Margaret Scriver "To See Eternity"

Bob Scriver’s daughter, Margaret, died of cancer at age thirty. Because her conception forced his first marriage and because he loved the actual fact of her existence as a smart, responsive, and loving little daughter -- followed by a kind of loss as the marriage failed -- he had intense emotions surrounding her death. These he resolved in a portrait bust done at the hospital.

Her hair had been cut short for convenience in the hospital and she asked for it to be restored in the portrait. Bob made it blowing in the wind and spoke of her as his “prairie daughter,” which became the working title. Only later did we speak of that wind as death, a cold wind indeed, and then the title became “To See Eternity.”

This bust represents a breakthrough into a set of busts totally unlike Bob’s more familiar cowboys, Indians, and wildlife pieces, but not entirely unprecedented. Earlier he had done a bust of Arlene Lightfield, called simply “Arlene.”