Sculpting the Eastport mermaid wasn’t Richard Klyver’s idea.

Back in 2009, the local artist wanted to create nine sculptures of invertebrate sea creatures to decorate the town’s waterfront.

Four private donors offered to finance the project — if he altered his concept.

“These people showed up and said, ‘If you change the subject matter from invertebrate sea creatures to a mermaid, we’ll sponsor you,’” Klyver said. “I said, ‘OK, you’ve got a deal.’”

Eastport is the easternmost city in the United States, straddling the southern end of Moose Island. Klyver’s smiling bronze statue now presides over the port’s waterfront having been unveiled in early August to kick off the first annual “Bay Day,” a sea mythology-themed festival.

“[The sea] tends to fascinate a lot of people,” the sculptor mused. “There are people who are intensely pragmatic, who don’t believe in anything, but then there are people — including me —who are titillated by things that are mysterious.”

Richard Klyver’s dimpled creation is the first mermaid statue in New England, according to date from Phillip Jepsen, a sea mythology enthusiast, who runs mermaidsofearth.com.
PHOTO COURTESY OF TOM WALSH

Klyver was born in Baldwin, N.Y., a small town on Long Island, and studied fine arts and illustrations at the New York School of Visual Arts in Manhattan.

Before moving to Maine in 1974, he spent three years teaching high school in Kenya —two years at a girls’ school in Fort Hall and one year at a boys’ school in Nyeri.

Many of his sculptures depict scenes he witnessed in Africa, such as one bronze piece of monkeys on a log.

“I heard a noise, and I looked around and saw a big old rotten log, and these four Sykes monkeys come shooting across that log,” Klyver recalled. “One of them looked back, and now I’ve got this indelible image of them.”

The sculptor specializes in figures in motion; his female figures dance, his hippos wrestle and his giraffes run. He uses as few support beams as possible in his sculptures, though, opting instead to make them hollow and ultra-lightweight.

Klyver also teaches art part-time at Eastport Elementary School and Shead High School.

Because he had to work around his welders’ schedules, and because he can only work in his outdoor forge during warm months, the mermaid took longer than expected to complete.

“If Rodin can take 20 years to do ‘The Gates of Hell,’ I can take five to do a mermaid,” the artist chuckled, referring to a famous 19^th-century work by the great French artist Auguste Rodin.

Bronze sculpting is a long and methodical process. Klyver began by creating a clay and insulation foam “underpinning” model. Then, he used plaster molds of the underpinning to create a wax statue.

He then cut the wax figure into eight sections in preparation for the bronze molding. He employed the “lost wax” process to create the bronze mold, dipping the pieces in shell-fused silica sand that builds up, coat after coat, until it’s about half an inch thick.

Then, he put each section in the burnout kiln and turned the heat up to 1,200 degrees F, cooking the wax out of the mold. After heating the bronze in the furnace, he poured the molten metal into the cavity where the wax previously was.

During the project’s first bronze pouring, a section of the tail developed a fissure and had to be redone.

“Pieces that tend to be flat are very hard to cast sometimes,” Klyver explained.

The sculptor does not weld, so he instead enlisted the help of Jerry Morrison of Morrison Manufacturing Inc. in Perry as well as Will Dupree, a welding instructor at Calais Community College, and Lorne Campbell, an assistant welding instructor at CCC.

After all the pieces were welded together, Klyver began perfecting the statue. He smoothed down the welding marks with sandpaper and Scotch Brite pads and colored the metal with patina, a chemical mixture that comes in brown or green and smells pungently of rotting eggs.

He was putting the finishing touches on his creation until just a few days before the unveiling.

Richard Klyver relaxes in the yard next his outdoor forge and workshop. The sculptor enjoys having a little bit of nature nearby while he works.
PHOTO BY LAURA COLE

Although the most famous mermaid statue is The Little Mermaid in Denmark’s Copenhagen Harbor, Klyver didn’t model his creation after that one — he worked purely from his own imagination.

“I just did what I thought was a beautiful girl and gave her a fish’s tail,” he explained.

Klyver was born in Baldwin, N.Y., a small town on Long Island, and studied fine arts and illustrations at the New York School of Visual Arts in Manhattan.

Before moving to Maine in 1974, he spent three years teaching high school in Kenya —two years at a girls’ school in Fort Hall and one year at a boys’ school in Nyeri.

Many of his sculptures depict scenes he witnessed in Africa, such as one bronze piece of monkeys on a log.

“I heard a noise, and I looked around and saw a big old rotten log, and these four Sykes monkeys come shooting across that log,” Klyver recalled. “One of them looked back, and now I’ve got this indelible image of them.”

The sculptor specializes in figures in motion; his female figures dance, his hippos wrestle and his giraffes run. He uses as few support beams as possible in his sculptures, though, opting instead to make them hollow and ultra-lightweight.