WILBY COLEMAN
Recreating one's career paradigm and breaking the mold of a conventional, respected, and flourishing lifestyle defy the fortitude, much less the determination, of most individuals. Valdosta, Georgia, resident Wilby Coleman has accomplished just such a feat. In two years he transformed himself from Wilby Coleman, successful lawyer, into Wilby Coleman, steel sculptor. Still respected in his community, though perhaps with a new esteem and a different reputation, Coleman revels in the success of his pursuits in the sculptural domain. However, there is nothing common or rigid about his work or his view of success.
Coleman grew up in College Park, Georgia. His mother had been a commercial artist with Women's Wear Daily in New York for many years, and examples of her design work are found today in Coleman's collection. He does not recall any family directives about pursuing an arts-oriented career, but there were early signs that art and design interested him. He entered Washington and Lee University, with the intention of obtaining a degree in business, and left two years later to study art at the University of Georgia. After one brief quarter, he decided another field might offer a more lucrative future. Ultimately, Coleman graduated from law school, joined an old Valdosta firm and for thirty-five years was the quintessential lawyer, husband, father of five, and good corporate citizen.
Coleman had deserted the studio, but the excitement of art never left him. In fact, one of his strongest recollections is of a family visit when he was seventeen or eighteen to New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. There in the African galleries, the sculptural forms with their simple, strong, dramatic lines made a lasting impression. The impact of those images and lines can be seen today in his own sculpture.
Years later, when Coleman finally began "making things," it was on weekends or nights. He turned an old tractor barn at the back of his two-acre lot into a shop with an anvil and welder, gifts from his wife Gloria. But as time passed, the nights and weekends stretched into several days a week, and soon his practice of law was scaled back. Coleman had become immersed in metal sculpture.
"It was like a volcano," he said. "I'd sublimated the artistic impulse for thirty years. This stuff came spewing out."
By 1989 something had snapped. The lawyer had re-forged himself into a sculptor. Coleman quit the law firm and turned his workweek into seven, twelve-hour days in his shop, each one idea-filled and exhilarating. Expecting eventually, as is not uncommon with artists, to hit a dry spell, to be in need of inspiration, Coleman has been amazed: the result of thirty years of sublimated "stuff" was a rich deposit of artistic inspiration.
He refers to his media as "handsome junk with intrinsically nice qualities." Found objects, scrap metal, and steel in rich varieties are all incorporated into his work. Valdosta's Rice Iron and Metal is a scrap-metal heaven, ideal for foraging materials and helping with ideas. Friends and neighbors also aided and abetted Coleman's lust for found objects by scrounging for raw materials, old cast-offs that come to life again in his sculptural forms.
The titles of Coleman's sculptures bear evidence of his slightly irreverent point of view. For example, How am I Doing for Openers? is made from various cutting and opening tools. Getting a Grip on the Future is created with wrenches, disks, and a toothed cultivator blade. Judges I have Known uses a shovel, cultivator parts, sheet metal and angle iron.
Another piece, "…And Baby Makes Three", was inspired by the dismay and anguish of his son and daughter-in-law at the challenges of family life. A disk harrow blade, square extrusion pipe, chain, shackle, a Civil War cannonball, pitchforks, and toilet floats are reconfigured to embody a man and woman joined as one with their new lifeblood, their child. One of the heaviest elements in the design, both physically and visually is the child, the cannonball. In this piece, as in so many of Coleman's other works, the materials are familiar to the viewer from other modes but the content is startlingly new. The piece as a whole resonates with meaning. There is humor in the whole and in the individual found objects comprising the parts (i.e. toilet floats for breasts and a cannonball, shackle, and chain representing the parental bond, relationship and obligations.) But in the parts he utilizes, Coleman shows a recognition of the intrinsic handsomeness of each design. His imaginative organization of parts is a creative gift demonstrating an understanding and enthusiasm for the abstract statements and sense of discovery of primitive sculpture and 20th century abstract designs. Coleman's work reflects a penetrating grasp of human nature.
His ideas have been inspired by nature, by literature, by his reservoir of humor and by years spent observing the human "animal." The lawyer's chair in court served as quite an observation point. His unique sculptural statements glisten with such humor, irony, and insight that one might call Coleman a "Mark Twain in metal," a person he slightly resembles.
Coleman's body of work as a sculptor consists of close to 450 pieces. Most are in his possession. They fill his home and spill over into the surrounding acreage, standing out among the trees and bushes, lined up in sections of the front yard, peeking out from vines, hanging from branches, and positioned at the back patio and at the front door. His suburban home is listed as a tourist site with the Lowndes County Convention and Visitors Bureau.
Rarely does Coleman sell his pieces. Financially, he has no need, and he measures his success not in monetary terms but in the exhilaration of the creative journey. Given the stacks of found objects and metal shapes spread across the yard and surrounding his studio, Coleman appears to have many productive years ahead and many creatively charged forms to forge.
--Suzanne Harper
Director of Art
Macon Museum of Arts and Sciences
