On this rock, borough artist builds a portfolio

Eighty-nine-year old Ray Bradbury, the legendary science fiction writer, said in The New York Times recently that he was  asked by a child, “How can I live forever too?” Bradbury’s answer: “I tell them do what you love and love what you do. That’s the story of my life.”

It’s also the story of Jack Shapiro’s. Shapiro, who will turn 92 next month, has lived, painted, and carved stone in Highland Park for 55 years. Coinciding with his birthday, Shapiro is making an open-ended loan to the H.P. library of a five hundred pound carving in alabaster, to greet patrons in the entranceway.

Shapiro started his artistic endeavors in the early 1950s, when he attended a class with South Brunswick artist and sculptor George Segal at the YM/YWHA of Raritan Valley. At the time he was in the middle of his career making artificial teeth and crowns at his dental laboratory across the river in New Brunswick.

Although the “Y” no longer exists, Shapiro has never stopped creating one thing or another. “I wasn’t looking for a career,” he said, “just a hobby. I liked working with my hands as I had done making teeth, with small tools, and I had spent a lot of time visiting museums, enjoying art.”

Segal taught him the rudiments of painting with oil, then with acrylic. The two maintained contact and Shapiro bought one of Segal’s later-famous pieces, a cast of a head. Using plaster bandages he got from a friend working at nearby Johnson and Johnson, Segal covered his human models with the bandages and the cast became the sculpture.

Segal remained on his family’s chicken farm in South Brunswick, got rid of the chickens, and continued making his famous sculptures, while Shapiro retired from his dental work in the early ‘80s and devoted himself to painting and carving.

Still in good health, slim, and with a shock of white hair, he still works daily in his studio of his house on Aurora Street, set in a hill. Shapiro has produced dozens of paintings: political statements on the civil rights movement in the south, the Holocaust, the singer Paul Robeson, and even Ethel and Julius Rosenberg leaving jail -- a photo he copied from The New York Times as he has done with many paintings.

“With paint you have to assert yourself,” Shapiro said. “It’s harder to come up with ideas. Stone you just work at it, (and) things happen.”

According to Shapiro, with painting, one aspect is most important.

“I try not to repeat my ideas,” Shapiro said. “My whole direction is originality, producing a work that has a natural significance in itself.”

He started carving in stone about 23 years ago, and has produced between 60 and 70 carvings. “I worked with small tools in a laboratory for many years and it was a natural transition,” Shapiro said. “I carve with chisels, hammer, and files without any electrical tools.”

Working with these tools, Shapiro uses softer stones like alabaster. He usually completes a piece, including carving, polishing and finishing, within three to six months. The artist also enjoys the long history of each stone he handles.

“You realize you are working on something that comes from deep within a mountain that can be 50,000,000 years old,” Shapiro said. “You think about the history that has happened between its creation and now.”

According to Shapiro, another important aspect of art is sharing it with the public. He has exhibited his work in New York in galleries in Soho, and more locally in East Brunswick, Metuchen and New Brunswick, and two exhibits of paintings at the Highland Park Public Library. This July will be the first time he is sharing one of his carvings with the library.

“Artists have a determined ego, they want to be seen,” Shapiro said. “No one works in a vacuum, you want to produce for a community.”