On Eagles Wings Spokane Sculptor Chester Fields Has Taken Eagle Art To Soaring Heights By Catering To Worldwide Demand

It’s a good thing for Chester Fields — as well as the rest of us — that the eagle was named our national bird and not the turkey as Benjamin Franklin had suggested.

Fields has found his niche as an artist capturing the enormity of the bird, with its elegance and majesty in flight.

Eagles appeared in his realistic wildlife paintings when he began life as an artist in the 1970s. Now, with little exception, eagles are his exclusive subjects. Fields creates bronzes of eagles many times their life size which he sells the world over.

There are Chester Fields eagles displayed in 25 galleries across this country and in 20 other nations. So, if you’re in New York or San Francisco or Saudi Arabia or Singapore, you might well visit a gallery that displays a bronze by the man who first studied art at Spokane Community College.

But you probably won’t find one in Spokane. Fields had to go where the money was to sell his work and achieve fame.

Although he could afford to live anywhere in the world, Fields prefers to have a Spokane address. He and his family live in a 6,500-square-foot home in the Valley’s Bella Vista Mountain. That’s not only where he lives, but where he works as well.

After graduation from SCC, Fields spent two years as an illustrator with the U.S. Army. He spent much of his military career in Germany, with good access to European galleries and the plentiful works of the masters that have withstood the test of time.

“When I came out of the military, I was flat broke,” Fields said. He hired on as an illustrator with American Sign & Indicator in Spokane and “began painting on the side — little wildlife paintings. I’d do them when I came home from work.”

Fields sold them as fast as he could turn them out, and it wasn’t long before artwork sales matched his annual salary of $6,500.

“It gave me the ability to contemplate going full time into the arts,” he said.

These days Fields said he can gross as much as $1 million a year.

But it’s not been easy.

He remembers the awe he felt standing in front of Michelangelo’s statue of David and the Pieta, and the paintings of Van Gogh.

Every artist dreams about becoming world famous, he said, but it’s another matter “to realize it, attain it in your lifetime.”

He dared to hope that one day he might enjoy financial rewards for his art like Michelangelo rather than have the value of his talent recognized after his death, as happened to the Dutch artist.

But he’s found fame a bit like the adage of the prophet who’s not recognized in his own city.

In 1994, Who’s Who Worldwide said Fields’ paintings and sculptures put him into the money range attained by only the top 1 percent of living artists today.

To become recognized as a world-class artist takes strategy — something he didn’t learn in school.

A business professor did caution him, however, not to tie himself down with an agent. So as a young man starting out, he and his parents packed his paintings into the car and drove to monied galleries around the country.

Gallery owners liked what they saw but told him his worked was underpriced. They couldn’t afford to sell a painting of his for $5,000 when another artist could bring in $30,000 for a similar piece.

He knew then how good he had to be to compete in the big league.

“It’s a matter of putting your energy into high-standard work to get into the galleries,” Fields said.

The world of fine arts “is highly competitive,” he said. “The business side is a whole separate issue. You have to expose yourself (to the most people) in the shortest period of time.”

Fields knew early on he wanted his art to reflect realism and not abstracts a la Picasso, as his art teachers urged him to do.

A thousand years from now, when people consider the art created in this era, Fields wants to be among those who showed life as it was — just as those whose work he so admires did a thousand years ago.

He had to learn to gauge what attracted his audiences.

Fields first earned regional fame for his Western-style paintings of Indians and horses and native wildlife. But the audience was limited.

While birds in general are appreciated across the nation, Fields said, people tend to buy pictures of birds they know.

During the 1970s Fields created a local, appreciative audience for his art depicting quails. But someone in Arizona probably isn’t as apt to be enamored with quails as someone from the Northwest.

So, another limited audience was revealed.

Eagles, on the other hand, are appreciated the world round, he said.

Early Greeks and Romans forged eagles onto their coins. Mayans and Native Americans integrated eagles into their cultures. Eagles are universally loved.

Fields likes to imagine the first man on Earth looking up into the sky, wishing he could fly like an eagle. An eagle, mind you, not a turkey.

It was a near disaster that allowed Fields to ascend in his career, much like a bird taking flight, and changed his medium from painting to sculpting.

He had already made a name for himself nationally as a Western painter when a business deal for a series of paintings soured and Fields was left $50,000 in the hole. And that was on top of the $200,000 he would have earned if the man who commissioned the work hadn’t reneged.

Even though he won the lawsuit, Fields was devastated.

“I believe man controls his destiny,” he said, “but sometimes God up above is steering the wheel for you a little bit.”

Fields decided he couldn’t physically paint fast enough to turn out the number of paintings it would require to cover his financial loss. But creating a sculpture that could be reproduced - and sold - a number of times over might be the ticket.

So, on faith he borrowed $30,000 from a bank and “Splashdown” was born in 1984. And a new career was launched for the artist.

“Splashdown,” a bald eagle taking flight with a trout securely clutched in its claws, won Best Sculpture at the C.M. Russell Art Show in Montana. It went on to bring Fields worldwide acclaim.

A private art collector bought a “Splashdown” monument for $650,000 to display in his San Diego home.

“I dug ‘Splashdown’ out of my heart, out of my gut, and it worked for me,” Fields said.

One of Fields’ eagle sculptures was displayed at Las Vegas for a number of years. A visitor to Caesar’s Resort, a retired Air Force colonel, wrote the Spokane artist a fan letter which said in part: “To say the least it is the most magnificent sculpture of an eagle I have ever seen. I just stood there entranced and could not move.”