By the time woodcarver David Hostetler landed on Nantucket in the early '70s, he had already established himself as a nationally renowned sculptor, free-thinking educator, and die-hard garage-band drummer. Immediate embracement of the island was a logical progression for this Midwestern iconoclast from Athens, Ohio. His life had been a succession of accidental discoveries and successes resulting mainly from his openness to experiment and his willingness to follow his impulses, even if he wasn't quite sure of the outcome.

David had come through World War 11 relatively unscathed. A training-camp injury landed him in a VA hospital and gave birth to his art career when he observed a fellow patient doing watercolors every day. "It was an epiphany," he remembers. "I just started drawing." Soon after the war, he joined the thousands of veterans flocking to colleges and universities across America. Although he planned to study engineering at Purdue, in part to appease his father, fate intervened and his application was mistakenly sent to Indiana University. Indiana had a great art department and David found his focus. "The die was cast," he says now. It was at Indiana that he was first introduced to sculpture by the American master Robert Laurent.

>Hostetler transferred to Ohio University, earning his B.EA. in 1949, and stepped into an opening for a ceramics instructor, gaining tenure in 1957, the same year he completed his first wood sculpture, Torso. It was indirectly through his teaching that Hostetler chanced upon Nantucket.

In the summer of 1970, David was asked by the Smithsonian Institution to represent the United States in the "Family of Man" show at the Buckminster Fuller Dome in Montreal. Afterwards, he and one of his students, Sue Henning, took a modified counter-culture road trip through Canada and New England down to Nantucket. It was another revelation for him.

"I fell in love with everything," David recalls. "St. Laurent, Halifax, Pegu's Cove. I had my first lobster. Guys stood in the road holding these pink things. I was dubious at first but then I was tracking down everyone who had them. I wanted to settle everywhere. Yet Sue talked about nothing but Nantucket. She had worked at the Gordon Folger and knew the island. She told me to just wait.

"We were traveling in an old truck with a camper and when we got to Wood's Hole it barely fit on the Nobska. Of course, we had nowhere to go once we got to the island. I didt't know you weren't allowed to camp on Nantucket. We didn't have much luck until we went out to visit some friends of Sue's, Fran and Pete Purcell, who were staying out in Shimmo. They let us camp there."

A chance encounter that night with a friend of the Purcells', Sandy Scull, had a lot to do with shaping David's perception of Nantucket.

"When we arrived at Purcell's place, I saw this guy in the yard, on his hands and knees, cleaning bluefish. I was fascinated. I had always fished for pan fish, but these were monster things. That summer he and Pete took me out and taught me bluefishing, quahogging, and crabbing. I landed my first striper, a thirty-three pounder."

David returned to his farm and studio at Coolville Ridge that fall and resumed teaching and carving. But once the school year ended, he was back on the rock. "I decided I had to be on Nantucket in the summer and so I bought the first lot being sold out at Miacomet. Dick Kalman built my house right on the corner of Somerset and Somerset. The Miacomet Race Track was still going strong then. It was a great time. Every Wednesday we'd get our martinis and walk over to the track. The Lodges would be there with their picnic baskets, their wine, and pate. Ralph Marble owned the land and the track and I remember everyone wanted to see his horse, Blue Flame, win at least once. But whenever Blue Flame took a lead, she'd end up breaking stride and lose. What a time."

Along with sculpting and teaching, music has long been a basic necessity for David. His passion for drumming found fertile soil on Nantucket. "One of the first nights I spent on the island I ended up at the Chicken Box. I wasn't sure where I was but I found myself seated between Willie House and Augie Ramos. That was a long night. I heard a lot of great music there and sat in with bands on many occasions. They used to call me up on stage as the oldest living rock-and-roll drummer. I met a lot of wonderfiil musicians like Corky Laing, Jack Bruce, Leslie West, Airto, Stan Strickland, Bobby Parker. I remember one time there was a bomb scare at the Box during a Muddy Waters show. Everybody cleared out, but I had gotten up to the front of the stage and wasdt about to leave then. When Muddy came back in he said, 'Man, you must really dig me.'The Chicken Box looms large in my life. So many stories. Someone should write a book about the place."

With a couple of frenetic Nantucket summers under his belt, David took a step back and made an observation. "I looked around and saw what could be a hell of an art market. There weren't many galleries available, but George Vigouroux ran the Lobster Pot Gallery on Easy Street and it looked promising. James Hunt Barker was his floor manager. So I walked in with a sculpture over my shoulder with that hippie cockiness. George liked what he saw and told me I was on for the next season.

The following winter David received a call from Jimmy Barker informing him that George had had a problem in Palm Beach and wouldn't be returning. However, Barker was opening his own gallery on Pleasant Street and would be glad to feature David's sculptures there. Over the years, they would maintain a close personal and professional friendship. Barker's ties to the society mavens and art collectors of Nantucket, such as Eleanor Fletcher and Jean MacAusland, gave David's career a huge boost.

"Nineteen seventy-two was a riotous summer. We had a seven-foot woman out on the front porch. Sabra Peterson would ride by in her tour bus, stop, and announce to her passengers, 'This work is by the well-known sculptor David Hostetler.' So we got to be friends, which led me to her husband (renowned artist) Dick Peterson. The fates were kind to us and the next sum- mer I went down to the wharf to his gallery. He was the best scrimshander I'd seen. I was with Dick until he died in '75, and then moved in with Bud Hambleton. Bud worked in steel and did some really good work. I remember a Nixon piece with his arms stretched out in his famous victory pose. Somebody made a political statement one summer and threw it into the boat basin."

David did not exactly overburden himself with work during those years. For the most part had just drop off a piece to the galleries now and then and go fishing. "What can I say? I was totally hooked after that first striper at Smith's Point. I made incredible soups with periwinkles, edible sea lettuce, clams, whatever I'd find. I was always into the island on that level. I didn't spend much time on the art front."

Socially speaking, if he wasn't jamming with musician friends, he could be found hanging out at the Chicken Box or the Roadhouse, a jazz club on Fairgrounds Road run by Gene Mahon. "The Roadhouse was the last great jazz place. But it just died when disco came on the scene. Disco was a death knell, a whitewash of music. Gene and I still have a twinkle in our eyes when we meet, sort of pony tail to pony tail, you know."

Hostetler's devotion to music, and drumming in particular, is inextricably entwined with his art work, a synthesis of primal urges. He is known as a direct carver, working.in a tradition where the artist approaches a log or stone and reduces it to a crafted piece of beauty. Even his bronzes begin with raw wood. "Carving is a rnantra-producing act. You beat on a log or stone, get a rhythm going, you eventually drift off to an alpha state where the subconscious is floating around. It's a beautiful place. It has a calming effect."

In 1976, David took a leap of faith when he decided to share a gallery with Tom Mielko. "I had a lot of pressure from friends and my mentor, Larry Zelkin, encouraging me to promote myself I needed a gallery but I didn't want anything to do with one. So our arrangement was pretty loose. He sat one night, then I had a night. We shared the money. It was totally insane. On one side of the building it was Mielko-Hostetler Gallery, on the other side it was Hostetler-Mietko. We didn't have enough floodlights, so the nights I worked all the lights were on the sculptures and the nights he worked they were on the paintings. And in the whole five years we were together neither one of us sold one of the other's works."

Some of David's fondest memories from the '70s were the roundhouse cultural raves that would take place every night among the wharf-rat artists. "At the end of each harrowing sales day, we'd all gravitate over to the Straight Wharf Restaurant. Peterson, Mielko, Kerry Hallam, Cheiko, Cromartie- the whole crew. We'd sit outside on the patio and emulate in a very ersatz way a Parisian cafe. Discussion was all about art. The nice thing was there was a ferment and friendship among us and it happened every night. We were full of piss and vinegar and heavy attitudes about what was right or wrong. Cromartie, in particular, was often given to emotional outbursts. Maybe it was a youth thing, but it was intense."

A singular presence was finaly established on Old South Wharf when David opened his own gallery in 1980. It has evolved into a beacon on the Nantucket art scene.

The summer of 1985 was a major turning point in his life. He met his biggest patron, John Mecom, owner of the New Orleans Saints, as well as his future wife Susan Crehan. Their union was the result of a matchmaking effort by yet another Ohio student of David's, antiques dealer Glen Randal. "Life has been pretty tame since 1986. More sales and clients and projects like the Trump Tower in New York City (his work, the Duo, was selected by eminent architect Philip Johnson to be placed at the Trump International Hotel and Tower at Columbus Circle). My financial fame has taken off but my needs are still simple."

In his forty-plus years of carving, David has completed over 600 sculptures. Besides the Trump Tower placement, his works are prominently displayed throughout the country. On the east coast, they can be viewed at the Wauwinet Inn on Nantucket, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Kennedy Library in Boston, the government building in Reading, Pennsylvania, and at Seward Johnson's twenty-two acre sculpture park, Grounds for Sculpture, in Hamilton, New Jersey.

Today, with Susan by his side, running the gallery, planning the social agenda, and keeping the gourmet fires glowing in Ohio and on Nantucket, David appears to be more centered than ever. Time has not altered his decades of devotion to the female form. His magnificently stylized wood and bronze sculptures continue to epitomize his search for a universal statement that embodies the empowerment of women. "It is beyond choice-it is a compulsion, an obsession." His current subject matter, the goddess series, began in the '80s with a chance encounter. A cousin that he had never met before introduced himself to David at an exhibition. He suggested that David was a "goddess man" and didn't realize it. "His comments planted a seed in my mind. I began an intense study of archetypes, symbolism, and mythology. I read a lot of Jung, and many of the leading feminist writers, such as Eleanor Gadon, Merlin Stone, and Camille Paglia. They opened up my eyes to what I was really doing, where I was heading."

This past winter David was "led by the wood" into the creation of more folk goddesses, harking back to the old sea figures he used to create. "I also completed two figures called Jazz Women, coming out of my revitalization of jazz music. That series will continue. I've been playing two or three nights a week with a couple of great musicians and loving it. We couldn't figure out a name for ourselves so I guess we just call ourselves the Trio." Also, David's discovery of the printmaking process has directed him to new themes and direction in his sculptures.

Despite the changes swirling about Nantucket, David and Susan are well grounded in their new home and studio off Milestone Road. "You look around and see so many people selling out, they can't resist the prices and you can't really fault them. But that would never hit me. I'm on island almost six months every year. My summers without Nantucket would be unimaginable.

"There are so many people I'm indebted to for their support over the years: the Petersons, three generations of the Kalman family, Steve and Jill Karp, Seward and Joyce Johnson. The Giffins gave me such good press in the Inky. Corky Laing was always available to make music, even when he was on the verge of a breakdown after one of his endless road trips. Bill Sevrens supplied me with a lot of great material from his stockpile. We talked a lot of wood. Lisa and Mike Kittredge introduced me to southern France, which had a great influence in forming my artistic and musical life. And I probably owe my life to Kerry Hallam, who observed me sweating through my first Lyme attack and threatened to cut off the free meals he and his wife had been providing me unless I went immediately to the emergency room. Of course at the time I thought all I needed was another glass of vodka. The list goes on and on. just being down at the boat basin has been such a positive experience. I've met so many people who have become friends and collectors of my work. I've had quite a run and I have two different wonderful lives. Who would have believed it in 1970?"

Terry Pommett is a free-lance photographer and writer and a frequent contributor to Nantucket Magazine.