Garland Weeks Story
Until the day a gallery owner shook his hand and asked to represent him. A commission followed, then another gallery and Garland Weeks had truly become a professional. Now, finally, others began to recognize what was going on in his modest studio. As he had honed his talent, so had grown his reputation.
Garland had made himself into a celebrated sculptor and now owns numerous honors and memberships in prestigious organizations like the National Academy of Western Art. He is a past president of the Texas Cowboy Artists Association and was named Official Sculptor of Texas in 1995. He was selected for full membership in the National Sculpture Society in 1990, and eventually was asked to serve on the Board of Directors of this, the most prestigious organization devoted to sculpture in the country. We have only a few thousand professional sculptors in the USA, most of whom maintain other jobs to support themselves. Only 1000 or so artists are accepted for membership in the National Sculpture Society, and a mere 132 are recognized as Fellows. Not many more than sit in the US Senate, it’s that exclusive. Garland was selected for this honor in 2004.
A similar national honor came when he was tabbed as the Kenan Master Sculptor in Residence at Brookgreen Gardens. This South Carolina institution contains the largest collection of American figurative sculpture in the country, with 800 of its nearly 3000 piece collection always displayed on its fifty acres. Garland teaches at Brookgreen every year, helping develop the next generation of sculptors.
Robin Salmon is Director of Sculpture at Brookgreen, and has known and worked with Garland for decades.
“What makes Garland special?” I asked.
“His personality. He’s kind and generous — you can depend on him.”
He has helped educate hundreds of sculptors through various programs in this fabulous setting, and Robin said he can walk students through the grounds and point out what the sculptor tried to do in a piece on display, then explain the piece in the context of the artist’s life and the techniques in use when the artist worked. A cowboy once told Garland he could share his vision through sculpture, and today the same lesson is being passed along among the priceless art and live oaks of South Carolina.
Over time, working in West Texas, away from the artistic centers of Dallas, Houston and Austin has perhaps cost Garland some commissions, but he says he is closer to the Western Art museums of Colorado and New Mexico. More importantly, he lives in The West, among its people, creatures and vistas.
“He’s the real deal,” said Michael Grauer, Curator of Cowboy Collections and Western Art at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City. Garland is “much revered in the Western Art world, and the national art world, too.” Michael told me Garland is a “Renaissance man,” not surprising in light of the experience he’s accumulated over the years.
Darrell Beauchamp, Executive Director of the Museum of Western Art in Kerrville, likewise praised Garland, echoing Robin in South Carolina by saying Garland is “honest and dependable, and you appreciate that when you work with artists.” Darrell also noted that Garland “starts with respect for his subject,” which sounds very much like the process I witnessed.
I thought I had the wrong address the first time I visited Garland’s studio in Lubbock. It looks like the cheapest place in town to get a new muffler for your car. But inside the corrugated metal walls, well, it has the same look, without the mufflers. Walls and tables are covered, every inch, with notes, sketches, and the detritus of sculptures past, present and future. Tools hang on the walls, bags of clay and all manner of models and project prototypes fill the floor. But you see all this only vaguely — you’re drawn to an arresting life-size miner, just emerged from his mine, worn, yet dominating the room.
Garland works alone, unless he’s using a live model. “I let a cousin watch one time and could hardly work for all his interruptions, so yeah, I work alone.” But, gracious as always, he let me sit in on a session. Today he’s asked his model, George Coon, a former star athlete at Texas Tech, to return so Garland can work on the shoulders and how the clothing actually drapes on the body.
“I’m going for composition and design that doesn’t come across in a flat dimensional photograph,” Garland explained.
“No shortcuts,” Grauer had told me, and now I saw that attention to detail playing out. I don’t know how many times they had done this, but George quickly put on the shirt, boots, overalls and an antique mining hardhat before he assumed his pose with the historically correct shovel. Here it was, Garland’s respect for the subject that Beauchamp noted. But after quite a while, maybe not respect for his model.
“Quit squirming, dammit.”
“I have to move, man, I can’t bend over like this all day.” George slowly stretched and straightened his back.
“All day, my ass. We’ve barely started,” said the artist, but his blue eyes sparkled as he grinned. The figure in clay already showed years of sweat, dirt and hurt. Today, the frustration and pain Garland teased from his model was exactly what his miner needed. Probably not happenstance. By the end of the session, a tired and exhausted miner stared across the studio. The process had felt like work, but the results were a kind of magic.
While George changed and Garland brought out the beer, I looked closer at one of the black-and-white photos the client had supplied. Sure enough, the identical shovel stood in the corner of the studio. The day’s work finished, I felt safe in breaking my cousin-inspired vow of silence.
“I found it on eBay,” Garland told me.
“Can’t you just use the real shovel instead of making one out of clay?”
“Of course. But that wouldn’t be sculpture, would it?”
In the end, the clothing got yet another makeover. The mines were wet and miners got soaked. Once again the draping was carved and scraped until it was right — the sodden overalls “hung quite differently,” and that required a makeover. If the process seems excessive, Garland told me a college sculpture curriculum would include an entire semester on draping, and probably two. Would anyone realize the difference or significance — wet clothes or dry? Antique gear or re-draping clothes, it matters to Garland.
T exas has many of Garland’s pieces on display besides the museums mentioned previously. The Texas Tech campus has the cartoonish Raider Red mascot, conveniently near the football stadium, and the wonderful National Ranching Heritage Center has another, but his best known piece in Texas is his statue of Old Yeller and the dog’s young master and friend, Travis Coates, in front of the Mason public library. A tourist attraction of its own here in the hometown of the book’s author, the statue shows both Garland’s ability to create an emotional response in his audience and his whimsical nature, too, as several small animals roam the statue.
Artists of any type need a grab bag of talents and skills and experience to succeed, among them a knowledge of failure, even tragedy and heartbreak. Also triumph and victory so the artist can recognize these in his subjects and communicate them to his audience. A plaintive country song or a stirring operatic solo or brushstrokes on canvas — all send a message to the audience from the artist. Garland says intelligence is essential for artistic success, beyond the countless technical details every artist must master and he is clearly an intelligent man, his choice of a rodeo career notwithstanding. He owns perhaps the largest private library devoted to sculpture in the world, and has an incredible knowledge of the history of his chosen field.
Yet his unique background may have been the best education and preparation for his successful pursuit of his “passion”. Although he’s worked hard to develop his God-given talent, the years of competition and struggle that exemplify Ovid’s patience and toughness informs his art and mirrors the best of the spirit and ethos of Texas. Garland has been patient and tough — his work reflects that, and maybe his art prods us to recognize these qualities in ourselves and others.
Garland’s statue of the miner will be displayed in a public sculpture garden in Missouri, where perhaps a granddaughter of one of those miners will pull her family out of their shiny F-150 to stand before it. Hopefully she will see, not the tools like Grandpa had in the garage, but a moment from time and think, “Oh, Grandpa, I never knew it was like that.”