How Hilltown sculptor Andrew DeVries transforms molten metal into lasting art

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DeVries says he considers this piece, titled "The Juggler," a self-portrait.

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Another work in progress in DeVries' studio shows the light, flowing nature of his pieces, which are inspired by his love of dance.

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Wax versions for a work titled "Papillon" by sculptor Andrew DeVries

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Sketches and life casts that DeVries took of Don Chevannes for the Soldier On sculpture

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DeVries' wife, Patricia, says that when her husband is absorbed in his work "you don't bother him."

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DeVries pulls a hollow wax casting of the Soldier On sculpture from a mold as he explains his work during the open studio in August.

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Don Chevannes of Florence was the model for the Soldier On piece. At right, DeVries presents him with a small bust of himself. The commissioned head-to-toe sculpture is still in its mold on the table behind the men.

When pouring molten bronze, Middlefield sculptor Andrew DeVries resembles a mad scientist, or perhaps an alien. He wears a U-shaped helmet with thick goggles; a bright silver coat falls from his shoulders to his ankles. His hands are encased in enormous gloves.

The bronze - heated to nearly 2100 degrees Fahrenheit - looks like lava. It's bright orange with dark streaks. Get within 10 feet and you can feel its intensity. You can hear it, too - the dull roar of the stove, the bronze hissing.

This is a near-daily routine for DeVries. But once a year he opens his River Studio, just past the Worthington town line, to the public. In addition to the wine and cheese, the grapes and crackers, there's a bronze pour. This year, over 100 people showed up to watch, circling around the foundry, shading their eyes against the sun and the glowing bronze.

Using an intricate pulley system, DeVries maneuvers the container of liquid metal out of the stove and over a casting - a ceramic shell that loosely resembles a weary but unbowed soldier - buried in sand. He positions himself, then tilts the bucket so a stream of bronze flows through the air, disappearing in the sand-covered castings to cool and harden.

It happens fast. Timing is everything at this point in the sculpting process. Once the bronze is pulled from the oven, it cools quickly - 50 degrees a minute, losing its malleability.

Bronze owns a storied place in the history of human development. Take away the outfit and what DeVries is doing isn't so different from what prehistoric peoples did thousands of years ago. The Bronze Age was an era of metal-casting that allowed human beings greater refinement in terms of weapons and tools and farming implements. As DeVries likes to say, bronze was really the first step in civilization.

So watching a pour is oddly captivating, simultaneously a glimpse into history, alchemy, artistic process. There's even the added element of danger - molten bronze on the skin can be unforgiving.

When the pour is finished, DeVries pulls off his helmet and sheds his gloves. His face is flushed with sweat but his eyes are bright, his smile infectious. "Well?" he asks.

One member of the still-mesmerized audience begins to clap. Then another. Then the applause ripples over the sunlit fields and forest that surround the studio.

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"You have to think like metal," says DeVries later over lunch in his house, next door to the studio. "It will always love you."

Metal, for DeVries, is bronze - his medium of choice since he first began working with it over 30 years ago. Bronze is heavy, but DeVries sculptures lean to the light side ¿ they flow, they exude a delicate balance. Dancers leap through the air, a woman floats connected to the Earth solely by a strand of hair. It is almost as if DeVries is determined to defy the limits of his raw material.

His foundry - the one his father helped him build when DeVries moved to Middlefield in 1985 - is visible at the far edge of the surrounding field. The table is covered with brochures for his current show in Old Lyme, Conn. Next to the olive oil is G. Savage's "A Concise History of Bronzes."

DeVries tends to eschew biography, always steering conversations back to the work itself - how to pour bronze, how to finish the patina, when flaws can work to the benefit of the overall aesthetic and when they can't.

Art, says DeVries, consumed his life from a young age. He recalls an early viewing of ballet on PBS's "Great Performances:" The grace and elegance in the dancers' movement fired his imagination. How could one capture that movement in a drawing? In a sculpture?

"I can't say this enough," he says. "The world of ballet had a profound influence on me. It was my dream as a kid to end up in a ballet studio."

And so, in 1977, at the age of 16, DeVries left the family's working dairy farm in Rochester, N.Y. and set out across America to embrace his destiny. And if he was unsure what that meant in terms of geography, he knew full well what it meant in terms of vocation.

"I only knew I wanted to be an artist," he says. "So one day I packed up all my brushes and pictures and art books and took off."

He took his time on the road, stopping at museums and galleries from Phoenix to Salt Lake City. He ended up in Denver where he spent nearly every day for two years hunkered down in ballet studios, studying and drawing professional dancers such as Rieke Maria Love. At the same time, he began using clay, honing his sculpting skills. Working with his hands in that way, he says, was a revelation.

He also began using bronze, apprenticing in two foundries. His formal training is minimal - local art classes in Denver, and six months in a Parisian gallery in the mid-1980s. He is primarily self-taught. "Everything else was just working and working and working," he says.

Learning on his own was liberating, says DeVries. He was bound only by what he saw and the repeated efforts to imitate it, to find a way to go beyond it.

"It means that you can turn inward and push yourself to do different things," he says. "I can take a piece where I want it to go."

DeVries has no qualms about acknowledging his innate talent. But he's quick to point out that his success as a sculptor owes less to talent than to two other factors. The first is his prodigious work ethic - not unlike that which his parents put forth day after day on the farm. DeVries works seven days a week, 5:30 a.m. until well after dinner. It's a grueling, relentless schedule and he sticks to it doggedly.

The other factor - the one he returns to most often in conversation - is his vision. DeVries literally sees the finished work in his mind. And that, he says, is the real gift.

"I used to think that being an artist was a choice," he says. "But I've come to think that there was something in whatever greater powers there are that put me on the Earth to do this work."

His wife, Patricia, talking to visitors at the open house about her husband's process, put it this way. When DeVries turns inward to heed the call of sculpture, "you don't bother him."

"It's a very eerie, faraway kind of look and you just know that he's seeing something and you leave him alone," she says. "You don't go there."

"I'm the gateway for these pieces," says DeVries. "I don't really question them. I really don't think about what I'm doing. I'm just the guy who gets the work done."

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But for a guy who just "gets the work done," he's picked up plenty of admirers and accolades along the way. Unlike many artists, DeVries embraces - albeit reluctantly - the obligation to run a business. Early in his career he began seeking out commissions, and showing his work whenever possible. His first public commission came in 1989 - a 9-foot-tall dancer in bronze for the Hebrew Home and Hospital in West Hartford, Conn. Two years later the National Sculpture Society awarded him its prestigious Walter & Michael Lantz prize. Connoisseurs from across the globe travel to his Middlefield studio - or to his gallery in Lenox - to buy pieces. His work is in private collections from Germany to Israel to Portugal to Korea. Robert Redford owns some of his art.

This is a man with a considerable gift, says John Downing, CEO of Leeds-based Soldier On, an organization that provides shelter, counseling and job training to homeless veterans of the U. S. military. When the group decided to commission a sculpture for its "Soldier On" award, which was presented to Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, last night, Downing, who was familiar with DeVries work, said he knew just the guy to do it.

DeVries, says Downing, "has a genius and a gift within that God gave him."

The evidence of that gift fills his studio. There are sculptures in various stages of development at all times - those which need only the final touches to the patina, those being modeled in clay. Chunks of plaster litter the floor; charcoal sketches of soldiers and dancers are tacked to the wall. Chisels, files and brushes abound.

Like most sculptors, DeVries produces his work in limited editions that rarely exceed 100. While some of his work is large - the dancer outside the Hebrew Home and Hospital - much of it is smaller, anywhere from 1 to 3 feet tall.

Though he frequently draws in pastel - and all of his bronzes begin as charcoal drawings - DeVries says he is unlikely to work with any medium outside of bronze. He has seen sculptures of glass and marble in his mind, but doubts he will ever shepherd them into existence. DeVries says he has enough sketches to work in bronze for 20 lifetimes.

"I learned a few years ago that even if I stopped drawing and just did the sculptures that I can't finish them all. It's the only thing that makes me sad," he says.

Friends and admirers often encourage him to farm out parts of the sculpting process. Let other artists do the pouring, for example. It's cheaper, quicker. And it would free up time to get more sculpting done.

But DeVries stands his ground. He insists on maintaining control over every step of the process. Not a single sculpture leaves his studio until it's perfect, he says. And that's not a point he's willing to compromise.

"It's not just about pouring the metal," he says. "Each step really makes a difference."

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So what's involved in the pouring of bronze? First, DeVries sketches then models the piece in clay. He creates an armature - a skeletal support that outlines the sculpture and holds up the clay, keeping it from collapsing under its own weight. Every aspect of the finished sculpture - the muscles of an outstretched arm, the tresses of hair - are done at this time.

Next, DeVries makes a mold of the sculpture and uses it to create a hollow wax casting. This will be used to make a heat-resistant shell into which the bronze can be poured. Because any imperfections on the wax, even a hairline crease, will be transferred to the bronze itself, DeVries takes considerable time "chasing" the wax - refining each detail, smoothing out any irregularities.

Once the wax casting is completed, the ceramic shell is made. The casting - an exact image of the finished piece - is coated with slurry, then stuccoed with fused silica. Each layer of slurry and silica must completely dry before the next is applied. This process often takes the better part of a week. The mold is then "baked." The original wax bleeds out, leaving a ceramic shell.

DeVries melts bronze ingots at 1850 degrees Fahrenheit, pouring the bronze when it approaches 2100 degrees. The ceramic shell is buried in sand to insulate and buttress it. As the bronze cools, the shell cracks. Later, DeVries will remove the shell with a hammer, leaving jagged white chunks scattered over the ground. The bronze is then sandblasted to remove any remnants of ceramic.

The larger sculptures are frequently made in pieces - torso, legs, etc. DeVries welds them together, then "chases" the bronze. As with the wax chasing earlier, he works the bronze with hammer and chisel, and progressively finer files, to ensure that each detail is precisely the way he wants it.

Finally, DeVries "colors" the bronze, refining its patina. In its original state, bronze develops its own patina according to environmental influences, but DeVries will apply paste wax to a still-warm piece, buffing it with a soft cloth to create a deep, rich glow.

It's not a process that lends itself to haste. From the moment of conception to final installation can take anywhere from six months to a year.

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Bronze conveys a sense of gravity. But the forms that DeVries creates, like those dancers he watched as a child, seem weightless, bound to the Earth by the most tenuous of bonds - a strand of hair, an outstretched finger. Their heads are often turned to the sky, or pointed toward the horizon, as if in longing.

During the open studio, a visitor mentions this to DeVries. Is it deliberate? she asks. And if so, what does it mean? DeVries hesitates before answering. "Is there a message in it? There's a message for me, but is there a message for you?"

Getting him to reveal his "message" can be tricky. His fascination lies with the process of creation and it often masks the deep pleasure he takes both in the finished product and the opportunity to share it with the world. Part of the reason for the open studio - and why he so enjoys his Lenox studio during the busy summer months, he says - is that it allows so many people to take in his work.

"Not everyone who walks through my studio can afford the work," he says. The pieces range from close to $1,000 to tens of thousands. "But seeing it like this gives them something - it allows them to feel what I feel creating it - and that's part of my job, too."

Being an artist, says DeVries, is both a burden and an obligation because it "never lets you go."

"You get this gift, this vision, and you have a responsibility to that vision," he says. "All art has energy and it's alive. It brings such joy to people. It really does."

Sean Reagan is a freelance writer who lives in Worthington.