Welcome to the website of sculptor W. Noel Logan, owner and operator of Rincon Bronze Works, a fine art foundry located in the small village of Toquerville in southwest Utah. I have been involved in the art foundry business both privately and commercially for more than 35 years.
In my foundry and attached sculpture studio, I create quality, durable molds, and cast exceptional metal work with professional patinas and finishes. Although I enjoy working with a diversity of materials, I prefer metals such as steel, bronze, copper, aluminum and silver because of their intrinsic quality of long lasting durability. As a sculptor, my subject matter choices are often equally as diverse as materials, including abstract or conceptual forms and representational pieces.
Having graduated from college in the late 1970s with a BFA in sculpture and MA degrees in both Art History and Archaeology I balanced my art pursuits with a rewarding career as a professional archaeologist working throughout the American southwest. During this period I attempted to combine my love of sculpture and my avid interest in Southwestern cultures and landscapes to create unique images in steel and cast bronze.
As a born and bred westerner, early in my career I focused on “Cowboy and Indian” realism. Over the next few years my work as an archaeologist began to have a direct impact on my perspective as an artist. Surrounded by amazing natural landscapes, prehistoric structures and primitive art I began to note the powerful presence of archetypal forms or prototypes upon which I could pattern my art work. This was an important period of artistic metamorphosis for me. I found my real passion was not in a realistic end product but in the character and purpose of the creative process.
Today my preferred approach is to use metal (steel, aluminum, copper, brass, silver and bronze) as my final and true medium. Metals in general, have unique qualities that I am fundamentally drawn to, in that they are malleable, they can be shaped and formed by hammering, melted and cast, molded, polished, patinated and bent. It is this basic metal adaptability that stimulates the subject matter of each body of work and determines the materials and the forms of my sculpture.
I absolutely revel in the noise, heat and smoke of bronze and aluminum casting. I do all of my own foundry work as an essential part of my artistic processes. Bronze casting is one of the oldest techniques in sculpture usually used as a medium to give permanence to permeable materials like clay, plaster or styrofoam.
While I use a variety of materials and processes in each piece, my methodology is consistent. Although there may not always be material similarities between my different sculptures, they are always linked by recurring formal conceptions. There is a necessary exaggeration of relationships between my metallic mediums and the planes and forms that I use to create, at times, an unintended impression of a semi-association with animals and human forms.
Sculpture must be seen, felt and even heard - I love the sounds of different metals clanging and banging together. If my work does not stimulate intellectual and emotional reactions, then I have failed to achieve my artistic goals. I am not overtly attempting to trace resemblances to known forms or objects, but rather to create the pure beauty of form and design and the interplay of mass, movement, and three dimensional space.