FF: And at that point, when you were still in high school and your first year of college, had you started to do sculpting in any medium?

Gisela von Eicken: I’ll tell you when the sculpting began. It happened when my Aunt Gisela, my father’s sister, came to Montreal. And she moved into a studio on Sherbrook Street across the street from the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

And she began teaching sculpture and I went to one of her classes. When my children were babies. And I began to build with her method. It was all in sections, the heads were -- this was portraiture she was teaching. And you worked from chamber to chamber to chamber.

Now this to me was a wonderful way to learn, from the inside out so to speak. But after I’d done it once, it became very tedious and extremely time-consuming. Not at all how I wanted to spend my time -- creating likenesses of people.

Choker with leaf pin. Gold-filled wire, brass. Fern necklace. Gold-filled wire, brass.

So what I would do as I sort of moved from that would be I’d take an armature which just would be a piece of wood sticking up in the center of a board, right? And slap something on it to thicken it, and then slap the clay on the outside of that, and get on with it. I didn’t feel that I had to do all of this chamber work on the inside; I wanted to get to what I wanted to say more quickly than that.

Belt. Color-coated copper wire.

Now her way, of course, fired very well because the heat went through these different chambers within the head properly, so that it didn’t explode or anything like that. But I found stuff that I could use that didn’t have to be fired, like liquid steel and different methods that had not been tried yet, but that still gave, to me, a more spontaneous feeling. So I was constantly sort of fighting the methods all the time to find better ones for myself.

After leaving Canada, Gisela moved to Lake Tahoe, where she met and married Michael Smithe, a jazz congo drummer.

Sculpture of Michael Smithe by Gisela von Eicken.

They led an itinerant, happy, peripatetic life -- gig to gig, hotel to hotel. One stop along the way was the Showbiz Motel in Tahoe.

Gisela von Eicken: I had a friend who was a musician. And he was a conga drummer. And I came and I met him you know -- I had met him already in Canada. And I joined him in the United States.

About a year later we got married; we decided that that would be a good idea. So I got a divorce in Reno, and we walked across the street and got married right after that. So then, at that time, we needed money, of course, and he, being a musician, he was making some money, but I realized I was going to have to pull some resources here and make some money as well. And I talked the motel owner into my doing paintings in each motel room; and the motel was called the Showbiz Motel.

So I did a cubist version of three singers.

They were three women standing with microphones. That was one of them. Another was a musician, sort of with his foot up on the rung of a stool, playing a saxophone.

I did eight of one subject and eight of another and eight of another, because that’s how many rooms there were in the Showbiz Motel.

So we didn’t have to pay to be in the Showbiz Motel for quite a number of weeks, because I was doing paintings in all the rooms.

Contour earring. Dark copper, pink coral.