Biography: Part 4
ANGEL
|
C LOVES JAZZ
|
FlAMENCO NOVEAU (lifesize) |
One day I get a call from a man who has seen my
work at a patron’s house. He wants to come to my studio and when
he does he commissions’ twelve life-sized drawings of Monsters, everything
from Bella Lugosi’s Dracula to Lone Chaney Sr.’s Phantom. This
man was building a castle in L.A. and wanted to hang original art of these
characters. I think this is the perfect job for me.
Carl and I decide to move to the desert of California,
we had heard that the art scene in Palm Desert was really starting to happen
and also we could run our energy business from there with less stress and
less money. So we moved to the desert. We rent a house with a great studio,
equipped with rattlesnakes, black widows and various other desert dwellers.
I immediately get involved with the local art scene all the while working
on my monster series. I started showing with Valerie Miller who also handled
some of the artist I admired from California, Billy Al Bangston, Lita Albuquerque,
and Laddie John Dill.
In the meantime I begin working in clay, thinking perhaps
I can take a second job as an assistant in a local studio and afford the
cost of casting in bronze. So I took a job with a local sculptor doing design
drawing and sculpting. This sculptor was John Kennedy who had started his
career quite late in his life. We collaborated on a few pieces, one called ‘Strange
Duet’. Which was close to the style I continue to work in today. During
this time (1994) the man who had commissioned me to do the artwork for his
castle commissioned me to do a monumental piece of art. A twenty-foot dragon
cast in bronze to grace the moat in front of his castle. By now I had been
casting my own smaller pieces and had a good relationship with Les Brown,
owner of Metal Arts Foundry in Paso Robles. I put a team together, contacted
my mentor Bill Hilbert from Hawaii who came in on the project as a consultant
and also because he had been so good to me while under his tutelage in Hawaii.
This project took a couple of years, during that time
I quit working in the studio of John Kennedy, started showing in galleries
in San Francisco, Los Angeles and the desert. Valerie Miller had closed her
galleries and I was now showing with Pat Harkins of Desert Art Source.
We installed the dragon in 1996 and I now had a large
body of figurative work in cast bronze. I had gone through teaching myself
to draw, paint, weld fabricated steel, to sculpting and casting in bronze.
My work was being shown in sculpture gardens, private collections, a city
hall and galleries.
Somewhere during that time I married my best friend Carl.
And then at the age of fifty I received a commission from Kemper Development
Co. to create and cast a fifty foot bronze sculpture to grace the entrance
of Bellevue Place in Bellevue Washington.
After meeting Kemper Freeman and his group and the architects
at Sclater Partners in Seattle Washington I realize what a gift it is to
work with people who have such incredible integrity and vision.
When I was thirteen years old I wrote and illustrated
a poetry book for a rotary contest. When I was being interviewed by the board
they asked me why I decided to write a book and I said , “Well someday
I want my life to be like a book, so I am practicing now”.
I ‘m still practicing my life and the book seems
to be writing itself.
Gesso Cocteau 2008
Contact 
