Today we’d like to introduce you to Deran Wright.
Hi Deran, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
There is no real stage of my life I can point to and say, ‘that’s where I became an artist’. My mom says I was drawing as soon as I could hold a crayon.
As a kid, I was always drawing, I was never without a sketchbook, and I was also fascinated by sculpture. I made snow sculptures, sand sculptures, clay sculptures, and then when I was around 11 years old a professional sculptor gave me some sculpting wax.
I cast my first bronze sculpture when I was 17. My third bronze sculpture was a commissioned piece for a local businessman, a bronze sculpture of an eagle, and I sold a lot of them. That eagle led eventually to the eagle sculpture on the Carswell Field Memorial. And that one led to the next one, and it just continued on, until today. Over the years I have made hundreds of sculptures.
I have been a full time artist all my life.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Unfortunately, the life of a full time artist is never quite smooth. There are always ups and downs, lean years and fat years. It takes some getting used to, the lack of a steady income. Some people can’t do it.
Luckily, I haven’t had to worry about that for a good while.
The biggest obstacle to great sculpture is funding. Most people don’t realize just how expensive it is to create a bronze sculpture. It’s rarely in the budget for public artwork. However, since a bronze sculpture can last for thousands of years, it’s a great investment for a community, and can really be a defining symbol for a neighborhood.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
Figurative bronze sculpture is perhaps one of the most traditional of the classic arts. The high standards were set in Ancient Greece, and artists since have tried to push that envelope, with sporadic success. But this means people have an almost ingrained expectation of what bronze sculpture is, and what they expect to see. There’s even an acronym… ODWG… Old dead white guys.
I try to break out of that expectation when I can. Gnomes, Fairy’s, Gryphons, Greenmen, The Minotaur, Bronze trees, King Arthur… classic themes, but I try to treat them in a way that’s never been seen before. I use my drawing skills to try out new approaches, and work out most of the problems before I even start sculpting. And I love sculptures that kids and people can interact with.
There’s also a trap where you wind up sculpting the same thing over and over. The artist who sculpts only dragons, or the artist who sculpts only eagles… that would bore me to death. I have made sculptures of an incredible variety of things and subjects. Each one presents a new learning curve, and an opportunity to stretch.
I enjoy learning new things, and I bring that to my sculpture.
Can you tell us more about what you were like growing up?
I imagine that I was a pretty quiet kid. I liked to read, and I liked to draw. I could sit for hours at a time engrossed in a book or a drawing. But I was of that generation of kids, that once we left the house, as long as you came home by twilight it was mostly ok. I wandered around the dry creek beds, built forts in abandoned fields, and just generally ran wild with a pack of other feral children.
I drew portraits of my friends, and made comic books, and sold them to the other kids for pocket change, so I guess I had an early sense that you could make money from art.
But even then, I enjoyed learning. Not the boring stuff they taught at school… I read comic books, historical fiction, fantasy, westerns, spy novels, things that should have been way over my head. I read the encyclopedia, even read the dictionary. And everything I read about, I drew pictures of.
I’m still pretty much the same, but now I make drawings and sculptures.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.deranwright.com
- Facebook: Deran Wright
