She gathers up art: Webb City native, MSSU grad creates sculptures from woods on the farm

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November 21, 2009

Anonymous The Joplin Globe Sat Nov 21, 2009, 08:34 AM CST

The Associated Press

AVILLA, Mo. — With four young children, a farm to run and limited financial resources, Rachel Wilson needed some art supplies that were close to home and cheap.

She found fallen hedge branches.

Her artist’s eye saw horses.

“The sticks that I found ... I could just see that it was horse form,” she said. “They needed to be a large form.”

Her horses are certainly large. One is the size of a live plow horse, and they can take the weight of a person almost as easily as the real thing.

Her love of horses, nature and her family are all part of the story, but it starts with the love of art when she was just a child.

“I was always interested in art,” she said.

MSSU roots

When she went to Missouri Southern State University, it was on a full-ride Thomas Hart Benton scholarship in the fine arts.

“That’s when I started taking art seriously,” she recalls. “And it’s something I’ve taken real seriously the last three years.”

Her first love was oil painting, but that is “not really kid-friendly... It doesn’t wash out well,” she said.

So she moved to acrylics. Her children, ranging in age from 1 to 8, join her, creating their own paintings with the fast-drying, water-based paint.

She recently sold a two-canvas painting — “an abstract take on a still life” — that will hang in the lobby of the Market Station Apartments in downtown Kansas City.

But painting with the kids is not always convenient, and when the weather is nice, everybody likes to get outside. Looking for an outdoors art project this spring led her to the woods.

To the woods

She decided she would create an “assemblage” out of natural materials on the farm.

“It really started out of necessity,” she said. “We were outside already, and I always seem to find something creative I can do.”

Now, even her little ones have been working on their own sculptures.

Cost was an additional incentive.

“We’ve been through some tight times with farming,” said Wilson, a “city girl” from Webb City who now loves the farming life with her husband, Kyle, a third-generation farmer.

Now, it’s a family event. Kyle Wilson drives the pickup truck, and she and the kids “pick up sticks.”

Those sticks are pretty special — they are big, shapely, hard and resistant. “As far as I can tell, it lasts for just about forever,” she said of the wood.

Hedge — or Osage orange trees — were planted in the hedgerows and used for fencing. The Wilsons have dug up hedge fence posts placed years earlier that are still green and untouched by rot or bugs.

Plenty of material

It’s easy to find the fallen branches, especially after the ice storms of 2007 and 2008.

“I don’t take anything off living trees,” she insists. “I’m kind of a tree-hugger, I guess.”

While the size and shape of the huge branches may have called out “horse” to her, she may have already been thinking equine.

“It has sentimental value,” she said. “The first thing my husband gave me when we got married was a horse. It was something I always wanted as a girl.”

About a half dozen of Wilson’s hedge horses were on display at Art Central in Carthage recently.

“This is a great setting for them now,” said Sally Armstrong, who manages the studio. She notes that the horses appear to be in their natural setting amid the fall foliage.

Wilson entered a single horse earlier this summer in the studio’s membership show, and it drew such interest she was invited to display the “herd.”

‘Personality’

“The motion and the movement that she shows is fantastic,” Armstrong said. “It’s amazing.”

Passers-by, both in cars and on foot, were drawn to the realism and the artistic vision of the sculptures.

“She’s just created personality,” Armstrong said. “Every one of them has it’s own personality.”

Wilson has sold two of her horse sculptures, and has three people on a waiting list for smaller versions.

“It just worked out,” Wilson said of the availability of the material and the opportunity to create something of such beauty that reflects her own love.

“It’s just something I lucked into.”

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She gathers up art: Webb City native, MSSU grad creates sculptures from woods on the farm

Joplin City Manager Mark Rohr wants the city to distribute weather radios to all Joplin homes that don’t have one. That’s 11,000 radios. Do you think that’s a good use of $300,440?

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