'A Fuller Person'

Bronx sculptor's passions are family, Church, community

By MARY ANN POUST

When metal sculptor Ray Quinones finishes a piece, he doesn't offer it for sale right away.

"I usually keep them for five or six months and look at them," he explained, "because once they leave, I'll never see them again."

Sometimes he'll take a photograph of a favorite--like the rhinoceros he did on a commission from the Bronx Zoo for presentation to Bronx Borough President Fernando Ferrer.

The finished piece is in Ferrer's office, but a framed color photo hangs in the foyer of Quinones' home in the Castle Hill section of the borough. When he's feeling expansive, which is often, he'll tell visitors how he constructed the piece, he'll explain the creative thought behind it and he'll point out that the ears of the animal are erect and facing forward--as though it were in danger.

"It's an endangered species," Quinones remarked, telling the story last week. "That's why it works."

Quinones, 55, works his metal by hand and doesn't cast anything from a mold. With a mold, he explained, the temptation is there to turn out lots of copies and the piece is no longer one-of-a-kind.

And he uses only hand-driven tools. His garage-turned-studio has an assortment of rubber hammers, an ax, wire brushes and an array of other implements that look as though they could have been salvaged from a 19th-century blacksmith shop.

"When you use power tools you lose something," Quinones said. "The piece becomes very fine and smooth. It doesn't have the texture that a sculpture needs to look hand done."

The Puerto Rican-born Quinones, an active parishioner at Holy Family, is himself an original.

He has functioned as a full-time artist while living for nearly 30 years in a tidy working-class neighborhood not known as a center of creative ferment. He has lived most of his life in New York, but he visits Puerto Rico each year and can lecture anyone who asks on the minute details of its government and politics.

His involvement with his parish is so intense that he carries keys to the church on his key ring and has turned Holy Family Church into a mini-museum of his pieces, including candleholders done for the parish centennial last year and a Tree of Life used in a campaign some years ago to renovate a parish hall in the basement.

"I just look around the church and I come up with ideas," he said.

Quinones also has a strong commitment to family life and his community--so much so that after leaving the Marine Corps he turned down a promising job opportunity because he didn't want to ever again leave the Bronx. It was a decision he does not regret, however, because it steered him toward a new (though lower-paying) path as an artist.

"The payoff has been the satisfaction I've gotten in creating," he said.

Ray Quinones is one of seven children in a family originally from Caguas, Puerto Rico. They moved to the South Bronx in 1952, during a time of massive Puerto Rican migration, and settled on East 141st Street in St. Luke's parish. His mother, he said, was deeply religious and, with the help of a translator, lobbied the pastor to have Quinones and one of his brothers be altar servers.

At the time, he said, Spanish Masses were celebrated in the church basement and only boys from the parish school were accepted to serve the altar. "We were all altar boys in Puerto Rico," Quinones said, adding that his mother's campaign was a success. He and his brother became the first Spanish-speaking altar boys at St. Luke's and the first from public school.

"The Mass was in Latin at that time, so the language didn't make that much difference," he said. "But it was important to my mother. Her dream was that one of her sons would become a priest. So she was happy at least seeing us on the altar."

After graduating from Morris High School, Quinones declined college scholarship offers because he felt he needed a break from the South Bronx, which had become a crimeand drug-ridden disaster area. He joined the Marines where, based on aptitude tests, he was sent to school for engineering and metallurgy. In 1965 he was assigned to the 3rd Marine Division in Vietnam during the height of the war. He was in an engineering battalion that built bridges and roads for advancing troops.

"It was a harrowing experience for me," he says of his Vietnam year. "I think that's when I really matured." It was Vietnam, he said, that brought him back to the Church after he had drifted away as a teenager.

"I saw a lot of changes in the Church because of the Second Vatican Council and I was very excited, especially about the new opportunities for the laity," he said. "I began to think that maybe that's where my strength is."

He was an early and active member of the archdiocesan Center for Lay Leadership and was its first lay board chairman.

Discharged from the Marines, he married a college friend of his sister's, Edmee Gabriel, in Holy Family Church. Quinones, who has a daughter, two sons and two grandchildren, moved with his new wife to Castle Hill neighborhood and a few years later they bought the house where they still live.

Quinones' first job after discharge was in the engineering department of General Motors at its plant in Sleepy Hollow, then North Tarrytown. "With my knowledge of metallurgy I knew I wanted to continue to work with metals. I was extremely fascinated by the interaction of metals, that's why I applied to GM, " he said.

But he balked when officials wanted to relocate him to company headquarters in Detroit for additional training and a move up the career ladder. "I did not want to go," he said. "I had been away for four years, I had recently married, and the thought of leaving New York again was wrenching for me."

So, with no training in art, Quinones answered a classified ad for an artist's helper. The artist, Silas Seandel, hired him and became his teacher and mentor. "I've been working with him ever since," said Quinones, who is now a vice president of Seandel's studio in Manhattan's Chelsea section, which produces original works of sculpture for interior designers and architects.

The job, he said, has "taken care of my bills, educated my children and enabled me to keep my house." It also allows him time to work on his own pieces in his garage studio, with art students from Bronx and Manhattan colleges frequently there to observe.

His life choice has also allowed him the freedom to immerse himself in his parish where, besides his lay leadership work and artistic contributions, he is or has been a parish council member, a Eucharistic minister, a coordinator of youth activities and a strong parish voice in the community.

"One of these days," he said with a touch of wistfulness, "I'll probably feel that I didn't spend enough time with my art." But he never wanted to become so consumed by art that he would lose touch with the world around him.

"I care about my Church, my family, Puerto Rico--and my art. I think I'm a fuller person this way," he said.