ARTISTS
in Good Shape
A dozen sculptors express themselves in three-dimensional forms By Gussie Fauntleroy & Norman Kolpas Shray An illuminating moment on a trip to
Gussie Fauntleroy and Norman Kolpas / Southwest Art
01 Jul, 2008
A dozen sculptors express themselves in three-dimensional forms By Gussie Fauntleroy & Norman Kolpas
Shray
An illuminating moment on a trip to Paris at the age of 15 set Shray on the path to sculpting lustrous bronzes of sensuously abstracted human forms. Her mother took her to the Louvre, where the teen encountered the legendary classical Greek sculpture WINGED VICTORY OF SAMOTHRACE. "I put my hands on it and felt like I was touching its luminosity," the artist recalls with wonder. "I turned to my mom and said, This is what I want to do.`"
Back home in San Francisco, Shray (who goes by her first name only) studied at the Academy of Art University and the Art Institute of California. Now internationally known and collected, she still makes luminosity her inspiration and her goal. Her 14-inch-high bronze SOULMATES, for example, began one softly lit morning as a block of clay sitting on a table in her studio. "A special light came through the window, casting an angle across the clay," she says. "I kept removing clay, following the light as it flowed across their figures. They were dancing with the light." Light continued to guide her through six months of intimately refining the lines before casting the sculpture at The Art Foundry in Sacramento. "I have an especially strong connection to that piece," she says. "I feel very protective of it."-N.K.
DOSSIER
REPRESENTATION
Gallery 444, San Francisco, CA; Portnoy Galleries, Carmel, CA; S.R. Brennen Galleries, Palm Desert and LaJoIIa, CA, and Scottsdale, AZ; Waxlander Gallery, Santa Fe, NM; Diehl Gallery, Jackson, WY; Ed Chasen Fine Art Gallery, Washington, DC.
Julie McNair
Growing up in Louisiana and Texas, Julie McNair was surrounded by antique dolls. "My grandmother had over five hundred," she recalls. "Sometimes, she`d cut my hair to put on them. And you could not play with them." So it makes for some sort of poetic justice that the 54-year-old artist now playfully creates her own doll-size human figures, which she forms by coiling and pinching clay, then firing it in the kiln at her Telluride, CO, home before painting with layer upon layer of oils.
The results raise warm smiles even as they probe deep psychological truths. FISHING, for example, depicts a woman who is literally "putting herself together, one jigsaw puzzle piece at a time, and discovering that she`s not what she expected," McNair explains of the likeably bemused figure. "She`s a bunch offish, and she`s always fishing for another piece." That kind of visual pun strikes just the right chord thanks to the artist`s mastery of her medium, honed through degree studies at the University of North Texas and the University of Wyoming, plus more than 17 years running a gallery. And it resonates with many collectors who, like McNair, have learned that, "as you hit a bump in the road of your own life, you have no choice but to find the humor in it."-N.K.
DOSSIER
REPRESENTATION
Sandra Phillips Gallery, Denver, CO; Telluride Gallery of Fine Art, Telluride, CO; Textures Gallery, Scottsdale, AZ.
Todd Van Duren
What if we didn`t build houses, but instead just came upon them growing by themselves, as if nature created them? That`s the starting point for the sculpture of Austin, TX-based ceramic artist Todd Van Duren, whose engaging and fanciful structures tend to curve, bulge, lean, and even snuggle together. Recent works, such as URBAN RENEWAL, play with the idea of new growth-in this case three fresh red houses, each with double roofs splitting off like green shoots-emerging from the decay of an aging and decomposing house.
What humans build for shelter has always fascinated Van Duren. As a kid he was drawn to the work of British artist and designer Roger Dean, known for album covers featuring fantastic architectural forms. He also finds inspiration in nature, both in crystalline structures and flowing, organic shapes. The 39-year-old artist rarely sketches on paper, but uses the "chalkboard in my head," as he calls it, to conceive his slab-built, kiln-fired works. Free of the practical considerations of real buildings, the results are as spirited as if they designed themselves. "I love looking at architecture, but so much of it is so purposebuilt that it`s boring," Van Duren observes. "With this, there are no constraints."-G.F.
DOSSIER REPRESENTATION
18 Hands Gallery, Houston, TX; clayWays Pottery Studio & Gallery, Austin, TX; Clarksville Gallery, Austin, TX; lota Gallery, Dallas, TX; Leopold Gallery, Kansas City, MO; Strecker-Nelson Gallery, Manhattan, KS; www.sculptr.com.
Laurel Peterson Gregory
Viewers of Laurel Peterson Gregory`s sculptures often have a peculiar response: They might strike the classic John Travolta pose from Saturday Night Fever, or suddenly break into dance, laughing as they bump each other`s hips. It`s a natural response to Gregory`s bronze creations, which are, after all, doing comical canine versions of these and other dances themselves. The sculptor is serious about the quality of her art, however, working with specialized bronze and patina artisans she calls her "A+ team."
Gregory, whose studio is a converted horse barn at her home outside Denver, sports an unlikely background for an artist -and for a woman, in fact. With an industrial arts degree that focused on power and transportation-"I was all about diesels and turbines," she quips-she has been an auto mechanic, master electrician, and building official, almost always working two jobs. After she married in 1993, she quit one job and funneled part of her non-stop energy into art. She trained in classical sculpture and tried out different subjects and styles to find what suited her best. Then she discovered dancing cats and dogs. "Life is often way too serious," she points out. "I call my work fine art that lifts the spirits!"-G.F.
DOSSIER
REPRESENTATION
Waxlander Gallery, Santa Fe, NM; Borsini-Burr Galleries, Half Moon Bay, CA; Vickers Collection, Beaver Creek, CO; Wood River Gallery, Ketchum, ID.
Kim Shaklee
Though she grew up in Denver and spent many happy vacations at her family`s cabin near Rocky Mountain National Park, Kim Shaklee`s earliest yearnings were for the sea. "I really wanted to become an oceanographer or a marine biologist," she says. As an adult, she wound up first pursuing another animal-related passion, showing Arabian horses-an enterprise that was so successful it took her to the elite U.S. Nationals show back in 1987. And there she finally found her true calling. "They had an art exhibit at the Nationals, and I fell in love with the bronze sculptures there." Back home in Denver, she sought the guidance of famed wildlife sculptor Gerald Balciar, and by 1990 she was sculpting full time. "This was what I was meant to do," she says.
It`s only fitting, then, that the 51-year-old sculptor now devotes an estimated 60 percent of her work to marine subjects like HOMEWARD BOUND, which portrays the elegant mating dance of sea turtles. In both the life-size, 7-foot-tall version and its 28-inch maquette, the bronze captures its subjects so faithfully that the viewer can feel the very water that surrounds them. "A sense of motion," Shaklee explains, "breathes life into the metal." So, too, does a finally fulfilled lifelong passion for the subject.-N.K.
DOSSIER
REPRESENTATION
Lee Youngman Galleries, Calistoga, CA; Reflections Gallery, Olympia, WA; Art Gallery of the Rockies, Colorado Springs, CO; Howell Gallery, Oklahoma City, OK; Scissortail Gallery, Owasso, OK; Art Incorporated, San Antonio, TX; Gallery at Merchants Square, Williamsburg, VA; Fountainside Fine Art Gallery, Wilmington, NC; Kensington-Stobart Gallery, Charleston, SC, and Salem, MA; Mystic Seaport Maritime Art Gallery, Mystic, CT.
Danae Bennett Miller
Danae Bennett Miller`s sculptures may be cast in bronze, but the 49-year-old artist considers her medium to be not metal but wax, the source of her works` surprisingly delicate, almost husklike forms. She achieves that effect by pouring hot wax into molds that yield sheets as thin as a quarter of an inch, which she shapes while still warm to portray a menagerie of animals. "I`m trying to capture the feeling ofthat moment when you just glimpse an animal, and then it`s gone," she says. The evanescent quality remains eerily present even when her work is transformed through the ancient lost-wax process, in which the originals, surrounded by sand, are melted and replaced by molten metal.
"The wax enables me to create a very light feeling, which gives a flow and energy to the final sculpture," says the artist, who studied at the University of New Hampshire and the University of Washington before settling in Bend, OR. There, she continues to find inspiration all around her on a ranch where her husband raises organic beef. "I`m surrounded by cows and horses and chickens and cats and fish and birds," she says. "There`s a lot of natural beauty all around me."-U.K.
DOSSIER
REPRESENTATION
Coda Gallery, Palm Desert, CA, and Park City, UT; Bronze Coast Gallery, Cannon Beach, OR; High Desert Gallery, Sisters and Redmond, OR; Kelly`s Gallery on Mainjoseph, OR; The Vickers Collection, Beaver Creek and Vail, CO.
Ray Kobald
"Everyone lives in their own box and is trying to come out of it," says Ray Kobald, laughing at the notion that led him to create IT MUST BE 5 O`CLOCK SOMEWHERE and the other pieces in his continuing series of box-themed sculptures. "I thought of this cantankerous old man holding his martini in one hand," he continues, explaining this particular work. "And in his other hand is the leash of his dog, who`s trying to come out of its own box."
Such offbeat and incisive wit, whether in the form of collector-friendly pieces like this particular 17-inch-tall bronze or in larger-than-life public commissions, is a hallmark of Kobald`s work. Based in St. Charles, IL, one hour due west of Chicago, the 77-year-old sculptor has approached his work with irreverent gusto since his earliest days of undergraduate study at Bradley University in Peoria and postgraduate work at Northern Illinois University and the Institute Allende in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. "People intrigue me," says the widely respected master. "I like to study people, and I like to joke. I oftentimes feel that artists take themselves too seriously. As I used to tell my students, we artists are really nothing more than storytellers."-N.K.
DOSSIER
REPRESENTATION
Mountain Traits Gallery, Jackson, WY; Mountain Trails Gallery, Cody, WY; Karin Newby Gallery, Tubac, AZ; Sacred Dancing Gallery, Bigfork, MT; Ben West Gallery, Hill City, SD; Courtyard Gallery, New Buffalo, MI.
Geoffrey German
Most people`s first fleeting impression of KUHLII is of a startlingly lifelike deer. Closer inspection, however, reveals its eclectic, almost fetish-like trappings: a foam body covered in artists` canvas scraps and wrapped in wire; legs of old cedar fencing; ears and hooves cut from car tires; found-tin eyes, ears, and nose; bleached tree-branch antlers, attached with a pair of railroad spikes. "There is a sense about it," says Santa Fe sculptor Geoffrey German, "that maybe it was dug up from a previous culture."
Like all the other creatures the 54-year-old German creates, the piece, whose title derives from the scientific name for a deer species, shows such a well-defined artistic sensibility that it`s surprising to learn he`s only been sculpting for three years. But that could also explain why his work makes such a refreshingly different impact. "My influences are natural history museums, not fine art museums," he says, though he`s also savvy about the art world, having studied photography at the Maryland Institute College of Art and the Boston Museum School before working as a furniture maker, a gallery director, and an advisor and teacher on the business of art. And the lessons German`s own works convey? "I try to give people just a starting point," he says. "Then, it`s up to them to add the narrative."-N.K.
DOSSIER
REPRESENTATION
Blink Gallery, Boulder, CO; Hibberd McGrath Gallery, Breckenridge, CO; Jane Sauer Gallery, Santa Fe, NM; Snyderman-Works Galleries, Philadelphia, PA.
Michael Tatom
Michael Tatom didn`t encounter mountain lions or bears as a boy growing up in Los Alamos, NM, climbing cliffs and playing in canyons. But wild animals have always been part of his consciousness, and carving has long been there, as well. At one point both his brothers, Kirk and Steven, were stone sculptors (Kirk later switched to painting), and Michael also carved in stone for fun.
Yet his primary focus for many years, after studying at the Gemological Institute of America in California, was jewelry, a field that continues to occupy about half of the 49-year-old artist`s time. As part of the process of creating gold, platinum, and diamond jewelry, Tatom carves in a type of hard blue plastic. In 1994 he began using the plastic to sculpt small animals, which were cast in bronze. Since then his creations have grown in size while his goal remains the same: to capture an animal`s essence, sense of motion, and spirit with accuracy, yet in gracefully stylized form. "I like lines that are fluid," he explains, "so you can turn it at any angle and have the lines all flow in a pleasant way."-G.F.
DOSSIER
REPRESENTATION
J. Willot Gallery, Palm Desert, CA; Packard`s on the Plaza Inc., Santa Fe, NM; Fairchild & Co., Santa Fe, NM; Farnsworth Gallery, Santa Fe, NM; J. Cotter Gallery, Vail and Beaver Creek, CO; Sorrel Sky Gallery, Durango, CO.
Destiny Allison
Each of Destiny Allison`s artworks begins with a question, usually about roles and relationships in life. Then the 40-year-old Santa Fe sculptor employs geometric shapes and fluid lines as an intuitive symbolic language to formulate a response. In the process, she creates striking works of beauty and balance in fabricated steel. Like TIME STREAM, an 8-foot-tall piece inspired by a breakfast-table talk with one of her 18-yearold twin sons, who wondered where to look for hope in a troubled world. Starting at the base, the sculpture suggests the upward journey of a dream that begins as a seed, rides life`s curves and surmounts its blocks, and finally reaches a point where the realized vision generates the seed of a new dream, and the process starts again.
A prolific and primarily self-taught artist, Allison does every aspect of the work herself, including cutting, welding, and grinding the steel and applying color through acid patinas and heat. Her sculpture is constantly evolving, a result of non-stop work as well as tools such as an electric arc welder, which allows for greater control than an oxy-acetylene torch. "I love to explore and play with media," she reflects. "I love to push an envelope and then change it."-G.F.
DOSSIER
REPRESENTATION
Winterowd Fine Art, Santa Fe, NM; Rogoway Gallery, Tubac, AZ; Thornwood Gallery, Dallas and Houston, TX; Mountain Shadow Gallery, Tucson, AZ; Fineline Designs Gallery, North Ephraim, Wl; Brunner Gallery, Covington and Baton Rouge, LA; TrowbridgeLewis Gallery, Middleburg, VA; Sacred Dancing Gallery, Bigfork, MT.
UPCOMING SHOW
One-person show at Thornwood Gallery in Houston, July 26.
David Unger
Working intensely and often on several pieces at once, Tucson-based sculptor David Unger seeks to infuse his art with strength, conveyed through his hands directly into the clay. "Strength equals energy equals feeling. It`s my energy and feeling that I put into it," he explains. The result is a lively and immediately understood sense of gesture, emotion, and attitude, even though Unger`s highly stylized figures contain featureless "everyman" faces and few details. THE STORYTELLER, for instance, tilts engagingly toward his listeners, drawing them into the encircling world of his tale, as the circle of his arms symbolically suggests.
Unger, 66, has been drawn to clay since he was a boy in New York City. He took art courses in college and later studied with professional sculptors, but art was put on hold during a 30-year career manufacturing small industrial wheels. Then an Arizona vacation led to selling the business, buying a (horseless) horse ranch, and converting stalls into a studio. Now Unger`s bronzes are in collections internationally, and his hands are happy to be expressing human nature in angles, geometric planes, and rounded forms. In sum, he declares, "I`m having the greatest time of my life."-G.F.
DOSSIER
REPRESENTATION
Karin Newby Gallery, Tubac, AZ; Old Pueblo Frameworks and Gallery, Tucson, AZ; Iron Horse Gallery, Park City, UT; Bill Hester Fine Art, Chapel Hill, NC.
Daniel Newman
Daniel Newman was taking a class in modeling clay when he got the first important clue about his future art career. At the time he was working in rocket engineering (a rocket scientist, as he likes to say), while pursuing his other love, art, on weekends and at night. Glancing around the classroom, he noticed his fellow students building forms by sticking more clay onto itself and shaping it. Newman, on the other hand, was shaving clay off. "I realized subtraction worked better for me than addition," he recalls. Soon he began carving stone, his medium of choice since 1973 and his full-time focus since moving to Sedona, AZ in 1989.
Working in stone such as Italian marble, travertine, and onyx and in a scale from 24 inches to 6 feet tall, Newman creates graceful stylized figures with a delicate, flowing feel. Inspiration can come from anything that catches his eye. He searches for the perfect stone in which that form, frequently reflecting the theme of love, resides. Then comes the challenge of releasing the form. "You can`t fight the stone; it`s more like ongoing negotiations," the 75-year-old sculptor notes, laughing. "You`re not a dictator, and you`re not really a creator-it`s a partnership with the stone."-G.F.
DOSSIER
REPRESENTATION
Exposures International Gallery of Fine Art, Sedona, AZ; Raku Gallery, Jerome, AZ; Courtyard Gallery, New Buffalo, MI.
AUTHOR AFFILIATION
Santa Fe-based Gussie Fauntleroy also writes for Art & Antiques, New Mexico Magazine, Native Peoples, and the Santa Fean. Norman Kolpas is a Los Angeles-based freelancer who writes for Home, Mountain Living, and Colorado Homes & Lifestyles as well as Southwest Art.
COPYRIGHT: Copyright Artforum Inc. May 2008. Provided by Proquest- CSA, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Only fair use as provided by the United States copyright law is permitted.
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Shray
An illuminating moment on a trip to Paris at the age of 15 set Shray on the path to sculpting lustrous bronzes of sensuously abstracted human forms. Her mother took her to the Louvre, where the teen encountered the legendary classical Greek sculpture WINGED VICTORY OF SAMOTHRACE. "I put my hands on it and felt like I was touching its luminosity," the artist recalls with wonder. "I turned to my mom and said, This is what I want to do.`"
Back home in San Francisco, Shray (who goes by her first name only) studied at the Academy of Art University and the Art Institute of California. Now internationally known and collected, she still makes luminosity her inspiration and her goal. Her 14-inch-high bronze SOULMATES, for example, began one softly lit morning as a block of clay sitting on a table in her studio. "A special light came through the window, casting an angle across the clay," she says. "I kept removing clay, following the light as it flowed across their figures. They were dancing with the light." Light continued to guide her through six months of intimately refining the lines before casting the sculpture at The Art Foundry in Sacramento. "I have an especially strong connection to that piece," she says. "I feel very protective of it."-N.K.
DOSSIER
REPRESENTATION
Gallery 444, San Francisco, CA; Portnoy Galleries, Carmel, CA; S.R. Brennen Galleries, Palm Desert and LaJoIIa, CA, and Scottsdale, AZ; Waxlander Gallery, Santa Fe, NM; Diehl Gallery, Jackson, WY; Ed Chasen Fine Art Gallery, Washington, DC.
Julie McNair
Growing up in Louisiana and Texas, Julie McNair was surrounded by antique dolls. "My grandmother had over five hundred," she recalls. "Sometimes, she`d cut my hair to put on them. And you could not play with them." So it makes for some sort of poetic justice that the 54-year-old artist now playfully creates her own doll-size human figures, which she forms by coiling and pinching clay, then firing it in the kiln at her Telluride, CO, home before painting with layer upon layer of oils.
The results raise warm smiles even as they probe deep psychological truths. FISHING, for example, depicts a woman who is literally "putting herself together, one jigsaw puzzle piece at a time, and discovering that she`s not what she expected," McNair explains of the likeably bemused figure. "She`s a bunch offish, and she`s always fishing for another piece." That kind of visual pun strikes just the right chord thanks to the artist`s mastery of her medium, honed through degree studies at the University of North Texas and the University of Wyoming, plus more than 17 years running a gallery. And it resonates with many collectors who, like McNair, have learned that, "as you hit a bump in the road of your own life, you have no choice but to find the humor in it."-N.K.
DOSSIER
REPRESENTATION
Sandra Phillips Gallery, Denver, CO; Telluride Gallery of Fine Art, Telluride, CO; Textures Gallery, Scottsdale, AZ.
Todd Van Duren
What if we didn`t build houses, but instead just came upon them growing by themselves, as if nature created them? That`s the starting point for the sculpture of Austin, TX-based ceramic artist Todd Van Duren, whose engaging and fanciful structures tend to curve, bulge, lean, and even snuggle together. Recent works, such as URBAN RENEWAL, play with the idea of new growth-in this case three fresh red houses, each with double roofs splitting off like green shoots-emerging from the decay of an aging and decomposing house.
What humans build for shelter has always fascinated Van Duren. As a kid he was drawn to the work of British artist and designer Roger Dean, known for album covers featuring fantastic architectural forms. He also finds inspiration in nature, both in crystalline structures and flowing, organic shapes. The 39-year-old artist rarely sketches on paper, but uses the "chalkboard in my head," as he calls it, to conceive his slab-built, kiln-fired works. Free of the practical considerations of real buildings, the results are as spirited as if they designed themselves. "I love looking at architecture, but so much of it is so purposebuilt that it`s boring," Van Duren observes. "With this, there are no constraints."-G.F.
DOSSIER REPRESENTATION
18 Hands Gallery, Houston, TX; clayWays Pottery Studio & Gallery, Austin, TX; Clarksville Gallery, Austin, TX; lota Gallery, Dallas, TX; Leopold Gallery, Kansas City, MO; Strecker-Nelson Gallery, Manhattan, KS; www.sculptr.com.
Laurel Peterson Gregory
Viewers of Laurel Peterson Gregory`s sculptures often have a peculiar response: They might strike the classic John Travolta pose from Saturday Night Fever, or suddenly break into dance, laughing as they bump each other`s hips. It`s a natural response to Gregory`s bronze creations, which are, after all, doing comical canine versions of these and other dances themselves. The sculptor is serious about the quality of her art, however, working with specialized bronze and patina artisans she calls her "A+ team."
Gregory, whose studio is a converted horse barn at her home outside Denver, sports an unlikely background for an artist -and for a woman, in fact. With an industrial arts degree that focused on power and transportation-"I was all about diesels and turbines," she quips-she has been an auto mechanic, master electrician, and building official, almost always working two jobs. After she married in 1993, she quit one job and funneled part of her non-stop energy into art. She trained in classical sculpture and tried out different subjects and styles to find what suited her best. Then she discovered dancing cats and dogs. "Life is often way too serious," she points out. "I call my work fine art that lifts the spirits!"-G.F.
DOSSIER
REPRESENTATION
Waxlander Gallery, Santa Fe, NM; Borsini-Burr Galleries, Half Moon Bay, CA; Vickers Collection, Beaver Creek, CO; Wood River Gallery, Ketchum, ID.
Kim Shaklee
Though she grew up in Denver and spent many happy vacations at her family`s cabin near Rocky Mountain National Park, Kim Shaklee`s earliest yearnings were for the sea. "I really wanted to become an oceanographer or a marine biologist," she says. As an adult, she wound up first pursuing another animal-related passion, showing Arabian horses-an enterprise that was so successful it took her to the elite U.S. Nationals show back in 1987. And there she finally found her true calling. "They had an art exhibit at the Nationals, and I fell in love with the bronze sculptures there." Back home in Denver, she sought the guidance of famed wildlife sculptor Gerald Balciar, and by 1990 she was sculpting full time. "This was what I was meant to do," she says.
It`s only fitting, then, that the 51-year-old sculptor now devotes an estimated 60 percent of her work to marine subjects like HOMEWARD BOUND, which portrays the elegant mating dance of sea turtles. In both the life-size, 7-foot-tall version and its 28-inch maquette, the bronze captures its subjects so faithfully that the viewer can feel the very water that surrounds them. "A sense of motion," Shaklee explains, "breathes life into the metal." So, too, does a finally fulfilled lifelong passion for the subject.-N.K.
DOSSIER
REPRESENTATION
Lee Youngman Galleries, Calistoga, CA; Reflections Gallery, Olympia, WA; Art Gallery of the Rockies, Colorado Springs, CO; Howell Gallery, Oklahoma City, OK; Scissortail Gallery, Owasso, OK; Art Incorporated, San Antonio, TX; Gallery at Merchants Square, Williamsburg, VA; Fountainside Fine Art Gallery, Wilmington, NC; Kensington-Stobart Gallery, Charleston, SC, and Salem, MA; Mystic Seaport Maritime Art Gallery, Mystic, CT.
Danae Bennett Miller
Danae Bennett Miller`s sculptures may be cast in bronze, but the 49-year-old artist considers her medium to be not metal but wax, the source of her works` surprisingly delicate, almost husklike forms. She achieves that effect by pouring hot wax into molds that yield sheets as thin as a quarter of an inch, which she shapes while still warm to portray a menagerie of animals. "I`m trying to capture the feeling ofthat moment when you just glimpse an animal, and then it`s gone," she says. The evanescent quality remains eerily present even when her work is transformed through the ancient lost-wax process, in which the originals, surrounded by sand, are melted and replaced by molten metal.
"The wax enables me to create a very light feeling, which gives a flow and energy to the final sculpture," says the artist, who studied at the University of New Hampshire and the University of Washington before settling in Bend, OR. There, she continues to find inspiration all around her on a ranch where her husband raises organic beef. "I`m surrounded by cows and horses and chickens and cats and fish and birds," she says. "There`s a lot of natural beauty all around me."-U.K.
DOSSIER
REPRESENTATION
Coda Gallery, Palm Desert, CA, and Park City, UT; Bronze Coast Gallery, Cannon Beach, OR; High Desert Gallery, Sisters and Redmond, OR; Kelly`s Gallery on Mainjoseph, OR; The Vickers Collection, Beaver Creek and Vail, CO.
Ray Kobald
"Everyone lives in their own box and is trying to come out of it," says Ray Kobald, laughing at the notion that led him to create IT MUST BE 5 O`CLOCK SOMEWHERE and the other pieces in his continuing series of box-themed sculptures. "I thought of this cantankerous old man holding his martini in one hand," he continues, explaining this particular work. "And in his other hand is the leash of his dog, who`s trying to come out of its own box."
Such offbeat and incisive wit, whether in the form of collector-friendly pieces like this particular 17-inch-tall bronze or in larger-than-life public commissions, is a hallmark of Kobald`s work. Based in St. Charles, IL, one hour due west of Chicago, the 77-year-old sculptor has approached his work with irreverent gusto since his earliest days of undergraduate study at Bradley University in Peoria and postgraduate work at Northern Illinois University and the Institute Allende in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. "People intrigue me," says the widely respected master. "I like to study people, and I like to joke. I oftentimes feel that artists take themselves too seriously. As I used to tell my students, we artists are really nothing more than storytellers."-N.K.
DOSSIER
REPRESENTATION
Mountain Traits Gallery, Jackson, WY; Mountain Trails Gallery, Cody, WY; Karin Newby Gallery, Tubac, AZ; Sacred Dancing Gallery, Bigfork, MT; Ben West Gallery, Hill City, SD; Courtyard Gallery, New Buffalo, MI.
Geoffrey German
Most people`s first fleeting impression of KUHLII is of a startlingly lifelike deer. Closer inspection, however, reveals its eclectic, almost fetish-like trappings: a foam body covered in artists` canvas scraps and wrapped in wire; legs of old cedar fencing; ears and hooves cut from car tires; found-tin eyes, ears, and nose; bleached tree-branch antlers, attached with a pair of railroad spikes. "There is a sense about it," says Santa Fe sculptor Geoffrey German, "that maybe it was dug up from a previous culture."
Like all the other creatures the 54-year-old German creates, the piece, whose title derives from the scientific name for a deer species, shows such a well-defined artistic sensibility that it`s surprising to learn he`s only been sculpting for three years. But that could also explain why his work makes such a refreshingly different impact. "My influences are natural history museums, not fine art museums," he says, though he`s also savvy about the art world, having studied photography at the Maryland Institute College of Art and the Boston Museum School before working as a furniture maker, a gallery director, and an advisor and teacher on the business of art. And the lessons German`s own works convey? "I try to give people just a starting point," he says. "Then, it`s up to them to add the narrative."-N.K.
DOSSIER
REPRESENTATION
Blink Gallery, Boulder, CO; Hibberd McGrath Gallery, Breckenridge, CO; Jane Sauer Gallery, Santa Fe, NM; Snyderman-Works Galleries, Philadelphia, PA.
Michael Tatom
Michael Tatom didn`t encounter mountain lions or bears as a boy growing up in Los Alamos, NM, climbing cliffs and playing in canyons. But wild animals have always been part of his consciousness, and carving has long been there, as well. At one point both his brothers, Kirk and Steven, were stone sculptors (Kirk later switched to painting), and Michael also carved in stone for fun.
Yet his primary focus for many years, after studying at the Gemological Institute of America in California, was jewelry, a field that continues to occupy about half of the 49-year-old artist`s time. As part of the process of creating gold, platinum, and diamond jewelry, Tatom carves in a type of hard blue plastic. In 1994 he began using the plastic to sculpt small animals, which were cast in bronze. Since then his creations have grown in size while his goal remains the same: to capture an animal`s essence, sense of motion, and spirit with accuracy, yet in gracefully stylized form. "I like lines that are fluid," he explains, "so you can turn it at any angle and have the lines all flow in a pleasant way."-G.F.
DOSSIER
REPRESENTATION
J. Willot Gallery, Palm Desert, CA; Packard`s on the Plaza Inc., Santa Fe, NM; Fairchild & Co., Santa Fe, NM; Farnsworth Gallery, Santa Fe, NM; J. Cotter Gallery, Vail and Beaver Creek, CO; Sorrel Sky Gallery, Durango, CO.
Destiny Allison
Each of Destiny Allison`s artworks begins with a question, usually about roles and relationships in life. Then the 40-year-old Santa Fe sculptor employs geometric shapes and fluid lines as an intuitive symbolic language to formulate a response. In the process, she creates striking works of beauty and balance in fabricated steel. Like TIME STREAM, an 8-foot-tall piece inspired by a breakfast-table talk with one of her 18-yearold twin sons, who wondered where to look for hope in a troubled world. Starting at the base, the sculpture suggests the upward journey of a dream that begins as a seed, rides life`s curves and surmounts its blocks, and finally reaches a point where the realized vision generates the seed of a new dream, and the process starts again.
A prolific and primarily self-taught artist, Allison does every aspect of the work herself, including cutting, welding, and grinding the steel and applying color through acid patinas and heat. Her sculpture is constantly evolving, a result of non-stop work as well as tools such as an electric arc welder, which allows for greater control than an oxy-acetylene torch. "I love to explore and play with media," she reflects. "I love to push an envelope and then change it."-G.F.
DOSSIER
REPRESENTATION
Winterowd Fine Art, Santa Fe, NM; Rogoway Gallery, Tubac, AZ; Thornwood Gallery, Dallas and Houston, TX; Mountain Shadow Gallery, Tucson, AZ; Fineline Designs Gallery, North Ephraim, Wl; Brunner Gallery, Covington and Baton Rouge, LA; TrowbridgeLewis Gallery, Middleburg, VA; Sacred Dancing Gallery, Bigfork, MT.
UPCOMING SHOW
One-person show at Thornwood Gallery in Houston, July 26.
David Unger
Working intensely and often on several pieces at once, Tucson-based sculptor David Unger seeks to infuse his art with strength, conveyed through his hands directly into the clay. "Strength equals energy equals feeling. It`s my energy and feeling that I put into it," he explains. The result is a lively and immediately understood sense of gesture, emotion, and attitude, even though Unger`s highly stylized figures contain featureless "everyman" faces and few details. THE STORYTELLER, for instance, tilts engagingly toward his listeners, drawing them into the encircling world of his tale, as the circle of his arms symbolically suggests.
Unger, 66, has been drawn to clay since he was a boy in New York City. He took art courses in college and later studied with professional sculptors, but art was put on hold during a 30-year career manufacturing small industrial wheels. Then an Arizona vacation led to selling the business, buying a (horseless) horse ranch, and converting stalls into a studio. Now Unger`s bronzes are in collections internationally, and his hands are happy to be expressing human nature in angles, geometric planes, and rounded forms. In sum, he declares, "I`m having the greatest time of my life."-G.F.
DOSSIER
REPRESENTATION
Karin Newby Gallery, Tubac, AZ; Old Pueblo Frameworks and Gallery, Tucson, AZ; Iron Horse Gallery, Park City, UT; Bill Hester Fine Art, Chapel Hill, NC.
Daniel Newman
Daniel Newman was taking a class in modeling clay when he got the first important clue about his future art career. At the time he was working in rocket engineering (a rocket scientist, as he likes to say), while pursuing his other love, art, on weekends and at night. Glancing around the classroom, he noticed his fellow students building forms by sticking more clay onto itself and shaping it. Newman, on the other hand, was shaving clay off. "I realized subtraction worked better for me than addition," he recalls. Soon he began carving stone, his medium of choice since 1973 and his full-time focus since moving to Sedona, AZ in 1989.
Working in stone such as Italian marble, travertine, and onyx and in a scale from 24 inches to 6 feet tall, Newman creates graceful stylized figures with a delicate, flowing feel. Inspiration can come from anything that catches his eye. He searches for the perfect stone in which that form, frequently reflecting the theme of love, resides. Then comes the challenge of releasing the form. "You can`t fight the stone; it`s more like ongoing negotiations," the 75-year-old sculptor notes, laughing. "You`re not a dictator, and you`re not really a creator-it`s a partnership with the stone."-G.F.
DOSSIER
REPRESENTATION
Exposures International Gallery of Fine Art, Sedona, AZ; Raku Gallery, Jerome, AZ; Courtyard Gallery, New Buffalo, MI.
AUTHOR AFFILIATION
Santa Fe-based Gussie Fauntleroy also writes for Art & Antiques, New Mexico Magazine, Native Peoples, and the Santa Fean. Norman Kolpas is a Los Angeles-based freelancer who writes for Home, Mountain Living, and Colorado Homes & Lifestyles as well as Southwest Art.
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