Benson Whittle remembers my late grandfather, Marden Clark. I didn't know about the connection when I called him to arrange an interview, but Whittle, a thoughtful, friendly and soft-spoken man, has a long memory and a head for names and asks almost as many questions as he answers. Whittle especially remembers something that Grandpa Marden, a professor of English, jotted on one of his papers when he was a student at Brigham Young University. "He wrote, 'You start a lot of things you don't finish,' " Whittle said. "I've found that to be pretty true of my life and character."

Maybe so. Whittle, 62, once pursued an advanced degree in Latin American studies at the University of Oxford before quitting after a year because, "I wasn't very happy at Oxford."

Of course, you might think that, as a successful sculptor in wood, stone and bronze -- his work was recently the subject of a monthlong exhibit at Gallery OneTen in Provo -- Whittle could say definitively that he's finished quite a lot of things he started.

Gallery OneTen director, Raquel Smith Callis, assisted Whittle on a private commission in 2000 and said that working under his supervision was "probably the best kind of work experience you can have. He's just really accommodating, and he has a very bright outlook."

And they got paid. So something must have been finished.

On the other hand, as Whittle put it, "There's a school of thought to the effect that a carved work is never finished." Take Michelangelo. "The week he died he was working on something he'd started 30 years before."

Which is probably what Whittle himself will be doing whenever it turns out that his time on Earth is done. He has a "huge backlog" of ideas that he'd like to set in stone (or wood, or bronze), and there are only so many hours in the day.

Time that's especially precious when you work with wood or stone, media that require patience and long hours. As Vern Swanson, director of the Springville Museum of Art, put it, "When a person sees any carving in wood or stone, they could be assured that this was no small commitment."

Which would be one thing if you spent all of your time in the studio. Whittle, who has a home in Milburn (north of Fairview in Sanpete County) and another one near San Antonio, N.M., spends a lot of his on the road.

"It's kind of exciting, but it's also troublesome to live in two places 650 miles apart," Whittle said.

(The split decision is probably at least partially a reflection of Whittle's commitment to family. There are numerous Whittles and Whittle in-laws scattered around Utah Valley -- he spent a number of his childhood and early teenage years in Provo, where his mother still lives -- while the parents of his third and current wife, Patty, are just minutes away from his New Mexico address.)

Learning by doing

Education has played a significant role in Whittle's life -- in addition to the bachelor's degree in Russian that he obtained at BYU, he has degrees in comparative literature and art theory and history from the University of Sussex in England.

Swanson said that Whittle's scholarly bent is reflected in his art. "Because of his intellectual acumen, he kind of thinks beyond other people," Swanson said. "He applies a high art IQ to his work."

And Dennis V. Smith, a Utah Valley native and fellow sculptor with a long appreciation for Whittle's work, said that Whittle's academic discipline allows him to be both thoroughgoing and guided by intuition.

"Ben's uniqueness comes from being both meticulously analytical and expressively spontaneous," Smith said. "He has a very, very broad range of perceptions."

One thing that Whittle didn't pick up in a classroom is any of his artistic know-how.

"I've never had a single course in sculpture or painting," he said.

(Yes, he paints, too. And plays the guitar. And sings. "I've been known to put down some lyrics," he said. "My first artistic interests were writing and music.")

In about 1975, he said, "I just spontaneously made a wood carving one night." The following year he began to carve stone. By the time he started to work with bronze "in earnest," more than 10 years had gone by.

The medium that he works in, Whittle said, often depends on what he has around the house. "When you're an artist you stockpile materials. You can't always afford to go out and spontaneously buy exactly the thing that you want."

Sometimes he makes sketches or designs, or creates a small model out of clay or wax before beginning to sculpt. Sometimes he just carves, or shapes, or chisels following a pattern in his head.

And there are times when there seems to be something that's hiding just beneath the surface of an unfinished chunk of wood or stone. Which is another reason to save up raw materials the way a squirrel stores nuts. "You walk past them frequently and your subconscious mind suggests a subject," Whittle said.

"You might even see a form already present in the material."

That's something that would probably make perfect sense to Callis, who said that Whittle's years of close contact with wood and stone have given him a near-magical ability to manipulate them.

"He has an intimate knowledge of surfaces," Callis said. "He just has this intuition and sympathy with his materials."

What kind of form an artist sees in raw stone or wood probably depends on what he or she is looking for. With Whittle, throughout much of his career, that's been characters and ideas suggested by his long-standing interest in the "pagan," or pre-Christian, religious icons and imagery of Europe.

The fascination, he said, dates back to his first encounter with the famous parish church at Kilpeck, in Wales, a 12th-century structure widely renowned for the pagan elements of its distinctive decorative stonework.

Whittle was in the area to visit a friend and had with him a recently completed wood sculpture of a male face with hair and beard carved to resemble the naked branches of a tree in winter. Whittle's exposure to medieval carving had suggested the pattern to him. After seeing it, his friend insisted that Whittle go with him to Kilpeck church the following day.

"I never could shake the influence of looking at Kilpeck for the first time that morning," Whittle said. "From there I began studying other edifices and other sculptures from the same period."

One probable result of Whittle's European leanings is the elegance of his work, Smith said. Whittle's work, he said "has a simplicity, and yet it also has a very sensitive awareness of form. When I look at the early Romanesque carving, it has that kind of simplicity."

He'd rather be painting

It isn't just giving form to wood, stone or bronze that occupies Whittle's time and creative energy. He built his home in Milburn from "scrounged" materials, many of them taken out of a steel mill where his brother had permission to collect scrap.

Callis said that Whittle's familiarity with the Milburn house probably makes him undervalue its uniqueness.

"The rest of us, when we're exposed to how Benson lives, we can't even believe it," she said. "It looks like his house was a seed planted in very fertile soil, and up sprang the most beautiful organic house."

Whittle is currently restoring his other residence, in New Mexico, a 100-year-old adobe structure purchased in 2001.

And, as a working artist, he also devotes a lot of time to a variety of stone-or timber-related jobs (some of them detailed in the bio section of his Web site, bensonwhittle.com) that provide a more regular income than selling pieces at gallery shows.

On one occasion, he accepted a commission to carve an enormous stone sculpture intended to replicate the Sunstone capitals used in the original construction of the Nauvoo Temple of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Whittle smiled when he recalled that job. On the day of their first meeting, his client, Nu Skin founder Blake Roney, asked Whittle whether or not he had anything to do with the Mormon Church. As Whittle put it, "I said, 'Well, only since the 1830s' " -- a reference to the fact that his family on both sides has been deeply involved in the LDS Church since its formation.

It's what you might expect to hear from someone who's the seventh of 10 children and served an LDS proselytizing mission to Brazil. On the other hand, you can sort of see why Roney would have asked. When I met him, Whittle was wearing a heavy black leather jacket, faded jeans and a tie-dyed T-shirt, with his long, wavy gray hair brushed back from his thickly bearded face.

As Swanson put it, "There's not a whole lot to compare Benson with," which would seem to be as true of the man himself as it is of his art.

And though his time for personal projects may be limited, the ideas haven't stopped coming. There are a couple of things that Whittle, recently recovered from successful surgery to remove a brain tumor "the size of a golf ball," still has in mind to take a crack at.

At the moment, his biggest ambition is to do a relief sculpture depicting the battle (recounted in Greek mythology) of the centaurs and Lapiths. "I like doing multiple figures together, sort of synthesized into a single composition."

Aside from that, he said, "my main other aspiration is to set myself up well enough, financially and otherwise, to paint for a solid six months. I've never done that before."

It's one more thing for him to start. Maybe even finish. Eventually.

Cody Clark can be reached at 344-2542 or cclark@heraldextra.com.

This story appeared in The Daily Herald on page C1.