Bio
Steve Shields, born in Red Oak, Iowa, moved around the US growing up, but settled for most of his adult life in the small town of Hopkinsville, Kentucky. His extensive body of work ranges from small figures in various poses and settings to larger-than-life sculptures that grace parks, museums, and churches throughout the Eastern and Central US and Canada. Shields’ subjects were diverse, and included Native Americans, bluegrass and country musicians, mythological figures, laborers, children, military servicemen and women, and even religious figures. In his hands, scrap metal was melted and reborn into works with a wide emotional range, and his subjects exemplified camaraderie, heroism, sorrow, despair, curiosity, and even virtuosity. Shields’ sculptures are of national significance not only because of their subjects and quality, but also because of his unusual and characteristic technique.
Born in 1947, Stephen Paul Shields was the third of six children of Dean and Mary Shields. Steve’s playground was the outdoors, wandering the Louisiana bayous with crayfish and snakes, then in Iowa’s creeks and terraced cornfields. When an elementary school student, his family lived in leafy rural Louisiana, then moved back to the rolling hills of Iowa during his junior high and first two years of high school. He was eager and curious, often building something--and always drawing. Additionally, he became familiar and competent at welding because the men in his family used oxy-acetylene cutting and stick arc welding for pragmatic purposes. Shields remembered his teachers regularly seeking his help with art projects. “I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t drawing and doodling,” he reminisced in an interview in middle age.
After graduating from Banks High School in Birmingham, Alabama, he went on to earn a degree in mathematics and psychology at Tarkio (Missouri) College. “By the time I got to college, I told myself it was time to give up the art I’d always done. I considered it child’s play. I’d never known anybody who made a living as an artist,” he said. He studied mathematics because it had a more practical application. Despite the departure from his real interests, it was as a college student that Shields developed a lifelong fascination with philosophy and human reasoning. He applied these qualities to his intensive research before starting each sculpture, revealing discoveries which influenced his work, integrating something of himself into each piece, and sharing his discoveries with anyone interested. Steve Shields genuinely loved people and could draw almost anyone into conversation, a skill which served him well as a sculptor.
Shields married Karen Sue Schechter in 1968, and in their first year after graduating from college, they did the unthinkable and took teaching assignments in Alexandria, Egypt. While wandering in the bazaar, Shields saw a primitive welded metal figure. It served as an epiphany of sorts, and he left the marketplace convinced he could create something similar. Using the basic metalworking tools at the school where he worked, his first piece was a two-foot football player. Delighted with the outcome, he followed this with a small owl. His technique was just starting to develop, and he welded strips of steel crating bands to form the rough outlines of his sculptures. The next step was to make a “skin” over the steel “skeleton,” which he did by melting steel coat hangers and welding rods. These early experiments became the basis for his three-decade career.
After leaving Egypt, Steve and Karen relocated to Kentucky, where Shields set up shop in borrowed space, and then later in his garage, working evenings with his welder and found materials while keeping a “day job.” He sculpted these early twelve-to-fifteen-inch-tall pieces, weighing twenty-five to thirty-five pounds, with a torch, made mostly from clothes hangers friends donated and crating bands from area warehouses. When pressed, he even used bed springs to fabricate his small pieces—a dog with three legs, two men on a park bench playing checkers, a doctor with his stethoscope. In just a few years, he had created more than a hundred and seventy-five steel figures.
As his skills and reputation flourished, Shields found these small steel pieces limiting. He wanted to include more detail, which could be achieved only with larger works. He also began to realize that found steel was difficult to work with because of its high melting temperature and rigidity. Additionally, steel was impractical for outdoor pieces; it rusted. Several years before his first life-sized outdoor sculpture was commissioned, Shields realized he would need the flexibility of working with a different material.
His exploration led him to copper. Softer and more pliable, it was weather-resistant and allowed for more variation in patina. His previous search for crating bands was replaced by one for copper piping, and scrap copper wire replaced coat hangers. Shields cut the piping into strips and used the torch and copper wire like brushes, blending the melted metal patchwork into a seamless, textured surface. “You get (the melted copper) to a syrupy viscosity, and then you can really paint it on,” he explained. “I knew if I could work with copper, it would give me a whole new arena.” The problem was getting enough heat on the copper to weld it. Copper dissipated heat so quickly that he couldn’t weld it with the gas torch he used on steel. “I got the biggest torch tip I could find, and suddenly had enough heat.” This technical and creative breakthrough in 1984 allowed him to transition from steel to copper fully.
The larger scale opened opportunities for textured surfaces that suggest leather, cloth, wood, hair, eyes, and facial expressions. His ingenuity extended into the creation of his tools, and he crafted slender, lightweight hammers, punches, calipers, and maneuverable stands to aid in producing his work. His skills and talents continued to deepen over the years, and in his last commission, Christ the Healer (1998), Shields was proud to have replaced the flat-surfaced eyes with concentric rings, giving the impression of ocular depth.
With larger pieces came an evolution in themes. Shields’ smaller steel sculptures were drawn from scenes from daily life and carefree recreation. The new, larger-than-life sculptures manifested serious and significant moments in history: the deprivation of and loss of Fly Smith and White Path, Cherokee chiefs who died on the Trial of Tears; the pain, fatigue and agitation of the three Korean soldiers; the proud isolation of death in the 101st Peacekeeper Memorial; and the solemnity of Lady Justice; among others. Even his final sculpture, an unintentionally incomplete rendition of Christ the Healer, survives as testimony to the depth of Shields’ work.
In a less well-known body of work, Shields also explored nonrepresentational ideas. Later in his career, he studied complex geometric shapes and experimented with the interplay between light and shadow. He integrated his love of the fundamental truth of mathematics with the whimsical qualities of copper mesh, creating a series of abstract and representational sculptures. Some of these pieces have the lightness of his early skeletal works while also embodying the polished effects of an artist who had mastered technique and was comfortable with form, texture, patina, and proportion. It is one such piece, Mobius Ring, which is mounted on his headstone.
Despite the somber underlying themes of much of his later work, Steve Shields is most remembered for his smile, stories, and witty comments–usually followed by unsolicited advice. His robust sense of humor surfaced almost anywhere. In 2001, the Janice Mason Art Museum in Cadiz, Kentucky, exhibited some two hundred pieces of his work in a retrospective. The audience appreciated the artistry of the sculptures, but even more so the memories of the man who created them. Shields’ family writes in the museum catalog: “Our home and lives were unusually happy, largely because of his wit and total belief in each of us. He had the utmost faith and confidence that each of us could do whatever we wanted to, and we all attempted to live up to his expectations. Love was a key part of his personality, not only for his family, but for people in general. So many anecdotes … show how interesting he found each person he met, and how he would listen to them with total concentration.” Like his sculptures, Steve Shields set a larger-than-life example for everyone around him.