Distant Early Warning
(An alternate approach to learning—and teaching art)
By Matthew G. Welter
A sculptor at age 43, I have assembled the means to a larger end -- creating huge monuments from mammoth tree stumps. My two creative loves are realistic human anatomy and pure-form abstraction. The study of one enables the other. To this end I have created a company, Timeless Sculptures, in Nevada's capitol, Carson City. Aside from my own life as sculptor, I have founded an active, exclusive sculptor=s guild, hosted by the parent company. The two enterprises operate in tandem to function as a training system with a design, production and marketing facility, providing an exercise against which to sharpen skills. The two function as a means to my aforementioned end. I shall revisit my peculiar Amission@, but first let me tell you how I came to consider it that.
I am hardly the product of a refined education and I don=t consider myself talented. Any skills I have are the residue of shear stubbornness and have developed quite on their own. I have learned almost exclusively from my own experiences and that of some kind artists along the way. I have always been driven from within, toward a calling only my heart could hear and that can never describe. I guess that’s why I became an artist in the first place—I just never had time for the education...
I began sculpting as soon as I could find my hands; anything messy-- mud to wax. From the start I was surrounded by helpers, always fascinated by my plethora of projects. I would someday call them apprentices -- scores of them. Some were paid, none too well. All were compensated. A few stayed for years, most now follow their own artistic callings.
My own first apprenticeship was with my father, Paul Welter. Dad was a master cabinet maker and wonderful father of eight. We lived in Camino; California=s A Mother Lode@. Dad was and is a proud craftsman and father of eight. His example has formed the foundation of my career as woodworker. My mother, Patricia, was more the artist--always spinning out something-- braided rugs to ceramics. Her unique wisdom forms the foundation of my artistry.
When I was 12, I approached a local wood carver about an apprenticeship. I paid Chip Fyn an hourly rate which allowed me to use of his tools and allowed me exposure to his facile, creative mind. I was under his creative guidance in my teens and twenties and in some ways I am still. Chip carved life-sized cigar-store Indians and wooden show figures with chainsaws and chisels.
Chip’s work was styled after the 19th century American masters of show-figure carving, though Chip=s work had a style all his own, as does his very life. He also had a one-of-a kind approach to promoting his art. His influence in marketing and presentation are evident in my own undertakings. I completed my first commission (for $200) under Chip=s loose supervision, and I have been filling commissions ever since, usually booked for months and months.
By the time I was 152 and still living at Mom and Dad’s, my helpers and I (by now I was calling them Aapprentices@) established my first studio/ gallery, The Wooden People Shoppe where I began using what I had been learning about design, display and marketing. I filled many commissions, and that forced me into creative areas I may otherwise have missed. With various helpers I traveled the west coast, showing my works in art shows, retailing my works and closing commissions. The statues started at a hundred bucks or so and went to five or six.
At 19 I was living on my own and seeking more training, I came this time to work and live at Chip Fyn=s facility The Sawdust Gallery. While Chip continued as my master. I was fortunate to room with an elderly woman named White Cloud. She used our living room as a studio that summer, as mesmerized, I watched her paint. From White Cloud I would learn that art is to be given in the service of something greater then one=s own self-interests. White Cloud taught me to perceive the unseen forces which ultimately guide our destiny.
Now seeking life experience, I traveled down the west coast on America that next summer and across the south west for a couple of years. I earned my way carving things with a hatchet and chisels. In the desert of New Mexico I carved an ornately sculptured rocking chair from a black walnut stump. I ended up selling it to a supportive couple, Jerry and Barbara Strauss. They also commissioned a monumental sculpture. The serving table, to be carved from 1 huge stump, would feature life-sized human nudes in varied states of realism and modification, all surrounded and supported by well proportioned, fluid abstractions.
Consequently, at 21 I returned to California in order to locate, procure and transport the giant redwood root-section needed for the sculpture, which would require some years to complete.
I rented Chip Fyn=s by now dormant studio and still active gallery and assisted his retailing operation for two years while I completed some of Chip=s commissions. Alternately I studied anatomy and acquired the10 ton root, always with help from a cast of willing student/helpers. After two years I moved my project to Folsom California, where I studied under Deno and Jobeka Trotta, of Gingerwood Arts a visual, performance and media research group. They were building a cultural center that would employ architecture bordering on sculptural.
I was extremely fortunate to be exposed to the creative evolution of their projects, while I furthered the huge redwood composition in the same neighborhood. The experience vastly expanded my understanding of what I myself could do to channel other artist=s talents into a common cause. Meanwhile I continued my anatomical studies, sometimes apprentices were patient models.
After a year, for logistical reasons, we moved the in-progress-seven-ton monument to the commissioner=s remote cattle ranch, in New Mexico. There, twenty miles from the nearest highway I had Mexican hands and their kids as assistant/students, but nobody to teach me art. That=s when I looked to the great masters for guidance: Michelangelo, Rodin, Henry Moore, Christo, Bufano. My anatomy books were always at hand, modeling anyone who would sit.
My stay lasted about a year, when I received the sad news that my commissioner’s marriage was dissolving and, by degree, my funding slowed to a trickle and the project halted.
Terribly discouraged, I was nonetheless released from the commission, but not from the mission. Remember the mission? I had begun to perceive my mission at age 24. Something about carving big sculptures to inspire and comfort people. But where--how?
I again returned to California and rented back my first studio showroom, where I started The Wooden People Shoppe only by now I had changed my business name to Timeless Sculptures.
I began creating my sculptures of people, now more anatomically and proportionately correct. Apprentices gathered and most were welcomed.
Some of my best works in that era were my contemporary fine-art pieces but only to the extent as my mountainous marketplace would allow. Marketing and research trips to the distant San Francisco Bay Area inspired me to both contemporize and denude my work, but my trips to the near-by Lake Tahoe basin were more profitable. At Tahoe, sculptured wooden furniture and wild-life statuary was more in vogue. Besides, I just didn’t feel right in the city.
At about that same time I met Carol Lee, an extraordinary portrait artist in pastel. Carol Lee began as an apprentice, soon became my wife and eventually became my ex-wife! Aided by her academic arts training, Carol broadened the depth and scope of my creative understanding, in terms of an expressive language. Together we explored our creative limits, each producing some strong pieces and vowing to achieve our creative ideals.
Also during that time, I met Todd Andrews, sculptor of monolithic bronze monuments. Over the span of ten years Todd has been a valued friend and generous teacher in the craft of molding and casting and the art of anatomical armature build-up sculpture. Todd has not only inspired my studies, but has passed along techniques developed and refined by himself and his associates.
In the midst of all my learning I still had to earn my way, so my new wife and I made the arduous move from Placerville, Ca. to North Lake Tahoe -- with lots of help, once again, from apprentices.
At Lake Tahoe we established Timeless Sculptures, a retail gallery that represented as many as 70 artists at one time. I would spend the next 15 years at Tahoe filling hundreds of commissions, always striving for anatomy B clothed, furry, feathered or nude. There, I received some commissions for monumental-sized carvings, mostly in traditional genera, thereby seasoning my experience in the monumental format.
Revenues from those commissions and retail sales from the gallery allowed me occasional time to pursue my anatomical and pure-form studies. For the moquettes, those scaled mock-ups intended for enlargement, I worked in wax, while floor-sized and monumental enlargements were executed in wood. I made molds from both the moquettes and the enlargements and cast them in cold-cast bronze. All the while my apprentices helped and learned.
While living in the Tahoe basin, I was very active with a lake-wide effort to establish the basin as a cultural arts destination, at one time chairing the North Tahoe Business Association’s Arts Image Committee. I remain a proud participant in that trend, where ever it will lead.
Also, during my tenure at Tahoe I began structuring an official apprenticeship program, made up of the scattered apprentices who were always about. The more structure, the more my students committed their minds to the task of learning this discipline, though there exists a fair degree of attrition, as in any apprenticeship program.
I have never been as interested in the comfort of my apprentice=s as I am their growth. The program itself, largely designed by its participants, screens the aspirants while giving anyone who leaves some new tools of knowledge, if not actual equipment--and fresh grip on their own mission.
Worthy of note, are the skilled people that have applied to the Apprenticeship Program. Due to the diversity and quality of these enthusiastic people and that of some of the other masters who have visited, the learning environment is both functional and facile. The apprentices earn no wage and nobody gets paid until a customer provides the funds for something a particular artist did.
Cooperation was key when we transplanted the operation some 30 minutes into the Carson Valley, in search of shorter winters, greater public exposure and cheaper rents. While in Tahoe, my customer base had grown so that I no longer needed to maintain a retail gallery.
In 2001, September 11th, the pieces were in place to complete my mission. The studio was assembled, apprentices trained, commissions were waiting to be filled…but the events of that day changed my lofty ideas for good, along with the course of history. I no longer wanted to make lots of big sculptures. I will make a few, just to get my bearings and then I will make a bigger one B much bigger. On 9/11 I heard a still, distant voice calling me.
At the start of the new year, three of my journeymen apprentices, the director of our
Community=s nonprofit Brewery Art Center and I drafted and signed the following document:
AAdvance of Freedom@
A declaration of intent
We the undersigned support and anticipate the creation of a colossal monument by Timeless Sculptures, hewn from a single American Redwood tree, as large as can be transported. Privately sponsored, publicly owned and overseen: A sturdy message on the sea of time. To this end, we offer our considerations, our knowledge and encouragements, that we should honor and advance our most sacred struggle and most fragile liberty B the advance of human freedom.
From this first concept has arisen Timeless Sculptures’ current push to develop a park in which to display the preliminary, “practice” monuments and ultimately, the park’s intended center-piece--“The Advance of Freedom”.
I will die knowing at least one person lived in pursuit of this mission...and likely more.
(To contact Matthew G. Welter, visit his company’s extensive website:
www.Timeless Sculptures.com)
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Fine art from Timeless Sculptures:
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