"Kiss Of The Art Gods: Memoir Of A Sculptor"

Water and fire have marked the life journey of figurative sculptor Dan Corbin. He worked out of a studio in Chico in the 90s where he began to establish himself as a living artist who could actually make a living from his art. Represented in galleries across the country, Corbin has specialized in creating life-sized sculptures of the female form.

His work is at once industrial and sensual. "An art analogy of my new sculpture style goes as follows: Rodin meets an Australian aboriginal conceptualist, and they began having kids."

There is no straight line from growing up in the 50s on a peach orchard in the Yuba City area to becoming a successful studio artist. The intriguing and passionate story is told in "Kiss Of The Art Gods: Memoir Of A Sculptor" ($15.95 in paperback from Gatekeeper Press; also for Amazon Kindle). Corbin's website (kissoftheartgods.com) features a gallery of his work.

The great flood came in 1955, inundating the ranch, drawing a line between an idyllic family life and the unraveling of that family in the years to come. After the flood ten-year-old Dan discovered an encyclopedia article on sculpture. "Looking back now, fifty years later," he writes, "I believe something mystical happened to me on that day." "Art," he adds, "is the nearest thing we have for getting it right and keeping it real."

That leads to the Art Gods. "I believe these gods reside in our bodies, in our minds, or in our DNA as agents of cultural progress, social bonding, and peaceful change." The Art Gods give short shrift to the dilettante, to the puffed-up person who dismisses his mentors. From Reno to Hawaii, San Francisco to Chico, the lesson took a long time to learn. There were brawls, booze, babes; and typhoid fever.

At long last he listened. He saw that firing clay sculptures produced incredibly fragile work, that his art demanded a different medium. The Art Gods smiled: "When the Art Gods think you can carry the torch of social change, only then do they give you their cherished blessing."

It's a heartfelt meditation on the Art Gods reclaiming a wayward son.