cliff Dupill at Athena Gardens.

(classical music) - Setting up the scale and the composition of the figures and making sure that there's enough negative space, but not too much.

So there's a lot of factors there that you have to think about.

So the biggest challenge as a sculptor is to create a three dimensional picture and that is the most challenging thing.

You get your thickness, it's about an inch, an inch and three quarter thick.

The thickest point is roughly two and a half inches off of some of the faces, but again, it's very flat, but you pack clay on it and then you just go right at it.

I mean, just the composition itself is very intimidating because you're sculpting Jesus and to me, how do you do that?

Really trying to get that to come off of the background, the flatness of it, to try to communicate a three dimensional part of that sculpture.

Once you sculpt the whole thing and so you're mixing a rubber together and there's a working time and you gotta put coat after coat so every 45 minutes or so you have to put a coat on, you have to put thickeners on and so once you apply that to the original clay it has to cure.

You build up layers.

(soothing music) And then from there, there's a lot of techniques with undercuts that we have to do with plugs for the hard shell and from there we'll delaminate it all and believe it or not the clay original is completely discarded.

You're left with a negative and then you cast, just like the pieces behind me, you can cast that in a different medium.

We're going to do a face mix.

It's a glass fiber reinforced concrete and that's gonna give the appearance of a stone look and then we're going to reinforce it with fiberglass and so that's gonna allow it to lighten it up because the piece is six and a half by seven so it's a pretty big piece, so we need to be conscience of that, but at the same time, understand that it needs to be light enough to install.

- Up the hill bud.

- [Cliff] Well this is installation day and very excited and nervous at the same time.

Transporting it and getting it there in one piece.

(drill sounds) - It is wonderful.

- It's been a long journey and a lot of time to create this.

- [Mover] One, two, and three, up.

- [Cliff] I'm hopeful, I'm prayerful that it will be success and everything will go smooth.

I can't wait till it's up.

We had prepared as best we could at the shop prior to delivery and most everything went smooth.

Things take a little bit longer than you anticipate, but we've had a lot of help and support and overall I'm thankful that it's basically there.

We're just about putting the finishing touches on.

It's been nice to work with Armando and mother Mary Anne and it's a little more involved in regards to the install, but it's been a memorable process.

(upbeat music) - [Mary Anne] We are so amazed at Cliffs talent and how dynamic it looks, how real it looks.

It's so intense.

This woman at the well, basically, was far nicer than anything that could ever have imagined.

It so enhances that whole area and also the whole of Saint Emmas and it brings a center of focus.

It's made out of cement just like the Benedictine of careerism of stability.

It is of a value for the ages.

(upbeat music)