Home / News & Publications / Michigan Catholic News / 2008 / Troy sculptor carves new mysteries
Troy sculptor carves new mysteries
by Robert Delaney of The Michigan Catholic
Published September 26, 2008
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Robert Delaney | The Michigan Catholic
Sculptor John Marovich in his Troy workshop. |
Troy — As his profession as an automotive tool-and-die design engineer became increasingly computerized, John Marovich turned to his avocation as a woodcarver.
“I had just spent $1 million on computers and software to meet General Motors’ requirements to keep doing business with them, when GM decided to change the software, and it was going to cost me $500,000 more. Plus Ford and Chrysler picked different systems,” Marovich says, explaining why he decided to close his business and take early retirement back in the 1990s.
Now, at 74, he spends his time carving things out of wood – all kinds of things. He started out doing duck decoys in the mid-1980s, but his craft has taken him in many directions. Animals are a particular specialty, from ultra-realistic to highly stylized. Carved birds, fish, bears, horses, snakes and many others fill the Troy home he shares with his wife, Darlene.
He has also turned his sculpting tools to the human form, doing portrait busts and full figures, some of them in action. A particularly striking sculpture is of a young woman surfing, accompanied on each side by dolphins. Marovich says his interest in religious art developed in recent years after Fr. Ben Kosnac, pastor of SS. Cyril & Methodius Parish in Sterling Heights, contacted him to do some angels for his church.
Angels carved by Marovich support the altar and three angels form the stand for the church’s Pascal candle at SS. Cyril & Methodius.
Marovich has high praise for Fr. Kosnac, and proudly shows the medal blessed by the late Pope John Paul II that Fr. Kosnac gave him in appreciation for the high quality of the work he did there.
“It came in a beautiful presentation case, but I decided to carve a special stand for it,” he says showing the “knee” of a Cypress root he carved with a relief of a Madonna and Child and a cylindrical hole in which to hang the medal. His work at the Sterling Heights church led to commissions for Sacred Heart of the Hills Church in Auburn Hills and more recently to the set of Luminous Mysteries reliefs for St. Mary Queen of Creation in New Baltimore.
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