Docs on rocks: Why do so many doctors study sculpture at PAFA?

It’s Saturday morning on the seventh floor of Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts’ Samuel M. V. Hamilton Building. The doctors are in.

Julio Galvez, a dentistry graduate from the University of Pennsylvania, drills with a steady hand as he focuses on a cavity within a gleaming white surface.

Two tables away, Alan Miller, another Penn Medical graduate, trained as an ear, nose, and throat doctor, is having a consultation regarding the treatment of a figure on the table.

Gastroenterologist Francisco Toledo runs his finger along the torso of the human form before stepping back to get a better look at the abdominal area.

The floor beneath is littered with white rubble — marble. These medical professionals — students in PAFA’s continuing education program — are practicing art.

For more than 35 years, PAFA’s Steven Nocella has been teaching a Saturday morning stone carving class, giving students — including a preponderance of medical professionals — the chance to “explore the possibilities of stone.”

While the class is often attended by the academy’s MFA students, more medical professionals have practiced stone carving here (for decades) than Nocella can count on both hands.

So what’s with all the docs banging rocks?

“They need an outlet,” Nocella said, and it’s an attractive option for “very smart, very intense” people, especially those with preexisting skills shaping teeth and bones. Among Nocella’s pupils is a retired spinal rehabilitation specialist, John Ditunno, whose sculptures, as reported by The Inquirer in 2020, express reverence and hope for bodies recovering from spinal cord damage.

Another celebrated student was Ditunno’s PAFA classmate, the late plastic surgeon Don LaRossa, who, in 1993, helped separate conjoined twins, and was featured in a PBS documentary. Known for his “golden hands,” LaRossa wanted to pursue a career in art, but was persuaded otherwise by his parents, according to his widow, Anne Cogdon LaRossa. When she accompanied her husband to purchase marble, she recalled the “big ugly stones” he selected and brought on a dolly to PAFA.

The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia surgeon, who specialized in repairing children’s cleft palates, “applied the same discipline to his sculpture work,” said Ditunno via email, carefully planing and executing smooth human forms with graceful lines.

“We know the muscles intimately,” Ditunno said, because “the first thing you do in medical school is dissect the cadaver.” So, when he approaches a stone, “I already have that as background.”

At the back of the stone carving room, amidst pounding mallets and the dull whine of pneumatic drills, Miller runs his dremel. He has been coming to PAFA for nearly two decades — thinking he could apply his training in head and neck anatomy from performing reconstructive surgeries on cancer patients. When he walked into Nocella’s class 19 years ago, he recognized his old boss from Penn: Don LaRossa.

For Galvez, stone carving feels like a natural fit because of his 25-year dentistry practice. “With the tooth you have a fulcrum [for the drill] and you start diving slowly,” he said as he carved a 70-pound hunk of marble — a former step that was salvaged from a historic home in Philadelphia.

Galvez, now an MFA student who graduates from PAFA in May, had always wanted to pursue art, but was expected to take a more secure, stable, and profitable career path. But, as he sees it, he chose a field that prepared his hands for what he does now. During his training at Penn, he had to carve models of teeth out of bars of soap. In a sense, they were mini sculptures. “Wow, you have a natural hand,” Galvez recalls his teachers telling him.

A reason professionals from the country’s first medical school find themselves practicing art across town at the country’s first art school, is freedom. “If you make a mistake in doctoring there are serious repercussions,” Miller said.

Stephen A. Liebhaber, a retired genetics professor at Penn Medical School, also an alum of Nocella’s class, now carves stone at home, but continues to visit the seventh floor as a metal sculptor. He, too, relishes the opportunity to make mistakes. It’s “the freedom,” he emphasized, of having a 14 x 14 piece of alabaster that weighs 45 pounds, “and I can do anything I want.” He also enjoys the pace, noting that stone sculpture can take months to evolve, “You think about it, you dream about it…” He likened it to a long-term relationship in which things evolve.

Liebhaber said Nocella “gives you the tools and a lot of freedom … he lets you evolve.”

After training her to use a mallet, chisels, and files, Nocella said to Jefferson Hospital nurse practitioner Sara Van Craeynest, “I want you to think about what is in this [stone] and try to get it out.”

The “newbie” in Nocella’s class, David Pryor, a retired cardiologist, discovered stone carving as a teen. He enrolled at PAFA three years ago, after reading The Inquirer story on Ditunno. The first piece Pyror made on the seventh floor was carved from alabaster. It’s a face in which one half is peacefully asleep and the other half, with a hollow where the eye should be, functions as a mask. “This is going to sound nuts but, you’re trying to hear the stone, to listen to the stone,” he said — it’s a kindred process, he believes, akin to listening to patients.

Toledo, the gastroenterologist who has been a regular at the Saturday class for three decades, further explains a mindset for stone carving. Lifting off the T-shirt that covers it, he reveals his sculpture, The Three Graces. Carved from Carrara marble, a trio of nude females dances in a tight circle with raised arms. Toledo wanted to depict the three ages of the women but, when he carved them, the figures defied time and age. “The stone guides you as you go,” he said, “follow the stone — there is no other way.”

Toledo’s medical office, where he sees patients with conditions related to digestion, looks more like a gallery — filled with many of his finished sculptures. On Saturdays, on the seventh floor, he creates bodies, from sumo wrestlers to dancing ladies. The hours he spends at PAFA, paying sustained attention to the stone forms, makes him more sympathetic to his patients. Practicing on stone, he said, has made him a better physician.