The Art of John Lopez

Byter Charles Z sent me an email last night with the message “Over to you mate”. Included in the email was a link to a collection of photographs, some of which have appeared in Bytes in the past.

The photographs are quite interesting but the unfortunate thing is that there are no captions.

The first photograph is the following:

It is obviously a sculpture made with scrap metal items but it had me wondering: Who was the sculptor? What else has he done? Why work in scrap metal?

I looked into it further and came up with some information and more photographs of the sculptor's work The following item and photographs are from an article about the artist at:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2633902/One-mans-junk-anothers-art-Stunning-sculptures-buffalo-horses-cowboy-riding-Triceratops-created-scrap-metal.html

One man's junk is another's buffalo sculpture. 

These stunning sculptures of heavy beasts have been fashioned from scrap metal. They are the work of artist John Lopez who welds the pieces from abandoned farm machinery. Based in the town of Lemmon, South Dakota, the 43-year-old has created full-size representations of creatures including a horse, buffalo and even a cowboy atop a triceratops. Mr Lopez had a successful career in bronze sculpting, but changed his working techniques after the death of his aunt Effie in a car accident. He moved to his widowed uncle Geno Hunt's ranch and set about making a family cemetery. But after completing a perimeter fence Mr Lopez ran out of material and, being 35 miles from the nearest town, had to search for usable scrap iron on site. 

Mr Lopez said: 'I am a sculptor and love to create. I started welding sculptures together.’ The 43-year-old added: 'I get my ideas from my life, the ranch, our history here, the animals around our area.'

Gallery:

The very first photograph in this post is of a sculpture called Black Hawk and is of a life-size plow horse pulling a single bottom plow.  This photograph above shows a detail from Black Haw, the photograph below shows the sculptor, John Lopez, working on Black Hawk.

John Lopez with his personal favourite, Steel Stallion.

Gallery #2:

The photographs below are from John Lopez's website at:

http://www.johnlopezstudio.com/ 

If you're wondering whether John Lopez does anything apart from scrap metal works, he has also sculpted 12 life-size presidential monuments for The City of Presidents project in Rapid City, SD. Some of the presidents include John F. Kennedy and John Jr., Grant, Carter, Harrison, Coolidge, T. Roosevelt, and Garfield.  Here is the pic of President Kennedy:

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Thanks Charles.

I will keep posting photographs from Charles's (I have a dispute with my son Thomas as to whether the correct form is "Charles' " or "Charles's". . .  I maintain that it is optional and that "Charles's" sounds better) link from time to time, with commentaries where I can find same.