This statue was commissioned by Fr. Leo Hayes in Ava, Illinois. He was a friend of my mother and he gave me this opportunity. This was the first marble sculpture I ever created under the teaching of Jacqueline Spellens and many other fellow students and teachers of Sculpture Spaces which was in Huntington Beach, Ca. I started with very few tools or ideas how to go about something of this size at the time. The stone weighed in excess of half a ton. It was truly a monumental task for me to try to figure the logistics of creating a work of this scale.

The base is a black granite which I had great difficulty with. It started as a large boulder which I found in a lawn and garden store. I had to cut it in thirds with two cuts using a 60lb jack hammer, and level it off. It stressed my abilities to the max at the time.

St. Elizabeth of Hungary was a princess and contemporary of St. Francis, in the middle ages. She performed miracles of feeding the poor and was a princess of the ruling family of Hungary.