'Look at this," says Harry Korpela, holding up a tiny blue seashell on the tip of his finger. "We're the first two human beings to see that coquina. Isn't she beautiful?" He's sitting cross-legged on the grubby floor of his apartment, using the cover of an old car radio speaker to sift through a tin full of sand and shells. There aren't many beautiful things in Harry's life; shells are about the extent of it. At 59, he's been in jail dozens of times, mostly for vagrancy. He lived on the streets for almost 10 years, most of which he spent in an alcoholic haze. Now he and his cat Joycie live in a tiny efficiency in J.L. Young Apartments in Sulphur Springs, where about eight years ago he sobered up. His only furniture is a grimy La-Z-Boy recliner where he sleeps, a couple of cushions from an old couch and two coffee tables gorgeously encrusted with intricate shell designs. As public housing goes, it's nicer than some, but still not the place you'd live if you had a choice.
If Harry had a choice, he'd be on a beach in Maui, hunting shells. He glues them onto pieces of wood in complex, swirling patterns, flowing streams of shape and color — mosaics that look as if they might belong on the walls of the old Russian Orthodox church he attended as a child in Finland, where he lived until he was 11.
With a Russian mother and Finnish father, he was bilingual and necessarily pugnacious. "There are two minorities there, Russians and Swedes," he says. He was small but scrappy. Then, as now, he could hold his own in a fight. "I'm a runt, but on ice, you have the advantage. You can kick a big guy's legs out from under him and rain fists. It doesn't matter how big you are; just don't let him get up."
The tough, wiry kid he was once is still very much in evidence in this oddly boyish man, with his freckles and lanky frame. His long, wispy, reddish hair is thinning, but he's nowhere near bald. He confesses that Loretta, a woman who lived on the streets and stayed with him for a while, colored his graying hair. "She went to beauty school and dropped out with only one week to go," he says. He points to an elegant seashell portrait of a woman with almost Medusa-like tresses. "That's Loretta." He also confesses that he put in his false teeth for my visit, adding that he had precisely 15 and three-quarters teeth when he had them pulled and replaced with these dandy dentures. The deep furrows on his face bear testament to the years and hard miles on him.
From Finland, Harry moved to Canada, then New York and later to Florida with his mother, who divorced his father when Harry was five. After dropping out of school in the eighth grade, he knocked around, doing carpentry, odd jobs and day labor. His speech is a unique blend of Brooklyn brogue and the slight sing-songy Finnish twang you hear in some Midwestern accents. Joe Piscopo meets Fargo's Marge Gunderson.
Although he'd dabbled in mosaic work using stone and broken shell and glass, Harry started working in earnest when he was sobering up, "just to be doing something," he says. One of his earliest pieces is on a coffee table left behind by an earlier tenant. "It was part of the inheritance," he jokes. "Can you see the Indian guy?" he asks, pointing out a tiny shell man with long whiskers donated by Joycie. "There's even some pot seeds in there somewhere."
He calls one pair of portraits "the Scullies," after Dana Scully, Gillian Anderson's character in The X-Files. The pair took him eight months to finish and contain a total of 27,000 shells.
He also has created a series of Lilliputian statuettes he calls his "Shellies," made from pieces of wood carved and covered with tiny luminous, pearl-like shells. "They've got Oscars and Emmys," he explains. "These are my awards." His wooden walking sticks are a variation on the Shellies, with animal and human figures. One, which he calls Susie Small Bush, has perfect rosy shell lips and a dainty pubis made of a single cat's paw shell, white with delicate brown wavy lines.
After the rocky road he's traveled, Harry harbors few illusions about his future and he's basically content with his lot in life. "I've finally found my niche," he says. "I know I'm never gonna be Rodin, but I would like to do something large."
What he wants more than anything, though, is to go to Maui. "It's a real paradise. You can ski on a mountain in the morning and go swimming in the ocean in the afternoon." He has a small map of the island, where he's located eight beaches that have the shells he wants. "This is not about a vacation. I want to die there. Just get me to Hawaii. I don't need another address after that."
But to get there, he's got to sell some work to get the money. It wouldn't take much, he figures. Just enough for airfare and a little pocket money until he can get established. He gets $500 a month in SSI, and a friend's uncle has said Harry can stay with him for a while.
So far, though, selling hasn't been his strong suit. One of his portraits, "Puuniqa," took the blue ribbon at the 2001 St. Petersburg Shell Show. That and the Big Top flea market are the extent of his exhibition record.
He points to a reclining nude called "Marie's Mirage," which has 14,000 shells. "Wouldn't that look good by a rich man's pool? … I've gotta find a rich man."
Artist Angela Dickerson, who teaches art to adults with mental illness at Project Return, first saw his work at Big Top. She's interested in folk art and self-taught artists and has offered to act as Harry's agent. She's now looking for a gallery to show his work. "I know if I can get him an exhibition he can make enough to get to Maui," she says.
Harry has a few tattoos, the most prominent of which is a constellation on his right bicep of a white horse, a moon and a sun. "It's from an old Finnish legend," he says. "If you see the sun, the moon and a white horse all at once, you make a wish and your wish'll come true."
He picks up his map of Maui. "If the right piece of wood comes along, I was thinking of doing an outline of Maui. I'd take some Florida shells and marry them with Hawaiian shells. Do you know they've got 1,500 varieties of shell on Maui?"
Senior Editor Susan F. Edwards can be reached at ed@weeklyplanet.com or 813-248-8888 ext. 122.
This article appears in Jul 10-16, 2003.