1. What or who was it that inspired you to make art your career?
Good teachers. At Glasgow School of Art and before that the art teachers of Bellahouston Academy on Glasgow’s southside steered me towards applying for art school. More importantly at Castle Toward, a residential art course for Glasgow school pupils in Argyll. That was a pivotal experience for the young me and set me on my path.
2. What attracted you to working in 3 dimensions?
In the very beginning, my father. As a little kid he always told me to look up when we were in Glasgow city centre, and it opened my eyes to that city’s incredible heritage of Victorian and Edwardian statuary. Then later, first year at Glasgow School of Art, as soon as I got my hands on hammers, chisels and suchlike I was hooked. I think it was the physicality of it, the sheer hard work and the challenges of dealing with it - shaping it, casting it, moving it, installing it etc.
3. What was it that propelled you to become an international artist?
I don’t even think of myself as an international artist, just an artist who happens not to work in his home town any more. There’s been no plan to it, projects lead to projects, opportunities present themselves and before you know it I’m living in LA and have had studios in Philadelphia and Queensland, as well as Glasgow of course. So I guess you could say I was self-propelled!
The Kelpies was a very demanding project, and they cast a long shadow both physically and metaphorically. After they were completed, we felt was time for a change. I’d worked in my home city for my whole career, with the exception of many protracted stays in Australia and I began to think “if we don’t try something different now, we never will.”
We’d had a great response to exhibitions in USA and had carried out a couple of valuable commissions, so my wife and I (Architect Hanneke Scott van Wel) applied for green cards, got them, and made the move. Just at the age most folks are settling into the comfortable latter stages of their careers, we did the opposite and moved to the US.
That was eight years ago. We first moved to Philadelphia, and now we’re set up here in Los Angeles.
4 What challenges did you face early in your career?
Biggest challenge: how to make a living from the subject I’d been studying for four years. GSA gave us no pointers at all on what we were supposed to do next. So for the first ten years I ploughed through a host of projects and commissions.
I worked making props for opera, ballet, tv etc. I built big props for pyrotechnic shows. I did museum conservation work. I did a ton of interior and architectural projects. It’s fair to say that in those projects I learned much more than I did in my time at GSA. I learned practical experience from the structural welders on construction sites, from the bricklayers, joiners, and crane riggers. From the designers and architects and even from clients
At that time Glasgow was undergoing a phenomenal change though we never realized at the time - funky new bars, restaurants and hotels were booming and they all needed detailing in their interiors. So we turned our hands to that while in among it all I was trying my best to win sculpture projects.
Eventually in 1997 I won a limited competition for a large sculpture beside the M8 motorway in the east end of Glasgow. That was a game-changer and from there big sculpture works started to come in. Very gradually one job led to another and the next and so forth.
But in context, the late 80’s and early 90’s there was not much market for sculpture- hardly any market for big sculpture at all in fact. I could have joined the ranks of artists working in their studios make small pieces for sale in the few commercial galleries and hoped for the best.
There was the burgeoning "Glasgow art scene” thing but that held zero interest for me.
However, there was a growing interest in public works and I was lucky to win many community-based projects across Scotland and beyond. I guess in a sense we were forging our own path as one job inspired another area to commission a work, and so on.
Financially It was very difficult indeed. With no “bank of mum & dad” to turn to, and no business track record, working in a relatively un-tested “market" it was very hard to persuade bank managers to have faith in us. I was determined that I would not go down the grant-application path, and instead rely on my own efforts. At one point my colleagues and I were nearing a 7-figure turnover, and the bank wouldn’t even extend our overdraft beyond 15k. It was very tough.
To summarize, the challenges were many, but I think through sheer hard work and tenacity I found a way through it all.
5 How do you navigate the balance between artistic integrity and your clients vision?
That is an on-going dilemma. I’m lucky to say I have had clients who allow me free range, but they’re few and far between. Most clients present parameters within which I have to work, either through budget, scale, the public realm, whatever.
Sculpture takes up space, you can’t just walk past it the way you can a painting. It is also, by its nature, more expensive to make due to the processes and material involved. Clients are often more nervous than they would be hanging a painting on a wall, so we do sometimes have to go to considerable lengths to win them over with concepts. The upside is they are always delighted with the finished product.
My job then is to satisfy their “vision-thing”, create something which they and the widest audience will appreciate, and somehow manage to design, build and install the artwork. And make a living. If I’m lucky, I persuade them to run with an idea which really follows my own artistic interests and vision but sometimes I have to live with compromise.
Compromise can also arise through the physical engineering and structural implications of a sculpture too, and you learn to temper ideas with practical reality. An old sculptor friend once told me it should be called “measured restraint"
Having said that, I am also lucky to have had many clients who simply ask for an impressive sculpture whatever it may be, simply to enhance their environment, and I’m more than happy to comply!
6. How has your artistic style evolved over the years?
I guess it’s become technically more refined, in that I have honed my skills with regards what I can do with the steel. I’ve evolved numerous cladding techniques for the steel plates and become used to the rigors of trucking and craning large artworks.
As I’ve become more adept with the materials it has allowed me to be more accurate in my “modeling” of steel in terms of anatomy and bringing a sense of emotion and engagement to the works.
However, I yearn to win more bronze commissions so that I don’t neglect traditional clay modelling skills in among all the flames and sparks of the workshop.
7. What's the most challenging piece you've ever worked on, and why?
Undoubtedly The Kelpies. Their sheer scale brought so many challenges. The technical and fabrication aspects were overcome with hard work and creative thinking by a group of incredibly talented people. The wider challenges of local politics, funding, client relationships and such-like were much more demanding. I’ll diplomatically leave it at that except to say that between us, the engineers, fabricators and other contractors we could have had them built in two and a half years. In the end they took over eight years. It was difficult.
We’ve had other challenging jobs, like balancing two tons of steel horse on a 300mm square section steel column 15 metres in the air, but those technical demands are always overcome by working with a great team and a “can-do” attitude.
8.What inspires your current body of work?
Trying to keep the doors open in the studio! Living and working in LA is expensive so my main inspiration at the moment is to keep projects coming in and get a foothold here on the west coast. On the few occasions I get to try and push my own artistic agenda and interests I try to create works with a strong sense of narrative - I’m intrigued by the natural world and by mythology, old and new, and obviously I have a long-standing passion for equine art.
Right now, we have three big equine pieces taking shape in the big studio and five or six smaller clay studies in my clay studio. But I’ve chosen a commissioned path in my work which is more client-driven, so a lot of the time I am responding to the briefs from clients rather than finding an outlet for my own esoteric pursuits.
9.How do you feel about the impact of social media and AI on the art world?
Mixed feelings. With social media artworks are reduced to a click, a scroll… which is a difficult thing to reconcile when you’ve spent a year or more working on an artwork. But it’s there and it's a “thing" so I guess as artists we have to somehow deal with it.
Some will fare better than others, but I worry that genuine hand skills and draughtsmanship are going to be increasingly overlooked and lost in the melee of technology. However, I do believe that the public and luckily some clients will still value traditional skills of artmaking.
We do find that for some clients the slick visualizations are very seductive, and it seems to have eroded people’s imaginations and willingness to engage creatively in the actual art-making process. For some it seems the magic finishes once they’ve seen the visuals, and the actual construction and install is an added extra.
It’s a strange phenomenon - like in museums these days when you see kids all interacting with the interactive displays, while the actual artwork is sitting right in front of them.
AI is something we’ve had very little direct experience with, in terms of the studio practice. I still draw, and write, and make the art. But I have seen its responses in terms of being a research tool and it is quite staggering. Who knows what the future holds.
10. What are your thoughts on a platform like Artesial, (which aim to give artists an easier online route to market with lower commissions than traditional galleries)?
If it helps get artists’ work "out there”, and brings fair financial reward to the artists, then good on them. My only hesitation is that purely online galleries might erode the experience of seeing the work first-hand - the brush strokes, the chisel marks, whatever. That said, the artists will make the choice themselves whether to embrace those platforms, and if it works for them, sells their work and empowers them to keep going, then that's got to be good.
The bonus question we ask everyone: what, in your opinion, does art do?
That depends on the art. If you’re talking about bananas taped to walls, you’re asking the wrong guy.
But the kind of art I’m drawn to, and that I aim to produce - it can create a sense of place, engender civic pride and bring a bit of magic to everyday life. It can evoke emotions the viewer didn’t expect and inspire joy, empathy and host of other emotions. It can tell stories and reflect the past. It can bring awe and appreciation of another person’s skill and dexterity, their imagination and vision.
If it’s well done, it transforms public places and breathes creative life into the environment. Basically, it makes the world a better place. As we learned with the Kelpies, it can even become a national tourism icon, create employment, transform the local economy and have a reach far beyond the community which it serves.
