An Illinois State University alum played a leading role in the recent celebration of a Chicago Cubs legend.
On June 23, baseball Hall of Famer Ryne Sandberg had a statue unveiled in his honor on the 40-year anniversary of the so-called "Sandberg game" against the St. Louis Cardinals.
The sculptor of the statue, Lou Cella, is an ISU alum who has created statues in various places around the world.
Cella, who works out of a studio in Highwood, Ill., said he was worried earlier this year that Sandberg would not be able to attend the unveiling after he was diagnosed with metastatic prostate cancer.
He said organizers knew "the potential tragic factor playing into this and it was very worrisome for us," Cella said in an interview on WGLT's Sound Ideas. "In that brief time we were interacting with him, he became close to me. He became somebody everyone liked seeing when he came in to review the sculpture."
Sandberg has since said he has no detection of cancer after his treatments.
How it started
Cella started school at ISU in August 1981 and planned on double majoring in theater and art. He participated in both for a couple of years before he started to focus on graphic art. Cella started to become interested in sculpting as a hobby in the late '80s, he said.
“I slowly was finding I was getting laid off by a recessionist economy in the early '90s and I started doing the sculpting more and more, and found myself in three-dimensional work more and more. I left the graphic world behind, though I would definitely say the teachers at ISU and what they taught on various levels always stuck with me,” Cella said.
In 2009, Cella sculpted a statue for the ISU campus — the Doug Collins-Will Robinson statue outside what was then called Redbird Arena. Doug Collins was the first overall pick in the 1973 NBA draft and Robinson was the first African American head basketball coach in NCAA Division I history. When ISU contacted Cella to sculpt the statue he was happy to accept.
“They found out that I was a graduate and they didn’t know that right away, so they felt like all the pieces had fallen into place for a good fit,” said Cella, adding he was happy he was contacted because he felt disconnected from Illinois State for many years.
Cella mentions that at the time of the Collins/Robinson unveiling, it was one of the most satisfying events he'd been part of, noting the entire Redbird community felt very unified during that event.
“What I especially liked was the way the athletic department and the college of fine arts seemed to connect in celebrating this,” he said.
One of the more challenging aspects about sculpting is not always having your subject modeling for you, said Cella. Will Robinson died before the creation of his statue with Collins, so Cella had to improvise.
“One of things we’ll do early on is take a photograph of the subject, a strong photograph, then photograph the sculpture itself in the same position and preferably the same lighting and we put them side-by-side and then lay a grid over them," said Cella.
"What we're doing is we’re aligning the eyes, nose, the mouth, the ear, the sides of the head and so on and checking it. We’re seeing if those lines are going over the same things on the sculpture.”
Cella also uses videos of his subject to help him grasp the details he thinks he could be missing.
“I try to find interviews of some kind or another because there may be something that is in the photograph that I may not be taking very seriously that when I see them in motion communicating, I find it vital to the personality and needs to be in there,” he said.
Cella said his sculpting projects are never linear, meaning that progress does not happen on a schedule or in a specific order. He also said that during his time sculpting the Sandberg statue, he was going back and forth sculpting a statue of football Hall of Famer Barry Sanders.
“I would say about two and half, three months of working time was what it took to actually sculpt the clay,” Cella said.
When Sandberg’s statue was unveiled at Wrigley Field, Cella said the unveiling was extra emotional this time around.
“In our studio, in that brief time we were interacting with him we became close to him. He became someone that everyone really liked seeing when he came in to review the sculpture,” said Cella, adding he would love to work with the Redbirds again.
“I’m not equipped to give you money, but what I do have is my time, and I’m willing to offer that if it's gonna help anybody in the arts at ISU. If I can help, I will because my time at ISU really meant a lot to me, and if it’s gonna help someone else there I would certainly enjoy helping them,” he said.
