Artist Bio
I grew up in the suburbs near New York City, in a town called Bedford Hills. It was a place where you could play softball and drink beer in the town park after work. Many of my friends were auto mechanics, and I was an auto body man. In 1979 I got a call from a friend of mine working for a fashion photographer in the city, who asked me to come down and paint a set like a car, with curves like fenders, and a high gloss finish. I brought down my two bodyman assistants, and we completed it in three days. The phographer was thrilled, and asked me to remodel the entire studio. I never returned to Bedford Hills, giving up car repair for a life surrounded by models, and lived in discos until dawn.
After a year, I'd had enough, and decided to follow my dream of producing sculpture in the marble yards of Italy. I sold my Maserati and shipped my Lotus to England. These cars had come my way through my work, bought cheaply, and restored by me. One paid for the trip, and the other was to be my way of getting around in a country I wasn't sure had public transportation. I got set up in a studio with two octogenerian marble carvers, and learned all I could from them, in much the same way I'd learned about cars at Billy Davit's Sunoco station. I was surprised to find myself using a lot of the same tools, and Ennio and Blasco were glad I could. They themselves were carving sculptures for artists, some using only faxes sent from around the world.
Most artists currently making statues today produce them in plaster or clay, and turn the models over to professional artisans who then carve them or fuse them into bronze, both expensive procedures. It shocked me to learn that, so I started trying to make things you couldn't afford to pay people to do for you. I came up with a design for a table base, a knot carved from a two ton block which weighed less than a tenth of that when finished. It was a success...over the next ten years, I sold twenty five of them, in Los Angeles, and in Paris, MonteCarlo, Florence, Jakarta, and New York.
Bored with abstract work, I moved towards the next level, the figure. I got several commissions after I won a best in show prize in a competition of nine hundred artists, for my first figurative piece, 'Dreamer'. The one I started with was a lifesize lobby sculpture, 'Electra', for the Alabama Power Company. Following that were more, mostly in Italy, where I was working. I met Umberto Sforza, of the family that governed Milan for two hundred years, and recognized his family crest as the hood ornament of Alfa Romeo cars. He commissioned me twice, for 'Ophelia', and then for "Nude with Cell Phone'. I did portraits of Robin Wright and Sean Penn's kids. I met Emilio Pucci, Isamu Noguchi, and Gina Lolobrigida, who's a sculptor in the same little town where I work. It seems a long way from Bedford Hills, but getting up in the morning, putting on work clothes, and picking up a grinder is still everything it used to be.
Jeff Goldman & Associates, Inc. Sculpture Source
10422 Tullymore DriveAdelphi, MD 20783
phone 301-445-3434
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