Artist On The Cutting Edge Decorating Colville’s Lampposts Latest Success For Steel Fabricator

Chris Anderson thinks of himself as a sort of Luke Skywalker who helped Colville bring out some of its history with a bit of “Star Wars” technology.

“It’s like a little teeny light saber,” he said of the plasma cutter he used to carve intricate steel silhouettes that hang from downtown lampposts.

Each silhouette depicts a different aspect of the city’s heritage.

Compressed oxygen and an electrical spark allow Anderson to slice delicate designs into three-sixteenths-inch steel as though he were cutting paper snowflakes with scissors.

Anderson, 33, is a skilled steel fabricator who’s been using a torch since he graduated from Colville High School in 1980.

For part of each year, he builds snowplow blades for his father’s company in Arden, Wash. He rounds out that seasonal work with metal fabrication for a Kettle Falls, Wash., mill near his picturesque log home at the edge of Mission Lake.

Art is still a sideline, but Anderson’s reputation is growing. An avid hunter and fisherman, he specializes in wildlife sculptures.

“He does wonderful work,” said businesswoman Pat Hanks, who recruited Anderson this spring for the Colville Chamber’s Downtown Revitalization Program.

The revitalization committee planned to borrow an idea from Cody, Wyo., which lines its streets with silhouettes of a bronco-riding Buffalo Bill Cody.

“I talked them into having each one be different,” Anderson said. “I kind of did it to myself there because then I had to come up with all the patterns.”

He pored through books, magazines and historical photographs for ideas.

The most static of his scenes is an obligatory rendering of Fort Colville, the Hudson’s Bay trading post that opened northeast Washington to settlers in 1825. Most other scenes show action, whether it is a farmer plowing or a pair of bull elk doing battle.

The 24-by-36-inch silhouettes, which weigh 40 to 50 pounds each, line U.S. Highway 395 from one end of town to the other. They link Colville’s turn-of-the-century downtown with the 2-year-old Wal-Mart and other new stores on the edge of the city.

Oak Street, a secondary arterial, also is getting silhouettes. There will be 80 when Anderson finishes in the next few weeks.

Almost 100 individuals and businesses contributed a total of $7,525 for the project, including the $6,000 Anderson was paid. More donations will be sought for flower baskets to be suspended from the silhouettes next spring. Federal money will cover the four-sided carriage-style lanterns that will replace the flower baskets in fall and winter.

Chamber Manager Laurel Somerlott predicted the lanterns and baskets will improve the dramatic effect of the silhouettes. Installation of the 23-inch-tall lanterns will begin early next month when a community college welding class starts manufacturing them.

Already, though, the silhouettes are turning people’s heads.

“We have gotten so many comments - good, good comments,” Somerlott said.

Anderson said he hopes the attention will help catapult him into a full-time art career.

He took ceramics classes all through high school, but fly-tying was about the only outlet for his creativity until recently.

“I’ve always enjoyed creative things, but I don’t have any formal training - just an active imagination,” Anderson said.

About five years ago, someone asked him to build a metal ranch gate with a wagon wheel and lettering. He persuaded the customer to let him add a steel buffalo skull.

Inspired, Anderson turned out a number of other three-dimensional sculptures and within a couple of years was named best new artist at the Northwest Territorial Art Show at Leavenworth, Wash.

In 1992, the Colville National Forest commissioned him to sculpt a pair of boots and a man. The sculptures commemorate Civilian Conservation Corps workers who toiled in the 1930s at the Growden, or Little America, camp about 12 miles west of Kettle Falls on U.S. Highway 395.

“The boots turned out real well,” Anderson said. “The man, some people say he looks kind of like Freddy Krueger, but I’d never made a man before.”

Rodney Smolden, recreation planner and trails coordinator for the Colville forest, admires the man and considers the boots “amazing.” They look so real, he said, that a little girl tried to put them on when they were lying loose in a Forest Service office.

“We were extremely pleased with the work,” said Smolden, who went to high school with Anderson.

Anderson had to back away from his art because he didn’t have a workshop and needed more tools. But he is putting the finishing touches on his shop now and is starting to dream again.

He has placed a buffalo skull in a Santa Fe, N.M., art gallery and one of his colorfully speckled fish is on display at Buffalo Street Interiors in Spokane. But it has been difficult to woo art dealers from traditional media, such as bronze.

Anderson thinks interest in steel sculpture will increase as dealers recognize each piece is unique, especially when color is added by heating the metal to different temperatures.

Thanks in part to the Colville silhouettes, Anderson has a half-dozen orders. Larger commissions include a great horned owl attacking its prey, a bugling elk and a bear.

“I’ve got enough art work lined up right now that it could be full-time, but I won’t give up my paying job right now for this,” Anderson said. “It’ll be weekends and evenings for a while.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo