My New Sculpture!

My sculpture of Frank Hamer for the City of Navasota was the awesome pinnacle of my art career. And it has taken awhile to come down to earth afterwards.  

It was such a strong concept  I cast the maquette as well, which I call "Texas Town Tamer."

Texas Town Tamer. You can read all about Frank Hamer in my other blog : russellcushman.blogspot.com

It is great, stalwart Americans like Frank that inspire me. This original bronze of Ranger Frank Hamer is TWENTY-FIVE inches tall. Not including the thick, cedar wood base.

Once the City Marshal of Navasota, Ranger Hamer looks good checking out Cedar Creek, where the real-life Frank Hamer used to cross every day on his rounds.

 Right now the sculpture can be viewed at:

 

Texas Ranger Hall of Fame, gift shop in Waco, Texas

 

 THE FRENCH MARKET,  at Tokoly Consignments, in Navasota, Texas 

Cushman OUTDOOR WORKSHOP!

Brazos Buffalo Blues

Yep, it's that time of year again... the bluebonnets are already popping... it will soon be time to get out and stir up some dust and paint our fabulous Texas wildflowers...

I will be giving a demonstration in Rosenberg on March 28 and then teaching a two day workshop following the demo in Washington County. Anybody interested needs to contact me and we will see if there is room. If not we will schedule another one!

The most important commission of my life...

Maybe for my WHOLE life...

The Frank Hamer monument commission was big in my world... perhaps the biggest deal of my career.  My father knew him, so I grew up with stories about him. I knew a man who even named HIMSELF after this man. He is considered one of the greatest Texas Rangers of all time. He almost single-handedly stopped a decade of racial violence in Navasota, and is credited with "taming the town."  And a commission to sculpt him,  just blocks away from where I sleep every night... And a place I will drive by several times every day... That's importnat.

One of my personal heroes, A true Texas hero, standing tall in front of a re-creation, if you will, of the City Hall from which he made history... a new City Hall that I helped to conceive... in my hometown...a landmark for now until...?

That's important.

I made him with a great deal in mind... my personal feelings aside, to honor all of our wonderful lawmen... public servants... the men like our gallant firemen, EMT's, regular folks who help and protect us every day. The ordinary people who regularly do extraordinary things. And that was important. The most important.

And I was so honored that they seemed as thrilled about the statue as I was. They get it. They understand, maybe better than any of us what the statue can represent.

Local lawmen join me in celebrating the Hamer monument.

 

So by the end of the Dedication... which I blogged about in the Navasota Current,  I was drunk with personal fullfilment...  probably unable to fully appreciate the honor of posing with these wonderful men. Still I lost it and cried when the Navasota Policemen lined up together with the Police Chief to get their photo with the new landmark.

 

 After all, it was for them as much as anyone, and the monument will always be a testimony of our esteem for them and what they do every day.  

 

A short video made by Chuck McCarroll about the dedication...

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuNP9oNQcjw

 

Finishing touches on the Frank Hamer bronze

I know many of you have been following the progress... so you deserve a peek.

Here the sculpture gets a few last details worked out. Omega bronze of Smithville, Texas has done an outstanding job.. and finished early and within budget... all a first for me. We will bring the bronze home soon.

Next, the final patina will be applied... and it's done.

And then INSTALLATION!

The Frank Hamer Monument is in Pieces!

And that is a good thing. Here is the progress made on the sculpture in the past few weeks... As you will see, the bronze casting process is a hard, dangerous, hot, and demanding craft.

Here are some of the wax pieces of the sculpture, made from the rubber molds.

The hands have been faithfully reproduced in wax, and are now hollow. The red stands are actually forms for the funnels that the bronze will eventually pour through.

The waxes pieces are dipped in alternate layers of ceramic and sand until there is a thick mold encrusted on them.

Frank's head.

The ceramic molds are fired to melt out the wax, and then later heated right before the bronze is poured. This makes everything compatible. You can't pour molten bronze into a cold mold.

The foundryman is wanting everything, the bronze, the molds, to be around 1600 degrees.

A special thermometer is used to monitor the heat.

Stephen Zabel, owner of Omega Bronze,  fetches the HOT molds from the oven...

The fired molds are placed in a sand box to hold them in place for pouring. Now everything is ready!

Easy does it... One drop could burn right through a foot...

Cast in three pieces, the base with the feet has been reassembled.

Here the torso is being artistically finished, the seams between the pieces "chased" and the texture that was lost in the process re-established with the skills of an experienced sculptor.

It wont be long! The dedication of the monument has been set for March 2nd!

Words to live by...

May, 2000. Last minute details at the foundry get ironed out before the installation of a major bronze grouping in Bryan. I am stooping with pain from a serious back injury just inflicted while lifting the bronze girl. I spent months in rehab, and then the insurance refused to pay for any of it, making me swear off any more sculpture jobs... But the entrepreneurial, creative spirit is hard to kill.

Years ago, while visiting with a Tom Maynard, a local banker, I noticed a quotation under the glass of his desk top. After reading it, and loving it, he offered to make a copy of it for me, as I was sure I would not remember the name of the writer or be able to find the quote again. That was before the Internet. I was thrilled to find someone, who was respected, had already described my attitude to a T, and I have kept that scrap of paper for years...

I do not choose to be a common man. It is my right to be uncommon if I can. I seek opportunity – not security. I will refuse to be a kept citizen, to be humbled and dulled by having my state and nation look after me. I want to dream and to build, to fail and to succeed – never to be numbered among those week and timid souls who have known neither victory nor defeat. I know that happiness can come only from the inside through hard constructive work and sincere positive thinking. I know that the so-called pleasures of the moment should not be confused with a state of happiness. I know that I can get a measure of inner satisfaction from any job if I intelligently plan and courageously execute it. I know that, if I put forth every iota of strength that I possess – physical, mental, spiritual – toward the accomplishment of a worthwhile task, ere I fall exhausted by the wayside, the Unseen Hand will reach out and pull me through. Yes, I want to live dangerously, plan my procedures on the basis of calculated risks, to resolve the problems of everyday living unto a measure of inner peace. I know if I know how to do all this, I will know how to live, and if I know how to live, I will know how to die.
H. B. Zachry

Leon is back... and better than ever

Leon Collins, the perennial sidewalk artist of Navasota, has re-established himself at Tejas Antiques where he began his amazing saga in American Art history. Leon is nothing if not persistent and resilient. If his sabbatical at his girl friend's garage taught him one thing, it was that even an art legend must have accessibilty. So Leon is back at work, prolific beyond comprehension, and wiser for the brief interruption in his downtown venture.  And the pressure is on. So many art buyers, so little time.

Leon produces art like a madman with a gun to his head. He paints an average of at least one painting a day. A LARGE painting. That includes time for prep-work and framing, and annoying me occasionally when he gets restless ;). He does not have time to think a thought. He paints what he sees, what he dreams, what he remembers, anything that comes to his mind.

If I ask him, what something is about, EVEN IF I AM BUYING IT, There is usually no symbolic theme, no deep story behind his works, no mission, no central message; A little girl avoids the jaws of an alligator, a man ducks his wife’s rolling pin, black women sail through a cotton field dragging enormous sacks… A crazy looking bird watches… you don’t know what it is… He is as purely stream-of-conscious as I have ever known. I might add that I often interpret his and his daughter's works with wonderful philosophical, metaphoric applications, deriving much more for me personally than they intended... and we laugh about it.

I purchased this painting by Leon Collins about a year ago. It now hangs in the Navasota City Hall. I had acquired two from him earlier but sold them for very satisfying profits. This composition is very tame for Leon, who often paints ghoulish characters overtaking expressive female forms, or black men and women in chains, suffering and enduring, often with allusions to Black Magic. His average customers are white, upper middle class, who seek and befriend him and embrace his work as if on a pilgrimage.

Smothered in approval and acceptance, Leon is even more addicted to the action … the thrill of painting and selling. He has no website, no business card. No agent. And he has sold thousands compared to my scores, just painting on the sidewalk in Navasota, Texas. Yet he has landed several magazine and newspaper articles about hs work, and a TV story on Bob Phillip's Country Reporter.. His highest art actually begins when he begins to talk about the paintings… then he is at his most creative. Leon is nothing if not the biggest, the most talented salesman and story teller in Grimes County. But his verbosity is matched only by his impatience. And if you catch him after a slow day, you will land a hell of a bargain.

Leon has had showings in Houston, College Station and Dallas, and been celebrated by fans all over the United States. His works are presently on exhibit at the African American Museum in Bryan, Texas.

Almost everything Leon Collins does is the antithesis to whatever any artist or professor or knowledgeable person has ever told me. And yet his sales outstrip whatever might be second. We talk all the time about the hows and whys... No doubt his rise is parallel to President Obama's,  but Leon's work and its success is a perfect storm, the juxtaposition of local color, black culture, popular fantasy, and the need of his mostly white following to... resolve something internal.  He is thriving purely because he offers a product that hits this culture right between the eyes… and they do not even know why. Ever since Picasso's Guernica, art has denied the soul. But when people meet Leon Collins, they seem to discover theirs. He is the high priest of racial atonement, and his sidewalk easel the confessional. And he has won thousands of converts.

And yet amazingly, against all workshops and lectures about marketing to the contrary, his success is completely dependent on word of mouth.

As is mine. (My advertising, auction donations, Internet activities etc. draw very little financial rewards) And amazingly, we are both having the best sales years of our lives. The two poles are quickening, but my success took thirty-five years of hard work to accumulate! He has been painting a fraction of that time. And that pretty much sums up the American art buisness, in this little art market microcosm of Navasota, Texas.





20" x 80" acrylic on hollow core door