Art From The Heart ‘Regular Guy’ George Carlson Finds His Acclaimed Artwork In High Demand By The Rich And Famous

Talk to the regulars at the Rose Cafe and Bar here and you’ll get an earful on their neighbor, George Carlson.

They don’t go on about his 1982 exhibit of pastels and bronze sculptures at the Smithsonian Institute’s Natural History Museum or pretend to analyze the section on him in the book “Masters of American Sculpture.”

They don’t mention his recent Governor’s Award in the Arts or the six gold medals he’s won from the National Academy of Western Art.

But they know their bearded, blue-jeaned friend is special.

“He sent Pierce Brosnan here,” Jerry Kirkpatrick practically shouts, as excited as a kid who’s just met Michael Jordan. Kirkpatrick is the cafe’s proprietor in this small logging town on the southern banks of Lake Coeur d’Alene. “He sat out on my deck. It was so neat. We got a nice picture with him.

“And then came Arnie.”

That’s Arnold Schwarzenegger, who pulled up to the Harrison dock with his entire family last summer in Carlson’s boat. He’d come to commission a sculpture for his home in Ketchum.

And they talk about Carlson’s friend, Bill Cosby, who recently commissioned the artist to sculpt a bust of his son, Ennis. It’s the fifth bust Carlson has sculpted for the entertainer since 1979.

Carlson’s neighbors drop their jaws at his clients, but they invite him in for coffee - and that’s how he likes it. He talks fishing with them. He asks about their kids.

“You’d never know who he is or what he does at all,” Kirkpatrick says. “He’s a regular guy.”

With a staggering list of artistic credits.

Carlson’s sculptures grace universities, museums, parks and fine arts centers throughout the nation. They add warmth to the grounds of cold-hearted corporations and passion to impersonal historical exhibitions.

“He and his work are entwined,” says Robert Yassin, executive director of the Tucson Museum of Art in Arizona. “His sincerity is in his art.”’

Cosby, who’s an avid art collector, noticed that sincerity in some of Carlson’s earliest works. Cosby’s art curator bought him several of the artist’s Native American sculptures. Then Cosby wanted to meet Carlson.

The art connection between the two men developed into friendship and led to repeated commissions.

Cosby’s wife wanted a portrait bust of her husband. Cosby wanted busts of Bill Harrah, owner of Harrah’s Club; actor Paul Robeson, for Central State University in Ohio; and Phylicia Rashad.

And, most recently, of his son, Ennis. He telephoned the sculptor shortly after Ennis was killed on a Los Angeles freeway in January.

“That was tough,” Carlson says. “I met his son when he was 10. He was bright, enthusiastic.

“I told Bill how I remembered him, and he said Ennis had never changed.

“It’s going to be hard.”

Carlson, who’s 56, has stuck with sincerity his entire life, and it has worked for him.

“You have to have an inner core that has a strong belief in what you’re doing,” he says. “You can’t be in it for the money.”

He learned from his mechanic father the satisfaction of hard work and from his pianist mother love and appreciation of art. She raised him among the art institutes, museums and galleries of Chicago.

He found just as much food for his soul in the Wisconsin woods, watching wild birds and the wonder of the night sky.

“One of the things that draws me to art is that it allows me to use keen observation at all levels - mental, physical, emotional,” he says.

By high school, he knew he was a painter.

At the American Academy of Art, Carlson learned the fundamentals. The Art Institute of Chicago taught him the abstract.

He honed his skills and learned discipline by drawing for an advertising company for eight years.

He was 24 and earning $80 an hour on some jobs when he quit.

“My dad thought I was crazy,” he says. “But you have to sacrifice to grow, have to go through purges.”

It was the 1960s, and Carlson caught the mood of the decade to indulge the soul. He packed his Volkswagen and headed to Colorado with his savings to ski indefinitely.

The West whetted an appetite he didn’t know he had. He slept in ancient pueblos in New Mexico and watched his candlelight flicker on the stone walls. He listened to owls and coyotes.

He connected with the Indian people’s closeness to nature. He was drawn to their facial structures and fascinated with their simplicity.

After two years of skiing, he was ready to draw again, and he’d found his subjects. But he had to understand them first.

“I wanted enough background to make meaningful art,” he says.

He enrolled in anthropology and Southwestern culture classes at the University of Arizona. He took sculpture, too, believing it would sharpen his drawing skills. It satisfied something deep inside him.

“It takes guts and courage to keep going, keep building,” he says. “There’s the wonder of watching it take shape.

“If you have a great day, it’s Zen. Everything flows, comes together in perfect harmony.”

He sculpted four pieces depicting his experiences with Southwestern tribes. But he couldn’t afford to cast them in bronze, so he left school for a job in a foundry.

The foundry taught him the casting process and rounded out his knowledge of sculpture. It also kicked off his career.

Sen. Barry Goldwater visited the foundry in 1965 and stopped for a friendly chat with Carlson. Talk turned to Carlson’s work, which Goldwater wanted to see.

Carlson had only uncast pieces, but Goldwater asked the prices. The artist had no idea. He threw out a price, and Goldwater bought two sculptures of Anasazi life.

“I was kind of amazed,” Carlson says. “I called my dad to tell him I was making money again.”

Money wasn’t his interest; it was a perk for doing what he loved. He moved a few years later to Denver, lived in a basement apartment and kept himself fed with odd jobs so he could devote himself to his art.

“I could’ve made more money doing other things, but they would’ve taken my mind off my work,” he says. “I didn’t want to compromise.”

Gallery operators encouraged him to paint because sculptures didn’t sell. He did both. His sculptures were a collection of abstract shapes that worked together in threedimensional harmony. They were as impressionistic as his paintings.

Galleries noticed and responded.

“I didn’t make a lot of money, but people believed in me. Those were great days,” he says.

But Carlson’s appetite for indigenous cultures craved more than the American Southwest could provide. In the mid-1970s, a photographer friend steered him to northern Mexico, where the Tarahumara tribe lives on the high slopes and deep gorges of the Sierra Madres.

He took a tent, art supplies, bolts of colorful cloth as gifts and a guide. He was fascinated by the shy Tarahumara’s primordial lifestyle and captivated with their spirit.

He painted only landscapes until he earned their trust.

As the Tarahumara got to know the unpretentious artist, they pulled him into their inner circle. The chief wanted him to marry his daughter. Carlson said he was engaged.

Most importantly, they allowed him to paint their pageants and games, social gatherings and daily routines. He paid Indians to sit while he sculpted.

They mirrored the beginning of civilization to him, but also the present.

“That was living, being there, feeling life channeling through you,” he says.

In two months, he captured the Tarahumara color and essence in 40 pieces of work. It was just a beginning.

In the next three years, he returned for three more two-month trips.

From the excursions, he produced metaphorical sculptures that ranged from the soulful Augustina, a child wracked with tuberculosis, to the powerful Dancers of Norogachic to the proud innocence of a Tarahumara boy. American galleries of the 1970s didn’t know what to think.

But collectors were excited. They clamored for his pastels.

He’d worked weeks on each, using hundreds of colors, blending small strokes of each to create the illusion of direct and reflected light, layering his colors for richness and depth.

One exhibit led to another, from New Mexico and Arizona to Chicago, Indianapolis and New York. A following was born, and Carlson’s art was earning him a comfortable living.

“It allowed me to keep my art going,” he says.

Which was all that was important to him.

He still wanted simplicity, a place to study life and the stars, in his jeans and loafers.

On a visit to a friend in Idaho in 1979, he found Black Lake near Harrison. A year later, he bought 55 acres there for a summer retreat.

Carlson’s work was known well enough among art collectors by this time that commissions and invitations began rolling in.

A park in Denver wanted a monument to a miner. The Smithsonian wanted to exhibit his Tarahumara work.

Corporations were paying $250,000 for his monuments.

Carlson accepted jobs that intrigued him and allowed him to immerse himself in research.

“I have to do an honest job,” he says. “I have to be able to get excited about it.”

Horses captured his imagination in the 1980s. He studied their anatomy and how they worked alone and as teams.

One of his favorite works, “Of One Heart,” is a stirring sculpture of two draft horses straining uphill. One horse’s head and legs are bent in effort as it helps the other.

Carlson spent months visiting ranches, chatting with old drivers, building models of horses in a variety of positions. Museums in Colorado and New York both bought half-ton sculptures as outdoor monuments.

In 1985 Carlson moved permanently to Black Lake with his wife, Pam. They built a comfortable Swedish farmhouse, straight from the 18th century, which so impressed designers that the storybook house has its own chapter in the book “American Design in the Northwest.”

He bought an old Presbyterian church the Masons were using for a lodge in the center of tiny Harrison and remodeled it into a studio. He’s worked there quietly ever since.

“When you’re in remote situations, you allow yourself to have your own thoughts,” he says.

His studio is a retrospective of Carlson’s 33-year career.

Sunshine streams through a wide skylight into the former sanctuary, blessing bronze Indian women and clay busts with its flattering light.

Actor Paul Robeson’s green head, appropriately larger than life, sits casually against one wall. A bust of a young Bill Cosby sits against another wall.

Three sizes of “The Boy and the Eagle,” his sculpture of a Zuni legend, sit on a work table, wooden packing crate and sturdy turntable. The largest fills a doorway and is unfinished, with clay covering only part of its plywood skeleton.

Sprinkled among his models of horses and rhinoceroses are graceful sculptures of ballerinas on point, cheek to cheek, in perfect turnout. The ballet is Carlson’s latest fascination.

He spent the early 1990s in New York studying the dancers at the School of American Ballet.

“I’ve always been interested in the human form,” he says. “I don’t know a lot about ballet, but I could watch and see who moves with grace.”

His work stays true to anatomy without robbing the dancers of their delicacy. His sculptures catch subtle tilts of the head, well-disciplined body lines, gracefully bent fingers.

“He sees in three dimensions, which most people can’t do,” says Yassin, the Tucson Museum director. “You can look at his work at any angle, and it’s complete.”

One of Carlson’s newer ballerinas, “Shy Maiden of the Laurel Tree,” is on the wall at the spa at The Coeur d’Alene Resort. The resort also bought six Carlson drawings to display at the spa.

The variety of his work has attracted an eclectic crowd of collectors, from politicians to industry captains to actors. He usually deals with them on their own turf. But occasionally his clients come to Harrison.

Like last summer, when Carlson pulled his boat up to the city docks with the Schwarzenegger family. He still chuckles at the amazed faces on the people fishing.

The newest Batman movie’s Mr. Freeze wants a piano-size sculpture of a team of horses pulling a plow and farmer. Carlson has created three models.

He wants Schwarzenegger to choose one and make suggestions.

“I learned to subdue ego and work with people,” he says. “I put the best of myself in there, and if they want changes, they’ll have it. It’s still up to my artistic criteria.”

Carlson’s friends from his Illinois boyhood are retiring now, but the artist says he has nothing from which to retire. He’s working toward a one-man exhibit in Europe and beginning to explore flamenco and modern dance in pastels and bronze.

As always, he’s doing just what he wants.

“I don’t retire. This is life,” he says, peering at the multitude of colors in one of his serigraphs.

“People look at these and say, ‘What’s this guy on?’ I’m on art.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 4 color photos