"Organic Metal" Show Opening - Feb 20th 2010
East Fork Gallery - Ft. Worth, TX
Show runs thru April 3rd 2010
Artist Richard Baggett speaks about his life's passion and his artwork.
Friends, family, students and collectors take a look at several new works by artist Richard Baggett at the gallery show opening.
Upon entering his stifling workshop, some might mistake the experience for being in the extremely warm company of Hephaestus, the Greek god of fire and metal working. However, as a stocky figure looks up at curious onlookers with a cigarette dangling from lips badly chapped from hours of immense heat, it is easy to come back down from this mythical mountain and simply ask, “how do you do that?” His piercing and intense crystal blue eyes peer through a face smeared with grime and grease allowing his wild and fiery beard to draw upward into a grin and shout over the roar of heaving machinery, “It’s all in the metal, Brother!”
Artist/Blacksmith and sculptor Richard Baggett was trained in the classical methods of blacksmithing at his place of origin near Fort Worth, Texas. Mastering the techniques of many that came before him to settle the old west, Baggett has since moved beyond concepts of experimental heat and form to new endeavors involving brilliant and imaginative play with metal to likes the region has never known. Although quite capable of creating massive, masculine, and at times imposing machine-like structures, his homemade hammers are also capable of replicating inconceivably delicate and organic flora using what he calls “thousands of tiny touches” to the metal.
Baggett, although a true master of fire and metal, will be the first to tell buyers and fellow artists alike that he does not come from a background of rigid academia or expensive study at any art school or graduate academy. His success as an artist manifested itself through the figurative and literal blood, sweat and tears of trial and error.
Perhaps the only thing superseding Baggett’s work itself is his extremely humble nature and approachable decorum. His pieces range from large organic shapes that seem ready to lurch from their two-ton granite pedestals, to mythical plant-like structures that appear to almost kiss the pollen that slowly drifts through the lazy and humid breeze in his cluttered workshop.
To experience an amazing place where fire and heat give way to life and beauty, join us for Richard Baggett’s “Organic Metal.” This unbelievable exhibition of indoor and outdoor installations will open to the public at 11 a.m., Saturday, Feb. 20, at the East Fork Gallery on Tarrant County College’s Trinity River Campus at 300 RadioShack Circle, Fort Worth. This exhibition will be free to the public and run from its opening time and date until April 10, 2010. The gallery is open between the hours of 9 a.m. and 9 p.m. seven days a week.
- David Blair / Curator, East Fork Gallery
