St. Xavier High School — I Live in Louisville
A Ferocious Project — The Courier Journal
Profile - Matt Weir - Sculptor — LEO Weekly
Tiger Project for St. X is Artist's Dream — The Courier Journal
Not your Usual 9-5 — The Courier Journal
St. Xavier High School
10.27.08
By Leslie Lyons
www.iliveinlouisville.com
Matt Weir reflects on the Lost Wax Process he used to create the life-size bronze Tiger that has become the official St. X mascot welcoming spectators and, in particular, opponents to the home field.
It is a case of the means justifying the end, instead of the other way around, as the process itself is as fascinating and formidable as the intimidating, artful finished sculpture itself.
“Tigers as dominant, fearsome carnivores are interesting as symbols,” says Matt, “but they are also associated with soul transfer.” And the journey begins. Even more so than being a graduate of St. X, it was this mythological concept of the Tiger that drove Matt to pitch the project and then obsessively research and focus the vision to its realized state.
Enter the Lost Wax Process. It is a 13-step process — if you don’t make any changes or adjustments along the way — involving clay models, three-dimensional computer interpretations, high-density Styrofoam blocks, ceramic molds, and molten bronze poured into a “sprue” system that creates a hollow yet highly detailed positive. In this case, a 13-foot-long 1,000 lb Tiger.
To date, this is Matt’s largest piece, and it will be officially unveiled this week where it now stands at the entrance to St. X’s playing fields. “I can’t even explain how daunting this was,” Matt says, while at the same time everyone passing by the Tiger and its creator shares nothing but awe and praise for both.
Maybe Matt is just shy, or maybe he is suffering from some kind of post-partum experience after living with his creation for almost exactly one year, but he seems uncertain. As an artist, he will most likely use that state of being to soul transfer to his next subject, while St. X students and fans alike enjoy a psychological edge to their team spirit.
Go and see the Tiger yourself and you’ll know what that means.
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A Ferocious Project
By Diane Heilenman. The Courier-Journal, Louisville, KY.
October 09, 2008
Sculptor Matt Weir has been living with a tiger for more than a year.
In the early months, it sent Weir into fits of sleep-walking. In the later months, he fretted so much over it that he lost weight.
But now, Weir has said good-bye to his daily companion. Last Tuesday, Weir -- with the aid of a crane -- dropped off the 1,000-pound bronze Bengal at his alma mater, St. Xavier High School, on Poplar Level Road.
The tiger crouches in a pivoting pose on eroded limestone, raised another 6 feet from the ground by a tall, black base. The tiger, simultaneously aggressive and defiant, appears ready to swat and bite the next thing that moves. He is part of extensive athletic improvements at the 54-acre campus. But this tiger is more than a school mascot, said Weir, 28.
A student of nature, behavior and evolution as well as art, Weir said the tiger also represents the status of the world's largest predator as being in danger of extinction. That metaphor fits Weir's body of work, but for those who are familiar with the primarily smooth, abstract designs that deal with the evolution of human behavior, his production of an impressively realistic tiger may be a surprise.
It has even surprised its maker.
"It was a learning curve; straight up," confessed Weir, showing off the untitled tiger at his studio off Oak Street. "It wasn't the process I was afraid of," he said.
Weir has worked at Louisville's Bright Foundry for nearly eight years and has made bronze castings of many other artists' works. The sculptor has a degree from the University of Louisville and has worked as an apprentice to the late Paul Field, a noted stone sculptor in Louisville, and as a helper to Louisville blacksmith Craig Kaviar.
"It was the abstract thought of making this tiger" that began to haunt him, he said, although "even in the beginning I was sure I could do it ... I just wanted to show myself I could."
At first, Weir said he figured he could keep working at the foundry two or three days a week and meet the deadline of completing the tiger in one year (September 2008).
Then, Weir said, he realized he was having trouble seeing what the tiger was really going to look like: "I realized I had to take more time off for research."
His goal was to create a tiger that was more than "just walking down the sidewalk."
"I felt I had an opportunity to make the world's best cat, to make this a very dynamic, active and, in a sense, voracious cat."
He visited the tigers at the Louisville Zoo. He inspected toy tigers, such as He-Man's green Battle Cat. He pondered the simplification of Egyptian sphinxes, the animal artists of the French salon. He watched gladiator films and Disney films. Weir went online and printed out images of tigers in the wild, fighting each other, mating, hunting.
He discovered the first images of running tigers made with multiple cameras by 19th century photo genius Eadweard J. Muybridge and the recent allegories of Walton Ford, whose "Tigers of Wrath" at the Brooklyn Museum in 2007 spoke to the way humans have feared and manipulated one of the world's most awesome predators.
He made templates and transparencies from anatomy books. Weir took his calipers and established a ratio of body parts to each other for the aggressive pose he wanted for this animal with remarkably long, slender, back legs and a remarkably massive chest, head and front legs.
By the time he had finished a one-third size clay model, he had solved 90 percent of the challenges, Weir said.
Now, he only had to live through a series of small disasters.
He sent the tiger to Daniels Engraving in San Fernando, Calif., which enlarges objects with a 3-D digital scanner and creates a file that is used by a technician with a milling machine to cut foam into the larger duplicate. The only problem was, the technician was mugged and hospitalized, delaying the process by six weeks.
When the tiger arrived back in Louisville, Weir had more hand-carving to do. "I snarled the cheek higher on one side ... I stretched, pulled and strained the muscles in as fantastic, but as believable, manner as possible."
He solved the issue of stripes. Sculptor Michael Keropian opted to remove the stripes on his simplified heroic tigers at the new Comerica Park for the Detroit Tigers in 2000. Mass producers of tiger statues opt to paint on the stripes. Weir came up with an engraver's solution, creating textural stripes by incising parallel lines in the clay with a piece of threaded metal pipe.
All went well during the laborious and messy process of making molds for casting. However, one of the ceramic casts broke during the pouring of bronze heated to 2,000 degrees and had to be redone. The two sides of the tiger torso, each a 400-pound casting, are the largest single castings yet done at Bright Foundry, Weir said.
By August, the St. X tiger had become a rush job.
Weir and helpers went to work cleaning up the 16 separate bronze castings, removing sand-like bits of casting grit -- "boogers," in foundry lingo -- from the tiger's teeth, gums, belly hair and from every single incised line in every single stripe on his body.
There was a little bit of metal contortion to hammer out or pull out with hydraulic clamps. There was the limestone base to carve and the need to make a precise jig of the tiger's footprints so he would fit on the base.
By mid-September, the hollow tiger was ready for the final touches. "We were very close to finished," Weir said.
He and a helper went in on a Sunday. "We turned on the lights. We went outside to enjoy the wind. We walked back in and the lights were out."
Power remained off for seven days. The tiger and base were finished literally on the last day of September, Weir said.
"It's done and I'm proud of it," he said. "I had a lot of help from a lot of people." Some were friends and students but, also, he said, "It's the first time I've ever employed my fellow employees at the foundry. The funny thing was, I was making less than I was paying them."
St. Xavier President Perry Sangalli said the commission was funded by donors John and Marlene Bohn, but declined to release the amount. The tiger sculpture will sit on a large base that will serve as a place to recognize all donors to the school's expansion and master plan. The tiger is located at a new plaza entrance to three new athletic fields opened last year, Sangalli said.
An Oct. 31 dedication ceremony for Weir's sculpture will occur during a home football game that evening with Central High School.
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Profile - Matt Weir - Sculptor
By Aaron Frank. Leo (Louisville Eccentric Observer) weekly
August 26, 2008
I’ve been an artist ever since I can remember,” says sculptor Matt Weir at his Germantown studio, the expansive back room of a dated warehouse. The 29-year-old Louisville native graduated from St. Xavier High School in 1999 and moved on to pursue a bachelor’s in fine arts at University of Louisville. With a drought in interest in sculpture at the university, Weir became only the second graduate with a focus in sculpting. “The department was more or less defunct at the time, but aside from that, most of my education and experience came from classical apprenticeships,” he says.
Weir has worked under the pioneers of the Louisville sculpting scene, including Paul Fields, Barney Bright and Raymond Graf. “There’s not an incredibly large group of us, but the ones who are here form a family tree, and mostly it stems from Barney Bright,” Weir says. Working closely with Fields, Weir learned the basics and a little more — dabbling in woodcarving, stone carving, welding and making molds.
His first major exhibit was his senior thesis, “Reproduction, Stress and the Death Drive: Go With the Flow,” which was displayed at the J.B. Speed Art Museum. The piece involved various concepts of the evolution of the human mind and body, themes that are strong in much of Weir’s work. “My passion is evolution and, specifically, evolutionary psychology,” he says. “Why we think the things we think. Why we behave the way that we behave, and just synthesizing our homosapien, human behaviors with the rest of the species and even materials, like wood and stone. Objects feel stress. You learn that and experience that in the process of working with materials and stretching them to their limits.”
The bulk of his personal projects are striking and abstract. In his studio are two sculptures of the brain, finely carved in Southern Indiana limestone. Weir’s commercial projects run the gamut from benches and backyard lawn figures to his latest and most significant project, a mammoth 11-foot-long, 6-foot-high sculpture of a tiger for his alma mater, St. X.
The school offered him the freedom to portray the animal with a realistic, contemporary theme. “The tiger looks aggressive and kind of defensive, which is actually pretty true to life when you consider that the tiger is on its way to being extinct,” he says.
After he wrangles the beast, it’s back to work on another personal project — “Check Out My New Spear,” a conceptual piece that involves sculptures of Weir and two other individuals. It is meant to portray the competition of evolutionary psychology.
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Tiger Project for St. X is Artist's Dream
By Bob Hill. The Courier-Journal, Louisville, KY.
July 15, 2008
Matthew Weir is casually perched on a chair in his warehouse studio, something approaching a thoughtful smile on his lean face.
His eyes are fixed on his latest work, a creature with a different demeanor -- an angry, snarling, tiger that will live forever in bronze near the entrance to the St. Xavier High School football field.
The tiger is immense -- 11 feet long and almost 5 feet tall. It is poised to spring from an 8,000-pound block of limestone that Weir will carve and shape into a natural setting to be placed 6 feet above the ground.
The tiger's muscles bunch at the shoulder as it pulls back a front paw to strike. Its head is slightly cocked, its open mouth showing 3-inch-spikes of teeth.
Weir, 28, created this from imagination and talent and work. He's been shaping the Styrofoam and clay model for 10 hours a day in the process of creating a 900-pound tiger in bronze.
His studio is vintage-red warehouse brick without heat or air conditioning. Conversation bounces off its thick walls. Its industrial doors are wide open on a July afternoon. Sunlight eases inside through big, blocky windows.
Weir has sold almost everything he has created -- but he is not interested in numbers. He is as lean as a butter knife and mixes intensity, salesmanship, art history and intelligence with a Louisville-born affability.
He is still staring at his tiger, searching for the words to explain how stone and oil-based clay will become bronzed, crouching fury.
"It's kind of a sculptor's dream," he says, "to create the biggest, greatest, most powerful walking carnivore in the world.
"You see all those classical lions and tigers from Greco-Roman history and art in all the museums. So I really wanted to do this very classical cat but with this very contemporary attitude about it, with almost an element of stress involved. ... Tigers are in danger of going extinct all over the world."
Weir's oldest memories are of creating art, first in drawings as a child, then in adding a third dimension with some unlikely help.
"I'd go out and bring things home from junk pickup day," he says, "nail it together in my garage."
He graduated from St. X, went to the University of Kentucky for a year to study sculpture, then returned to Louisville for some hands-on experience with some of the best artists Louisville had to offer: Barney Bright, Paul Fields, Craig Kaviar, Ed Hamilton and Raymond Graf -- the last a friend who has been a mentor on the tiger work.
Weir ended up with a fine arts degree from the University of Louisville. He works at the Bright Foundry, but never affiliated with any gallery: "It kind of had to be up to me to survive."
The tiger idea came in a starving artist phase about 19 months ago; he sent e-mail proposals to the Lakeside Swim Club for a bronze aquatic sculpture and to St. X. President Perry Sangalli, proposing the tiger.
Sangalli was interested, Weir spent months researching tigers, reading books, watching documentaries. He made a small model to be used as a St. X sales pitch. After seven months, Sangalli told Weir he had the job. Weir immediately changed the tiger: "It wasn't good enough."
The clay-to-bronze process will take a few more months. The final work will be so real the tiger's stripes will show. It should be ready by, say, the St. X-Trinity football game.
Just what that game needs -- some added motivation.
Not your Usual 9-5
Being one’s own boss is 24/7/365 proposition
By Michael L. Jones. The Courier Journal, Louisville, KY.
March 06, 2007
As an artist, sculptor Matt Weir is fixated on the concept of time. His work is ripe with allusions to ancient civilizations, evolution and modern man’s role in the world continuum. This is especially evident in “The Tree of Life as Described by Narcissus or the Wind,” a sculpture he created for the Jewish Hospital Medical Center South.
In Greek mythology, Narcissus was a youth who was so mesmerized by his own beauty that he couldn’t stop staring at his reflection in a stream. In “The Tree of Life,” Weir uses this as an analogy for mankind’s tendency to place itself at the center of the universe. He does this by juxtaposing two objects: a tree and an egg. The tree, made of bronze, has metal roots that dig through a thin limestone shelf to connect it to the egg, which is carved from the wood of a maple tree.
Bronze. Wood. Limestone. Weir said he picked these materials partly for the symbolic power. “Indiana limestone is like a historical record in itself,” he explained. “It’s all fossils and bits of stone. It’s special because you can see the time and accumulation in it. … Wood expresses the tree and the forest: an organism, a system, life. Bronze and steel are entwined with human history – a narrative of obstacles and advancement. Together, the materials in my work are the same as the materials of the story of life.”
Weir, 27, graduated from the University of Louisville’s Hite Art Institute with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in sculpture in 2004. He spends three days a week working at the Bright Foundry, 1621 E. Washington St., which was founded by noted sculptor Barney Bright. “I do a little bit of everything at the foundry, as does everyone else there. I melt metal, weld, and do metal finishing. It’s very much a team effort.”
When he’s not at the Bright Foundry, Weir works on commissions and proposals in his own studio, which is located in a former furniture warehouse in Germantown. Depending on the material he’s working with, Weir gets about $500 and up for each commission. “Bronze is expensive because of the process,” Weir said, “You have to make a mold and go to the foundry. Stone is less expensive, but it takes a lot of work to get something out of stone.”
Weir added, “This is a 24-hour thing, seven days a week, being your own boss. When I’m not working in the studio, I’m on the computer making contacts, trying to pay bills. That starving artist thing is no joke.”
Recently, Weir has been supplementing his income by creating more functional objects to complement his abstract works. He’s done several custom-made sinks and the Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft is selling several bowls that he made. “The functional stuff is something that I shied away from doing at first, but it’s a more lucrative avenue for my sculpture work,” Weir said. “I’ve come to see it as an extension of the other stuff. It’s something that is really creative and it can be enjoyed outside the art.”
Weir never consciously decided to be an artist; his temperament just pushed into that direction. “I’ve always been drawing and painting as long as I can remember,” he said. “Eventually, I started thing in more three-dimensional terms. I started working off the edge of the page. Then I started bringing stuff home that people had set out for junk pick up.”
After graduating from St. Xavier High School in 1999, Weir headed to the University of Kentucky to study sculpture. “I didn’t like the atmosphere there, he admitted. “They were mostly doing metal fabrication, welding large sheets of metal into different forms. There is nothing wrong with that, but that’s not where I wanted to go with my art. I came back to Louisville and started attending the University of Louisville. For a while, I think I was the only sculptor major in the whole school. The department was in limbo at the time because a professor had left. A painting professor was teaching the sculptor classes.”
Luckily, Weir found two mentors who helped him hone his skills – the late sculptor Paul Fields and Craig Kaviar of Kaviar Forge. Fields was an important figure on the Louisville sculptor scene. His work includes “Molly,” a life-size limestone rhinoceros at the Louisville Zoo; the two dancers that adorn The Louisville Ballet; and several pieces at the Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest, where Fields spent five years as an artist in-residence.
“The sculpture scene in Louisville is sort of a family because things are passed down,” Weir said. “(Sculptor) Raymond Graf studied under Barney Bright. Mike Ratterman worked with Fields. I did sort of an apprenticeship under Fields and Kaviar. I would work for Fields from 8 a.m. to noon, eat lunch and then go next door and work at Kaviar Forge. That’s where I honed many of my skills.”
One of the projects Weir worked on with Fields was a limestone flower blossom, “Untitled,” which sits in Bernheim Forest. Fields dedicated the work to his mother and Weir said it was an honor to work assist him. “We got this big piece of stone and we were knocking off like 300 pounds of stone,” Weir remembered. “I really got to cut my teeth with him.”
Weir’s own artwork has appeared in numerous places, including The Evansville Museum of Art, History, and Science; the Louisville Visual Art Association’s Water Tower; The New Center of Contemporary Art; Actor’s Theater and Hidden Hill Sculpture Garden and Arboretum.
The sculptor said he finally can communicate the things he wants to say in his art. “I’m really into evolution and psychology; that what I read a lot,” Weir said. “I’ve always had these theories on life and it’s getting to the point where I can express them with these different materials.” |
