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Available Cast Bronze Sculpture

I started working at the Walla Walla Foundry right out of high school; I wasn’t even an artist at that point. My early decision to work in bronze had a lot to do with the fact that is was so available to me. I was in the midst of it and I saw what it was capable of doing. Its durability, its ability to take an object and reproduce it...those things attracted me from the start.

Because I worked at the foundry, I knew how to do the entire process myself. My early creative decisions were based on my technical knowledge I learned from working on other people’s sculptures, doing the welding, patinas, wax work and mold work. You gain an understanding of the process to the point that it greatly affects how you would sculpt it yourself. I was able to anticipate things in my own work–how texture and surface would reproduce.

One time, while I was still an employee at the foundry, I had sculpted a life-size cow with a coyote on its back in plaster. I was due for a raise, and so approached Mark Anderson, the owner of the foundry, with a wage proposal. He countered by saying that he’d give me a raise, but as part of the deal he’d cast the cow and coyote sculpture for me. So here I was in my early twenties, and I already had a life-size bronze sculpture, which was rare for an artist so young. It ended up going to Seattle and became kind of a visual landmark in Pioneer Square (it eventually sold and is now in Kirkland, WA). That, in many ways, was the start of my professional career; it all started for me with a big cow and coyote.

Click images to enlarge

Please click on link above to view Brad’s newest sculpture at the Foundry Gallery.

“The price of copper…has quadrupled in three years and all but doubled in the past five months.” —The Economist, June 2, 2006.

Artists must now pay greatly increased prices for the copper from which bronze sculptures are created. Copper is fast becoming a semi-precious metal.

Text at top of page excerpt from:
Extending The Artist’s Hand
Contemporary Sculpture From the Walla Walla Foundry
Museum of Art/Washington State University, 2004