When the calendar flips from December to January and we welcome a new year, media outlets often run or air stories about the notable people who have died over the past 12 months. It's a lovely tradition. Our local public radio station even gave listeners a chance to call in and pay tribute to folks they had loved and/or admired and who had passed away in 2010.
The Boston Globe devoted a whole page to its farewell this year, and I scanned the very long list of people in various categories, amazed at the collection of talent that is no longer with us. One name I'd like to add is Elliot Offner, who died in October at age 79.
Elliot was an accomplished sculptor, a devoted educator, and a genuinely kind man. I met him in the 1980s when I worked at Smith College in Northampton, Mass. -- where he was on the faculty for four decades -- and reconnected with him last year, when he was facing cancer. Although passionate about printing, calligraphy, and other media, Elliot was known as a realist sculptor who earlier on conveyed the horrors of the Holocaust and later captured the beauty and movement of birds, fish, horses, and other animals in bronze. His metal menagerie included a leaning heron, a rising crane, a plunging whale, a spiky hedgehog, and a horse that looks like it's ready to gallop away. His great blue heron outside the greenhouses at Smith has been described as "a virtual symbol of the college, with its exhilarating unfolding of wings and elastic curve of neck."
I will miss Elliot and the joy he exuded. But I know his spirit remains alive in the people who loved him, especially his wife of more than 50 years, Rosemary. And I look forward to seeing the world through Elliot's artful eye when I visit places housing his elegant, inspiring, and sometimes whimsical sculptures -- like the new healing garden at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston or Bates College in Maine, where his loveable bronze beagle is a perfect tribute to young man named Dan who died way too early.
Thanks for sharing your many gifts with us, Elliot!
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