Harry Weber: Sculpting History

Arnold00:00:02

Welcome to St. Louis in Tune.And thank you for joining us for fresh perspectives on issues and events with experts, community leaders and everyday people who make a difference in shaping our society and world. We have an interesting interview today. Mark. I'm Arnold Stricker along with Mark Langston.

Mark00:00:15

Hey, Arnold. Yeah, I am excited about the interview that we have today.

Arnold00:00:19

I don't know if I want to.

Mark00:00:20

Say so too much about it, but if you've ever gone to the baseball game at Busch Stadium, you're going to really enjoy the show.

Arnold00:00:26

You really will. I had the privilege of having a conversation with Harry Weber.As a sculptor, he has an interview reputation with over 150 large commissioned sculptures in public view in 27 states, the Bahamas, China and Africa. These include historical figures, notables in the arts, politics and sports in 31 different cities across the country.Two of his sculpture groupings have been named national Lewis and Clark sites by the National Park Service. He was selected in a national competition to sculpt a statue of Dred and Harriet Scott, which now stands in front of the old courthouse.And his sculptures of famous sports figures are prominent features at 15 different professional and amateur stadiums, including Bush Stadium and St. Louis, Kaufman Stadium in Kansas City, Choctaw Stadium for the Texas Rangers in Arlington, Texas, and the TD Garden in Boston, Massachusetts.In 2023, he was awarded a star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame. He's also been inducted into the St. Louis Sports hall of Fame and the Missouri Sports hall of Fame.And our conversation took place at his studio as we discussed his drawings, paintings, sculpture and his life. Are you still painting or drawing or.

Harry00:01:28

Oh, yeah. I draw some every day. And I got together with a whole bunch of graphic artists.That's a painting I did of a bar in New York when I was really a starving artist in New York.

Arnold00:01:37

That's cool.

Harry00:01:38

That bar no longer exists. There's nothing big in here now because we just dedicated the general up in Culver Military Academy in Indiana.There are a lot of good stories about everything around here, but yeah, There are about 150 sculptures now across the country. China, Africa.

Arnold00:01:56

I heard about the Wainwright one in China.

Harry00:01:58

Yeah, yeah, that was fun. And the Sister City piece. And now the companion of a Chinese national batter is down at Ballpark Village.

Arnold00:02:07

It's been set up then.

Harry00:02:08

Yeah.

Arnold00:02:08

Okay. Okay.

Harry00:02:09

It's already there.

Arnold00:02:10

I know you did a lot of drawing in Vietnam, but let's go back. Were you doing the drawings when you were in high school?

Harry00:02:16

From when I was 4. I just love drawing and my father was an architectural engineer. But he was also, I think, a frustrated artist.Did a lot of drawing and cartooning at Washington University and where he studied engineering. And I just loved it. Yeah. I just like making marks on paper. And I'll give you one of these.Somebody wrote a book about me and asked what I did with the sketches, and I said, nothing. I really don't. So they put 50 years worth in here.

Arnold00:02:43

Oh, my. Wow.

Harry00:02:44

I do the concept drawings up there in the lower.

Arnold00:02:48

Okay.

Harry00:02:49

And sometimes they're detailed, like the pool holes and Blue Brock. And sometimes they're just action sketches to get an idea of how we want to handle it. Now, do you take.

Arnold00:02:59

You do a drawing from a photograph.

Harry00:03:01

Do you do it. Films from photograph. From imagination. A lot of it's just from imagination that Bull and Bear for Edward Jones. And it's really strange.We did Bulls and Bears for Edward Jones and for Stifel, like a month apart. They both commissioned it. They had no idea they were doing it. They just wanted it. But the one for Stifel ended up being 14ft tall.It's now on Broadway in Washington. So that one was so big that we had to rent a warehouse because we had to move those pieces back and forth. There's a film about that, really?If you just go to YouTube. It's tfool. Bull and bear. 20, 20 minutes long.

Arnold00:03:37

Okay.

Harry00:03:37

And it's a pretty good exposition of how bronzes are made from very stark to the finish.

Arnold00:03:42

This is the photograph. And it's. That's what you used for the.

Harry00:03:46

Yeah. And I told him that's the famous photograph, right. Of Bavior scoring a winning goal in 1970 against the Blues. He'd already scored the goal.You can see the puck has already popped out of the goal and no Picard. The reason he's flying through the air is. No. Picard hooked his thick clip off in the air.

Arnold00:04:03

That's a great letter there, too. Wow.

Harry00:04:05

But, yeah, he's a really nice guy. Almost everybody I've done a sculpture of that's alive.You've been really friendly and really nice, but I told them that was a great picture, but it was a lousy sculpture to get flat. So we put him a microsecond between this and that red.

Arnold00:04:22

You have stainless steel bar going through there to hold him up because that's a ton of weight there.

Harry00:04:26

1200 pounds of bronze on his right toe. Wow. And I can't. I can imagine what Rodan would have done if he had stainless steel. But all of these guys. These are Small maquettes for larger pieces.It allows you to do a lot of movement.

Arnold00:04:39

Let's talk about that for a minute because. Or for more than a minute. So you go up there and you do your sketch, you do your drawings of what you want to do. What's the next process?

Harry00:04:48

Dealing with a client and heavy duty stuff.Because most people are in the market for a bronze once in their lifetime, whether they're a corporation, individual, school, whatever, maybe once or twice. And they want to get it right. So like the bear we just finished for the Boston Bruins. This has just been installed a month ago.

Arnold00:05:05

That's pretty.

Harry00:05:06

That's a big 12 foot bear next to the garden down Portal Park. And when I first did it, I did sketches of the bear leaping like Bobby Orr. It would be a mirror. Right.And I got the marketing department, which I think was a young woman about 25, called and said, we just love what you did with the bear. It's just really beautiful. But it's scary near all the kids. Yeah. So we would like him ferocious but not scary.And I said, that's pretty useless information. But anyway, it was a long haul and we finally got it and they said we're going a fat bear, mouth closed. Really? Yeah.

Arnold00:05:44

And a bear with a mouth, mouth closed is not ferocious.

Harry00:05:47

No. And so we finished. That's the maquette for it over there.

Arnold00:05:50

Okay.

Harry00:05:51

We finished it in clay. Big 12 Foot Plane Group ready to cast it. They sent pictures up to Charlie Jacobs, who owns the Bruins. He said, no, we want the mouth open.So had to resculpt the head.

Arnold00:06:03

Gosh.

Harry00:06:03

But anyway, the process goes from sketches to maquettes. And a maquette is a fancy French word for small model.

Arnold00:06:12

M, A Q, U, E, T, T, E or something.

Harry00:06:14

That's it.

Arnold00:06:14

Okay. My. My French teacher would be proud.

Harry00:06:16

Yeah. I can't spell which why I do this. This one is going to be the next big project. If it happens, it may be one of my last because it's going to be big.Those figures will be 8ft tall. Wow. And that's going to the National Military Museum or center in Perryville, Missouri.

Arnold00:06:33

Okay.

Harry00:06:33

And they're raising money for it now. They're pretty close.

Arnold00:06:36

So you would do that here then?

Harry00:06:37

I would do that here. You would do these pieces separately and start moving them back and forth together to make sure that they interrelate.

Arnold00:06:44

And this is all clay.

Harry00:06:46

Yeah, clay on a wire armature.

Arnold00:06:49

And I hear you have a special mixture of clay, clay and.

Harry00:06:52

Yeah. There's a guy named McLaughlin and California, 20 years ago. Hated Chavant Plasoline clay because it's awful to use.He made a stuff called classic clay, which is a combination of clay, wax and petroleum jelly. And it's really nice because you can see at room temperature, 70 degrees, it sets up really hard. You can almost polish it.But when you put it in a cooker, it's almost liquid if you can smear it on. The only disaster I had, I did a nine foot statue of Don Ferro from University of Missouri outside the Perot field.And Ann and I left for a horse show. It was late in May and there was a thunderstorm. Knocked out the electricity, knocked out the air conditioning.Got to be about 110 degrees in the studio. I had up there and done six months of work, was a puddle on the floor. All I had left was the armature.

Arnold00:07:43

Oh, my God.

Harry00:07:44

And so we had to redo it. So that's why this place is kept pretty cool. When I was doing 4O, for instance, it was just rebar with chunks of insulation material to fill it out.And then you throw clay on that. But what we do now is we solve all the problems of movement and three dimensionality because it's got to work all the way around in this size.These will then go and get scanned with a laser. The digital information we put into a CNC machine and we get a rough comb model.

Arnold00:08:16

Okay.

Harry00:08:16

Of this pack.

Arnold00:08:17

Okay.

Harry00:08:18

And we will emaciate it. In other words, take it down and emaciate it by about a half an inch. So then I put a half an inch of clay on it and I can get most of the detail.There's still a lot of carving to be done.

Arnold00:08:29

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

Harry00:08:30

Because when you take something from this size to that size.

Arnold00:08:33

Right.

Harry00:08:33

You notice things that you didn't notice before. And so you clean it up.

Arnold00:08:36

I think that's one of the things about being a sculptor is the detail. It's just not a big lump of something. You get into creases in the sleeves and guy's pretty buff. He's got an i6 back there.

Harry00:08:50

Yeah. These are real people.

Arnold00:08:51

And the muscle veins.

Harry00:08:52

This is a guy named John Hannigan who was a Marine in Afghanistan. This is a nurse from Vietnam. And this is Harry Stewart, who was a Tuskegee airman. And it's called Laying down the Burden.It'll be a big pile of military equipment and he's throwing his boring plate holder on it.

Arnold00:09:10

Wow. So you get this big thing back.

Harry00:09:11

Yeah. Basically you carve it back until you like where you see the movement. And if it changes, we can break it and put things around, put clay on it.And I'm not a fan of absolutely detailed detail. I don't want to see every. Because it shuts things down. It makes it less spontaneous. So even the drapery contributes to the movement.And I like things that. And so once this gets done in full size, then we'll pull piece molds off of that. Like he's eight feet tall.He'll be casting about at least a dozen pieces.

Arnold00:09:44

Do you cut that big one up or do they do a mold of the big one in sections or is that not.

Harry00:09:50

In order to get the molds we would probably cut off the arms so you get all the undercuts. Sometimes cut off the head. Like for instance the Lewis and Clark fish down on the riverfront.

Arnold00:09:59

I know which one you're talking about.

Harry00:10:00

Yeah.

Arnold00:10:00

I've seen his arm come out of the water.

Harry00:10:02

Yeah. They've moved him up out of the water. An intriguing thing. We.There was actually the port authority had a point on his chest where it was 20ft above flood state. He was like a water gauge. But now we moved him 20ft up onto Lenora Solomon Boulevard.

Arnold00:10:19

That's good.

Harry00:10:20

That piece was cast in 198 pieces. And if you can imagine then reassembling that with like a three dimensional jigsaw puzzle where each piece weighs at least 50 pounds.

Arnold00:10:31

Wow.

Harry00:10:32

And pack welded together.

Arnold00:10:33

Yeah.

Harry00:10:34

So I've worked with the same bunch of mold makers and welder for 30 years. The reason we have a Ukrainian flag out in front is their Ukrainian absolutely fabulous artisan. Right.

Arnold00:10:45

I saw their website inside YouTube of them. Yes.

Harry00:10:47

Yeah. So Vlad and I have been working together for a long time and like I said, about 150 pieces.And every one of them is an engineering exercise as well as an artistic exercise.

Arnold00:10:59

So they do the mold there.

Harry00:11:01

Yeah.

Arnold00:11:01

Of these like the arm or the head of the pieces.

Harry00:11:03

Yeah. And then we pull waxes from those mold.

Arnold00:11:07

Okay.

Harry00:11:07

Then the waxes go to Lawrence, Kansas where at Astra foundry has big ceramic shell vats where we can cast fairly big pieces. Then we get the pieces of bronze back and Vlad weld some back together.

Arnold00:11:21

I saw when they were placing the dread and Harriet Scott sculptor down at by the courthouse. I don't think people think about the transportation of all of this back and forth. It must be.

Harry00:11:30

And then like taking Wayne right to China. It was a boat. And then we had to go meet, take it to Nanjing and work with their engineers and Put it together there. No, it was put together.

Arnold00:11:40

Okay.

Harry00:11:41

It was ready to be installed. We developed a technique for these stainless steel trees which involve two pores of concrete, one usually 12 inches below grade.Then we bolt the whole tree in that sculpture suspended on that and you put more concrete. That's in the lobby of the Drury Plaza Hotel.

Arnold00:12:01

And I've not seen that. I need to go down and see that.

Harry00:12:04

And it's. God, that was a mess. That's a 40 foot diorama that has 40 tons of rock. A 60 foot mural, eight life size figures.And they all had to fit seamlessly on the pile of rock. We only had a 10 foot space to work with because Drury wanted to keep his lobby open.

Arnold00:12:23

Oh.

Harry00:12:23

And we worked at night, so we pulled molds off the rock. And so these guys would sit exactly naturally. Naturally. That's the same with him.We install these guys at grade so that they look like they're walking around. You know. No pedestals.

Arnold00:12:38

Yeah. For new sculptures and even refurbishing that they put some kind of a patina. Right.

Harry00:12:44

And that varies in color depending on the chemicals you use. It's just an acid bath.

Arnold00:12:49

Okay.

Harry00:12:49

That reacts with the surface of the brown. And like liver of sulfur makes it black. Like ferric oxide makes it brownish. Ferric nitrate gives you a reddish hue.

Arnold00:12:59

Now is this something that you would do?

Harry00:13:01

We consult with the clients.

Arnold00:13:02

Okay.

Harry00:13:02

In terms of what we want to do. But normally we give a good old fashioned brown patina. And, and then the, the piece itself reacts with the atmosphere.If you remember the millis found down by the old train station.

Arnold00:13:17

Yes.

Harry00:13:18

It, it is now back being brown. When he did it first for years it was green because of the acid from the air. Sulfuric acid. You've got to keep the things whack.Clean them once a year.

Arnold00:13:28

Okay.

Harry00:13:29

But not going to wax on because.

Arnold00:13:30

I guess some people would like this color and some people would like the green.

Harry00:13:33

Yeah. It really depends on what you want to do. The, the bear, fortunately was a black bear, so we didn't have to worry much about that.And sometimes like on Bobby Orr, you can may tell there's a variance in the patina. There's more liver on the shirt. That's ferric oxide. So just suggested a little bit of difference. This is stainless steel.

Arnold00:13:53

Okay.

Harry00:13:54

Just suggest the ice.

Arnold00:13:56

You could put multiple kinds of acid different.

Harry00:13:59

Yeah. It's a little tough. It's a pain in the neck and, and outside it doesn't hold up all that well because of the natural Atmospherics.Unless people take care of it. And most people don't take care of.

Arnold00:14:11

So every year a bronze sculpture, a sculpture like this would be wiped down. And you said waxed. What is like a hot wax? Is it like a car wax or.

Harry00:14:20

Yeah, it's multicosal hard wax.

Arnold00:14:22

Okay.

Harry00:14:23

But you put it on during the day when it's hot, let it stay overnight, and then polish it up.

Arnold00:14:28

Gotcha. Okay. Okay.

Harry00:14:30

The neat thing with all the cardinals out here, and I love all those writhing little figures. And we agreed with the client that probably we didn't want huge guys out there in a life size statue is always 110% life size.

Arnold00:14:42

I was reading about that because of shrinkage.

Harry00:14:45

Partially because of shrinkage and partially because of the psychological effect of same thing of seeing a movie star. Gee, you look so much bigger on the screen.

Arnold00:14:53

Yeah.

Harry00:14:53

And. And also bronze being dark sucks up the light.

Arnold00:14:57

Okay.

Harry00:14:58

So it makes things look a little smaller. So you want a life size figure to be a little bit bigger than life size.Because they don't make statues of people that weren't a little bit bigger than life to begin with.

Arnold00:15:08

So who were your inspirations again?

Harry00:15:10

Two big inspirations. I love Rodan and everything he did because he did not over detail things.I could mention sculptors that are really good sculptors, but I don't like the end product because it just looks. Doesn't have any life to it. Too smooth, it's too exact. It's just has no spontaneity. Everybody has their own definition of art.

Arnold00:15:30

But that's true.

Harry00:15:31

But mine is it should have an immediate emotional impact somehow. And you should be able to see the facility of the artist in it.In other words, he knew what he's doing to the point that every stroke made sense but was fluid. I mentioned Velasquez. Those paintings of his look very detailed, but they're not. They're suggestions of detail. They almost fool the eye.

Arnold00:15:50

That's interesting.

Harry00:15:51

And same with Bellows. Same with Sargent. A lot of cases. His stuff moves into his life. The portraits have amazing emotional impact. My goal is twofold.If I'm doing a person, I want to understand what they're like. And I want to understand not only a good likeness, but an accurate representation of the emotion of the moment or of their character.So it's got to have two accurate pieces to it. Even the bus. You want to catch the character of it. That's Jefferson.

Arnold00:16:20

Yes. Even the dog.

Harry00:16:22

Even the dog. Yeah. Dog. Happy dog. Yeah. My wife came in here. This place was a mess. And she said, okay, that's the military wall. That's the art wall.

Arnold00:16:30

She organized you?

Harry00:16:31

Yeah, yeah, she did. Those are all leftover heads from maquettes.

Arnold00:16:35

Is this Jack Buck here?

Harry00:16:37

That's Jack Buck. That's one of three Jack Bucks I've done. That one's at the hall of Famous Missourians. And when Jack was alive, he said, I want this one to look like.When Carol's coming through the door with a bag of stuff that she just bought at Neiman Marcus, I say, having fun, blondie? That kind of wry smile.

Arnold00:16:55

What I'm looking at here, whether it's this one with the military that you're doing for Perryville, or whether it's Jack Buck or the dog waiting for approval from the master or any of these pieces, you really get a sense of their personality. And that's tough to do, but it's.

Harry00:17:12

Translation of a lifetime of sketching from life.If you look through that sketchbook I gave you, my entertainment is going to bars, airports, doctor's offices, whatever, and watching people and sketching them really fast. This is the thing that changed my life. The first sculpture I ever did was a foxhound.Okay, that one over there in 1977, because that's me as a huntsman up above it.

Arnold00:17:34

Okay.

Harry00:17:34

They asked me if I could do a sculpture of a foxhound. Challenge. Sure, I'll try it. Because they knew I'd do all kinds of art, drawing and painting.And if you think about it, a three dimensional figure is almost easier in a way. They're always more difficult.But if you do a drawing or a painting, you're taking a three dimensional subject, putting it on a two dimensional surface and trying to make it look three dimensional. Sculpture, you skip a step, you've got a three dimensional subject and you make it three dimensional. But it has to work 360 degrees.And one of Rodin's famous quotes was a. A good sculpture is an infinite series of profiles depending on how you look at it. And there's.There's no angle at which a sculpture should not work, not only as a representational piece of a human being, because I do mainly human beings, but it should look like a piece of artwork. In other words, it should have a movement and grace all of its own, like athletes do.My wife suggested, you've been doing horses and dogs and foxes and coyotes. Why don't you do people? Ozzie Smith had just retired, and that's a maquette in wax of him turning a double play.And I took that down to the Cardinals. And I didn't realize at the time that they were having a slight beef with Aussie. Smith retired. Everybody thinks that I'm a great sports fan. I'm not.I could. I. I could care less who wins and who loses. I never watch football game. But I love what athletes can do.Him and I'll tune into a game and it fascinates me. But the human body can do.

Arnold00:18:58

And he could do some things.

Harry00:18:59

And he could do some things. And so I said no, they weren't interested. Okay.But they called the next day, said, we've been thinking about it and we don't want to do Ozzie Smith, but we want to do all the players with retired numbers who are in the hall of Fame. At that time it was 10. When we put up pooh holes from Molina which are already finished in the basement, that push they'll be. Yeah.

Arnold00:19:22

So when they get into the hall of Fame. Yeah, just move those right out there.

Harry00:19:25

Yeah. They're way ahead of the game. Yeah. They figured I was 80 when they wanted to make sure it was very complimentary. Yeah.Build a Witcher said, hey, they're going to be in the hall in five years. We're not sure you'll be here in five years. Why don't you do them now? And I'm very content about that. By the way. I.I have had a really interesting life.

Arnold00:19:44

I see a Lt. Mars. Were you a lieutenant?

Harry00:19:47

Yeah, in the Navy on river patrol boats in Vietnam. A couple of destroyers and started off in submarines. I went from submarines to destroyers to river patrol boats, back to destroyer.Those river boats, those were 31ft long.

Arnold00:20:02

They were some kind of state of the art. You could turn on a dime.

Harry00:20:05

Oh, we could turn on a dime. But these Mark 1 boats, the very first one, which we were the first units to go to Vietnam in 1966. There were two guys. I can't remember their names.The government had asked Lockheed to do it. They said, we'll get them to you in two years. These guys put a prototype together in six weeks.And what this was a pleasure craft powered by two General Motors engines and Jacuzzi water jets. You know that. So there was no screw below that. And it's seven and a half tons. That thing drew nine inches of water on the plane.So we go almost anywhere. And the forward machine guns were ripped out of old B17 mount. They were old B17 mounts. They just dropped.

Arnold00:20:43

Seriously. Wow.

Harry00:20:45

And so everything was slap dash together.

Arnold00:20:47

No kidding.

Harry00:20:48

Then the Mark 2 boats were two years or a year later.

Arnold00:20:51

Okay. Did you go to OCS school or.

Harry00:20:53

No, My college was paid for because my father wanted me to be an engineer. And I thought that was about as pleasant as running a cheese grater on my head. I couldn't stand the idea.

Arnold00:21:04

So you were at Princeton, right?

Harry00:21:06

Yeah. I applied for a Navy scholarship.

Arnold00:21:08

Okay.

Harry00:21:09

And I passed the test and I passed the physicals and all this kind of stuff. And they said, where do you want to go? And I said, I got accepted at Princeton. They said, we'll send you to Princeton.So it was full ride, tuition, books, fees, 50 bucks a month, naval ROTC. And you came out as a regular officer.

Arnold00:21:25

Right.

Harry00:21:25

Just like out of the academy.

Arnold00:21:26

Exactly.

Harry00:21:27

So there was just as many of us as there were academy graduates.

Arnold00:21:30

Okay. Wow.

Harry00:21:31

Because there was, in the ROTC at any school, about 80 to 90% of them were reserve officers and there were about 10% that were getting ride scholarship.

Arnold00:21:41

Thank you for your service.

Harry00:21:42

Oh, no. Yeah. You're young, you're here, you're indestructible. The valuable thing I learned in Vietnam was the absolute assurance of my own mortality.And that's been very helpful psychologically through life. And also I figured it was. But so dumb, so idiotic a war. I was proud of my service, but the war was idiotic. Yeah.And I figured it'll be so dumb, we'll never do anything like that again.

Arnold00:22:06

We obviously haven't learned.

Harry00:22:07

No. And nobody learns.

Arnold00:22:08

Nobody learn.

Harry00:22:09

The current registration of history majors nationwide, college, 1.3%.

Arnold00:22:16

That's why we have so many wars.

Harry00:22:18

Yeah.

Arnold00:22:19

Because we're not reading our history.

Harry00:22:21

No. And now we're trying to rewrite it, which is even more. Yes.

Arnold00:22:24

Looking at these small pieces up here. The guy kicking the barrel, which is cute and looks like a civil war.

Harry00:22:29

No, that's Jack Daniels.

Arnold00:22:30

Jack Daniels. Do you ever do something that small or how do you get something smaller?

Harry00:22:34

I only did that small because when I got out of the Navy, I was medical down in the Navy and I went into advertising. And then I worked for a year at Gardner, worked for a couple of years at Ralston Arena. In the marketing department was new products director.Gillette was marketing director at Carter Wallace in New York. And then I started my own marketing consulting company. So they were my clients. Jack Daniels. Yeah. And one of my clients.Okay, I am fond of saying that. I'm not fond of it and I'm not proud of it, but my clients were Tyson Chicken, R.J.reynolds Tobacco, Anheuser Port, Jack Daniels and Smith Klein French Pharmaceutical. I work for everything that killed people.

Arnold00:23:17

I think the only ones.

Harry00:23:18

That's awful. Yeah. But the Jack Daniels people, I really enjoyed it. So those were Clank.

Arnold00:23:23

Gotcha. I love that. Kicking that barrel down. That's great.

Harry00:23:26

Yeah, the barrel one. That's the way they do. Yeah. Roll them into place.

Arnold00:23:30

Now, I noticed this down here, which doesn't look like one of what I would call your quote, unquote, normal kinds of pieces. Is this like a personal piece?

Harry00:23:39

No, that's Doug Flutie's hand when he was 12ft tall. What? Yeah. Wow. And I decided to just keep it.

Arnold00:23:46

Do you ever do things other than like animals and busts or people figures, Creative thing or.

Harry00:23:52

Yeah, some of the stuff inside. There's a sculpture of Walt Whitman in there. H o Maker. When I was doing stuff for myself. But doing bronzes for yourself is an expensive enterprise.It's one of the rhythms that not many people dabble in it.

Arnold00:24:07

Yeah. It's probably why you draw so much then, right?

Harry00:24:09

Yeah. Drawing is easy. Chisels are cheaper. Yes.The guy that influenced me most because of his way I ended up drawing was a guy named Howard Brody, who I first became aware of him during the Patty Hearst trial and to the courtroom artist. But he had been a combat artist in the Marines.

Arnold00:24:28

Wow.

Harry00:24:29

And just extraordinarily powerful. Very quick sketches. And that's what I love doing. If you go through that book, you'll.

Arnold00:24:36

You'll see he did one for you. As I remember the story, you were younger and you saw.

Harry00:24:41

That's Bill Malden. Okay. And that's inside as well.

Arnold00:24:44

Okay. I'm getting those guys mixed up.

Harry00:24:46

Yeah. But they're similar. They were both worked in World War II.

Arnold00:24:48

Okay.

Harry00:24:49

But Brody, everything he did had movement and power, and you could read the emotion in it.

Arnold00:24:56

And where does that come from?

Harry00:24:57

I don't know. The only things that make me cry are things that are done extraordinarily well. You see something happening that is a once in a lifetime thing.An immense defiance or immense courage or once you facility with anything, a singer. It's like I went to the Kentucky Derby. I love horses, obviously, and Jack Daniels being my client. Brown Foreman had a box right at the finish line.

Arnold00:25:20

Oh, wow.

Harry00:25:20

And I was thinking, God, this is great. And then I heard down the stretch they come and the chairs well up my eyes. I couldn't see it saying. But it's those kinds of moments.If you're doing representational artwork, you want to have that moment captured, even if it's a moment of stillness. That drawing of the guy up there with the gun here. Yeah.

Arnold00:25:42

Yes.

Harry00:25:42

The cigarette hanging out of his mouth and everything else that's about as detailed as I ever get. But it does capture a moment.

Arnold00:25:50

It does.

Harry00:25:51

This is my favorite piece of artwork that I ever produce in three dimensions or two dimensions. That was done in about a minute and a half on the plane of Reed. Two guys slogging through the mud to get back to our little base.That was just a quill pen and spit on a little piece of paper.

Arnold00:26:09

Wow. Sometimes when I will look at a piece of art, whether it's in 3D or 2D, they talk to me.

Harry00:26:17

Yeah.

Arnold00:26:17

It speaks to me.

Harry00:26:18

When I was little, I would go spend time with my grandmother because my mother taught school. My father was working with Shield Mill and she had no. Obviously no television or anything, but there were a whole bunch of pictures on them.And she would sit and tell make up stories about the pictures and they made a great impact on it. This one is really going to be cool. We just finished. This is going to be at Jefferson Barra.

Arnold00:26:44

Yeah.

Harry00:26:44

Which is where I will be eventually.

Arnold00:26:47

That's right in the middle of circle.

Harry00:26:48

Yeah.

Arnold00:26:49

That'll be wonderful.

Harry00:26:50

This is my father. I did a painting him.

Arnold00:26:52

Oh, there's the Malden there.

Harry00:26:54

Yeah. I had a brown paper bag that my. I bicycled from University City down to the Loop.Got a streetcar all the way downtown, walked to the Admiral and was going to take a cruise on the Admiral with my lunch. And I saw Bill Malden. I don't know how old I was, 12 or something like that. And I said, Mr. Malden, you're my hero.He dumped my food out and spread out the bag and drew Willie.

Arnold00:27:17

That's crazy. So you still ride in your free time?

Harry00:27:20

I do. And anne, who is 12 years my junior, still competes and wins.

Arnold00:27:26

Wow.

Harry00:27:26

And horse shows. Basically all I do is, well, just trail riding and stuff like that.

Arnold00:27:31

But that's fun. That's exercise.

Harry00:27:34

Yeah. It's good to keep this ancient body moving. I actually bought the Appendix quarter horse because he was only 15:1.Most of our horses were 16:3 or 17 hands. And getting down from those.

Arnold00:27:46

That's a.

Harry00:27:47

Is a jar.

Arnold00:27:48

Get a little ladder.

Harry00:27:49

Keep getting up with 15:1.

Arnold00:27:50

Not too bad. When did you transition to being a full time sculptor?

Harry00:27:54

The transition from. From just drawing for fun, which started when I was master foxhound at Bridal Spoon.

Arnold00:28:00

Okay.

Harry00:28:01

And so started doing those foxhounds and my marketing career. I had a pretty successful company for 13 years.And then Ann and I decided that even if we starved, it was a lot more fun to make a living doing artwork. It started to transition in, like, late 70s, and the equality of income was starting like a 1990 and then 1997. It was all artwork and.

Arnold00:28:27

And you never looked back?

Harry00:28:29

No, it was. And it's a nice thing because 80% of what I do has come in over the transom. People call, I want a statue of this. And you do it 20%. I compete for it.Either I'm requested. Like the sculpture of the director of the zoo we just did last year. Okay. They had, I think, eight artists competing for that.

Arnold00:28:48

Wow.

Harry00:28:49

And you send in your qualifications, you do drawings, you do whatever. And they make a determination. You win some, you lose some. Fair.But the nice thing about sculpture is every time you put one up, it's like a billboard.

Arnold00:28:59

Absolutely.

Harry00:28:59

And if the people like it, like I said, most people are in the market for sculptures once or maybe twice in their career. And the cardinal thing has been fantastic because 40,000 people 80 times a year pass those things.And one of them, like the athletic director at Boston College who came here to watch the Red Sox play, said, oh, we want to snatch a Doug Flutie. I like the way this guy does it. So.

Arnold00:29:23

Wow.

Harry00:29:24

He asked the Cardinals who did those, and that's how I got that job. The Cardinals are repeat clients. The Bruins are repeat clients. There's Nacogdoches, Texas, I think I've got six statues down there.Seven statues down there. I've got stuff at 17 different stadiums. There aren't that many sculptors that do it nationally and actually make a living at it.Of Chicago does a lot of sports figures.You know, there are a few others, not many, and I'm really lucky is that half my work is like history and just people that have done things that half as athletic at better rate mortgage.

Arnold00:29:58

We love talking to people about mortgages. If you are researching house hunting, ready to buy or refinancing, it's time for a better mortgage experience at better rate mortgage.A better rate is just the beginning. Better Rate Mortgage.com housing lender.Have you seen your technique evolve or what you expect as the end product kind of change over the course of your career?

Harry00:30:18

If you're any good, you've got a. You've got an indication of what you like it to end up looking like.And when I give the occasional lecture to our students and things is 80% of what you produce as an artist is good representation of your work. 10% you wish you could have back. And 10% is so good. You can't believe. How the hell did I do that?

Arnold00:30:43

Yeah, where did that come from?

Mark00:30:44

Yeah, where did that come from? So that's pretty. Pretty good, Mark, if you can do that.

Arnold00:30:48

But you were talking about that one that you kind of. As your best piece.

Harry00:30:52

Yeah.

Arnold00:30:52

That you did in the least amount.

Harry00:30:54

Of Couple of minutes. Yeah.

Arnold00:30:55

Yeah.

Harry00:30:56

And that's because if you think about it, I can only speak for representational artists, but I will also guarantee you that even guys like Roscoe Color Field Painting worked his tail off to really understand how those colors would interact and how he could get them on a canvas. So if you're going to be successful, it's 80% work. In other words, just doing it.And thanks to the fact that I'd been drawing since I was 4 years old, that automatically connect your eye to your hand to your brain, and you work automatically.

Arnold00:31:29

You don't think.

Harry00:31:30

Yeah, it's exactly the same as being an athlete in the. If a tennis player thinks about how he's going to hit a backhand, he's screwed. It's an automatic. It's an entire right brain exercise.

Arnold00:31:43

A muscle memory.

Harry00:31:44

Yeah, it's a muscle memory, but it's a muscle memory that involves the eye, the brain, and the hand all working together at once. And for instance, I can listen to audiobooks, which I do all the time while I'm sculpting perfectly fine.If I have to make a measurement, I have to turn it off. But this part is so automatic and so independent of what I'm listening to that it's not multitasking. It's just using different parts of the brain.And it actually helps me because I don't start saying, where does that eye go? You're just.

Arnold00:32:12

Yeah, you're cruise control.

Harry00:32:14

Yeah.

Arnold00:32:14

You're automatic pilot. You listen to music at all while you're.

Harry00:32:17

Oh, yeah, sure.

Arnold00:32:18

Okay. What kind of music do you like?

Harry00:32:20

It varies. Some classical, but a lot of it Americana. Now, I don't know if you heard of this kid J. Chessy Wells. No. Play him sometime. He's a new Bob Dylan.Really very good. But Guy Clark, all those guys.

Arnold00:32:34

Does it vary with what you listen to musically or a book based upon what you're sculpting at the time?

Harry00:32:41

No. Okay. Like I said, it's completely separate. Okay. I go from biographies, historical fiction, thrillers, anything like that.

Arnold00:32:51

It's a great way to pass time, too.

Harry00:32:53

Yeah, it's a great way to read a lot of books. I'm a big fan of reading. I give a talk to Marines every quarter that are having a hard time adjusting to civilian life.And the huge advantage we have now in this day and age and it's disappearing, which is odd, is that if you were in the Middle Ages, you lived one life. If. If you were lucky, you were on this planet for 4,000 a week and then gone.We're in a situation that thanks to book, we can experience thousands of lives and how people thought about things. And it changes the way you think.

Arnold00:33:27

About things and go places and not even have to leave your house.

Harry00:33:29

Carl Sagan said, it's a time machine and it does help you. It makes you a better citizen.

Arnold00:33:34

You have a favorite period of history in American history?

Harry00:33:37

No, I love all history. I think ancient history sometimes is actually more instructive than current history.

Arnold00:33:43

That's true.

Harry00:33:44

I very seldom get starstruck. I enjoyed Chuck Berry's company. I played golf with Gazi Smiths and all that. Good. It was. It's fun to meet these people.They don't make statues of dull people. And in 99% of the cases, they're very forthcoming, very outgoing. Destroy their company. We went to the funeral of Cliff Hill in Washington D.C.he was the Secret Service agent that jumped on the back of Kennedy's car and he died at age 93. His wife asked us to come and she was thinking of making a statue of that for the new Secret Service headquarters.

Arnold00:34:16

Wow.

Harry00:34:17

So she asked us to go to the funeral. Whether anything comes of that or not.It was intriguing to go to the funeral because it was at the National Cathedral and you heard the National Choir Frederick Hart sculpture. The frieze on the front of that thing is incredible. Yeah. And. But the. One of the attendees there was Anthony Blinken.And I thought, God, I would love just to shake his hand and thank him for what he tried to do. He re put together the alliances that were shaky after.

Arnold00:34:44

Right.

Harry00:34:44

80 years. And I went up to just to shake his hands and we ended up talking for about 20 minutes. I was, oh, I just got died of starstruckness. Yeah.

Arnold00:34:54

Yeah.

Harry00:34:54

Because he's an intelligent, extraordinarily erudite and caring individual. He said he put 3 million miles on the plane while he worked for Biden.

Arnold00:35:03

My God.

Harry00:35:04

And traveling back and forth. And he looks a lot younger at the funeral than he did when he was working. Yeah. He could stress work in his death. But one of the things.Back to the conversation we're learning from history, he started talking about parallels of the current situation. And I said, in a way, it almost resembles the Bronze Age collapse, where everything was working well.1200 BC, the Egyptians were training with the Assyrians, with the Hittites, Mycenaean Greeks. Everybody was happy. And then it all just a confluence of bad actors happened all at once and it just collapsed.The very idea that you can make decisions that affect your own life.

Arnold00:35:43

Yes.

Harry00:35:44

Is an amazing privilege. Nobody believes 90% of the world's population is born on a dot, and they're not going to move off that dot.You have the obligation as a human being, if you have the opportunity, take a look and see. What can I do to change my life for the better or other people's lives for the better? Yaval Harari, he wrote a book called Sapiens. Really good book.Short history of the human Race. He's an Israeli thinker. He basically gives a picture of civilization. Things are better now than they have ever been.

Arnold00:36:15

Absolutely, yeah.

Harry00:36:15

In the Middle Ages, the second leading cause of death other than death and childbirth was murder, because there was no rule of law to control it. You didn't like your neighbor, you bonked him on the head. Civilization has been progressing in fits and starts.And he said, normally if things are going wrong, like Hitler and Mussolini and that gaggle of dictators. Yeah, it takes a catastrophe to set things right. World War II was a catastrophe. It set things right back on the path. He said, I'm afraid now.He says that if it begins to fall off the path again, catastrophe will be so big it will not be recoverable. So the damage will be irrevocable.

Arnold00:36:55

David French had a conversation about how there was always some kind of, I don't want to say a moral imperative, but a moral cleansing. And then we fall down. And then there was some kind of moral thing that happened. We fall down.

Harry00:37:06

That's exactly what he was saying.

Arnold00:37:07

Right.

Harry00:37:07

You know, slowly proceeding graph, but in the end result, we are equipped with the same brain we had a hundred thousand years ago, but we are also equipped with massive amounts of destructive technology that they didn't have a hundred thousand years ago. So it's a very scary time.

Arnold00:37:23

Going back to a baseball analogy, when Mark McGuire signed his last contract with the Cardinal. He goes, how much more money do you need? And where's the point wet, you know, how many billions of dollars or billions?

Harry00:37:34

Yeah. The first mistake, I mean, you can take this all the way back to the Quahito Indians who had like debit cards that were running potlatches.Who could give the most away was the music. They started. As soon as money becomes the scorecard, I'M not saying money is bad. I like being able to pay my bills all the time.I like being able to have the.

Arnold00:37:53

To do with what you want.

Harry00:37:54

Yeah, but if money becomes the scorecard, it begins to own you.Great story about Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller, who were very close friends and they were invited as the token cultural attendees to a hedge fund party at on Long Island. And they arrived, all the ice sculptures and the champagne and the caviar and the orchestra playing.And Monica turned to Heller and said, joe, this guy makes more money in a half an hour than your entire book Run Dead Once Life. And Heller said, yeah, I know, but I have something he'll never have. He said, what's that? Enough.It is staggering how many people I know chase the buck for no reason whatsoever.

Arnold00:38:36

Now they're not happy. Yeah, you can't buy happiness.

Harry00:38:39

I'm really lucky I had enough money to buy this place because I happen to like solitude.

Arnold00:38:44

This is very solid. It's very peaceful. I really enjoy it because of where I live right now. It's very noisy. You know, it can be quiet on occasion.

Harry00:38:53

But same token, I was very happy living in the depths of New York where there wasn't a silent moment. But.

Arnold00:39:00

Yeah, but that's different times of life, though, isn't it?

Harry00:39:03

It's different times of life, but I think I could live in New York now and stagger down the street, still have a bit time. But no, and it's.The other nice thing about my job is I do meet incredibly interesting people who are doing interesting things and have had the culmination of their life be some kind of excellence. Yeah. Other than money. I've never done a statue of somebody simply because he had a lot of money.

Arnold00:39:25

And there's everyday people that do that. Exactly what you're talking about. They do a very good job, whether it's being a custodian or working in a factory. And they're.We always tend to, I think, exalt the people that we see on television. We've had a little brief conversation about that. People, but people who do a really good job.

Harry00:39:45

There's a great Theodore Roosevelt quote, secret to happiness, Be something, be anything, but just make sure you're a good one. And I. I feel that, by the way, best use of money for me is I am. The most terrifying three words in the English language for me are do it yourself.I love it when I can pay somebody who knows, who's asked from a hole in the ground to do something that I don't Know how to do.

Arnold00:40:07

Or don't want to do or don't want to. Don't have the time to do.

Harry00:40:10

Yeah.

Arnold00:40:10

Yeah, I guess.

Harry00:40:12

And like I said, you got four, 500 years tops on this planet. You want to waste a week re plumbing the basement. Yeah. When you don't know how to do it in the first place. If.But if you're a really good plumber and you solve somebody's problem and make them happy, that's huge. Yeah. Great line from Henderson, the Rain King. A great book. It talk. Talking about priorities, how you live your life was. Henderson was a.He was an investment manager. Very successful, 50 years old, hugely rich, very unhappy. And there's. It's a fun book.So he goes to Africa and screws everything up for a lot of people and. But he says, just once in my life. Once in my life, I'd like to look back at something I did and say, good for me.That's what you strive for every day. And justifiable pride is not a sin, it's a motivation. Yeah.

Arnold00:41:02

Is there a something that you've done that. It's a twofold question.And you don't have to give the specific detail of it, but is there something that you've done that came very easily for you, and then something that you really struggle with getting the final product done?

Harry00:41:20

Every one of these things was struggle. Even the thing I said, it took two minutes. That wasn't easy. It was. There was a piece of good fortune there.In other words, a lot of happy accidents happened all at once because I had an idea of what I wanted to do. It just happened. But all of the preparation to get to that point was a lot of work. When I was 11 and 12 and 13 and 14, drawing.And I draw every day, constantly be disappointed what I turned out. I would work on it and be terrible.And it wasn't until I was about 20 that I started consistently turning out things that were close to what I imagined. And the quick sketches, to me are the quintessence of what I do for a living. You know, if you can capture that moment and if you can have. And it's.The difficult part with a sculpture is it takes nine months to a year to make one of these things. If you can make one, and it ends up having the same spontaneity that a sketch took 10 minutes to do, then you're. That's really something. Yeah. Yeah.You're working on it for months closely.

Arnold00:42:26

To keep that excitement going.

Harry00:42:28

Yeah. Yeah. That's why you don't want to work too long in any one period of time, because you're. Most important part of my day is the first three minutes.I walk into the studio and I look at what I've done. You see what's there and what's not there.But after a while, your eye gets not tired, but you begin to hypnotize yourself, saying, oh, yeah, that's good.

Arnold00:42:49

I remember something Benton did when he was doing the piece for the Grand Ole Opry, which I believe was his last piece. And he always liked to do the big canvas. He would come back in and he would never sign until he was completely satisfied.And this is always something interesting I find about artists is they always want to tweak it a little bit. He finally went out and he was content with it. He signed it, and that's when he died. He had a heart attack.Do you ever have a time when, you know, yeah, this is done, or I'd like to work a little bit more on this one, or.

Harry00:43:18

Yeah, there's a point at which you reach that diminishing return, the saturation point? Yeah, I might be, as the thing is, leaving in Vlad's truck to go down and make running down to get one. One last week.But, yeah, it generally doesn't make any difference. If you come in one morning and look and say, yeah, it's done, we'll sign it.

Arnold00:43:36

Do you have a place you normally sign that's consistent?

Mark00:43:38

No. Somewhere unobtrusive.

Arnold00:43:41

Some artists do this. They do their little signature. I know Revis did this. He'd always. He'd do a peace sign and. Yeah, do anything like that.

Mark00:43:49

No, the one piece of advice I got from Marcel Salinas, who was. Who gave me painting lessons in the 90s, he said, if you make something good, for God's sake, sign it so they can read it.

Arnold00:44:01

That's true.

Harry00:44:02

And so I block letter. My signature is block letter Weber.

Arnold00:44:06

That's the signature that makes sense.

Harry00:44:08

He also gave me a piece of advice saying, remember, Harry, even the masters produced, so don't be too. Don't beat up on yourself too much.

Arnold00:44:17

And I think that you've been doing this long enough to know and you've seen a progression of your work that the things that you're producing, you wouldn't be doing them if you weren't confident that how they were going to turn.

Harry00:44:27

Yeah, the only thing I'm confident of is they're a good representation of what I wanted to get done. If somebody else doesn't like them, that's their. A Lot of really good sculptors. Like, they're a lot of really good guitar player.The three things you have three legged stool. 80% is work, 10% is talent. 10% is pure luck. I believe in the gladwell thing of 10,000 hours. Do anything for 10,000 hours, you get pretty good at it.Talent separates the one with 10,000 hours who get it just a little bit better than that guy that's competent. It's beyond confidence. It has some life to it. It has some vigor and style. And then the third component is pure luck.And you can't get by without all three.So you've got to put in the work, have the talent to begin with and then be very lucky and recognize when you are getting some luck and take advantage of it.

Arnold00:45:18

That's true. Do you ever struggle to come up with a creative aspect or have a roadblock working?

Harry00:45:23

No, I.Almost every other enterprise in my life, whether it's driving a car, playing tennis or riding a horse, I get sometimes like that artwork I've done so long that I'm pretty confident and I get to problem. But I recognize them as problems, not failures. It's a thing I've got to take care of, but I'm perfectly capable of taking care of. Okay.And I guess the other advantage I have is because all my money comes from clients now Self suffer galleries. And I do, but it's a tiny bit.I am not a prima donna and I am very oriented toward pleasing the client and not presenting any problems to them, which is why I used to hate things. And when I was in business where people would nickel and dime me to death. And so we put out a bid and we stick to it. And you win some, you lose some.Sometimes you put in more work than you get paid for, sometimes a little less.

Arnold00:46:18

But it all washes out.

Harry00:46:20

It makes it easy for the client. This is how much you're going to be paying and this is when you're going to be paying it.

Arnold00:46:25

Yeah.

Harry00:46:25

But no, I would say some pieces are bigger challenges than others. Like the Bobby Orr piece with massive challenge in terms of how we were going to get that. Yeah.But I think both Vlad and I have great confidence and we pull it off. Pull it off.

Arnold00:46:38

It's great to have somebody like that that you've worked with.

Harry00:46:40

Oh, yeah. I couldn't do it without him and I don't think he'd have a business without me.

Arnold00:46:45

And he's down in Soulard still.

Harry00:46:47

Sue Lord. Yeah.

Arnold00:46:47

Okay.

Harry00:46:48

And I've worked with him for 30 years and I yet to see him lose his temper. And we've had a lot of stuff to lose our temper about that. Speak highly, and I create the problems he solves. Yeah.For the engineering side, I know you gave the 80%.

Arnold00:47:03

10%. 10%. Any other advice that you would give someone who loves to draw or is thinking about that they have an inclination to be a sculptor or an artist?

Harry00:47:13

Yeah, a number of pieces of advice. Number one, an art history course is probably more valuable than a fine arts course. Look at what everybody else has done.Don't copy it, but find what you think really is effective for you. And like I said, everybody has their own definition of what art is.The only area of art that I write off, and this is personal opinion, is conceptual art, to me, is nothing more than big bumper stickers that, you know, even if ostensibly they're supposed to say something, but it's. It is like a bumper sticker. It's just a clever, whimsical hunk of stuff. I have yet to see a piece of conceptual art. That is art. It's just.But I do like abstract stuff. Like, I love Roscoe. I love Kandinsky. Yeah. But those guys are artists. They speak to you from whatever medium they're doing.So, yeah, I would say, first of all, take a good art history course or read a good art history book and get familiar with what other people have been doing, and then develop in your mind what you would like to produce and then work toward producing it. And that's tough. You'll see the sketchbook there. I. There's a whole bunch of different styles.Styles vary by the implement I have on the hand, how many drinks I've had, how much time I have, and who I want to emulate. So, number one, look at a lot of art.In taking a fine arts course, usually you are subject to one or two guys teaching who have their own set of skills. But it's like going to a book club where there's only one book, Open it up, look at a lot of stuff. And then for representational artists, any.Anybody that's doing anything close to representational art, even like Adam Wong, there's a guy you ought to talk to. See that he saw there.

Arnold00:48:58

Oh, wow, that's really nice.

Harry00:49:00

Now look him up, and he'd be a good interview for you sometime.

Arnold00:49:02

Adam Long.

Harry00:49:03

Adam Long, yeah.

Arnold00:49:04

Local.

Harry00:49:05

Yeah. And he just picks up driftwood and leaves and look at the thing from the front.

Arnold00:49:10

That's crazy. That is crazy. You have to have a real good sense of perspective on.

Harry00:49:18

Yeah. And he's he has got the 80 work, 10% talent, and he is just missing that 10% of look. And he's a really good representational artist.Second piece of advice is if you're in representational art, draw from life as much as you can. Don't draw from pictures, don't copy a photograph. All art, even if it's representational, is an abstraction. It's an abstraction of life.

Arnold00:49:40

Right?

Harry00:49:41

So make your own method of abstracting that life. And the only way you're going to do that is drawing from life. And, you know, like I said, doctor's office is anywhere you are, sketch and draw.And every Friday afternoon there's a whole bunch of artists that I know get together down on Grabway there. I hire a live model. You could all sit around, draw, and basically at each other's work. But it's fun. That's my major recreation, is still drawing.Boy, oh boy. I. It's a tough, tough field to make a living. Like, a tiny percent of musicians make their living as musicians.A tiny percent of writers, 90% of athletes, a tiny percent of artists. And they're lucky. Like, Adam is a fantastic artist and he's got his own style on his own. He needs to get lucky. Tell him I think you want him.

Arnold00:50:26

I will.

Harry00:50:27

And other than that, just keep working away at it until whatever you produce looks like what you want it to be. Don't get close, don't. Don't copy what somebody else has done.Frame that picture in your mind of what you want to get on the piece of paper or in that clay or whatever.

Arnold00:50:42

I'm a musician. What a composer puts on the score, they reveal all their technique right there. And you can actually look at it and copy it.But it's the interpretation of making that black and white into a whole nother.

Harry00:50:56

That's why they're conductors.

Arnold00:50:57

Exactly. And everybody's version of Shostakovich's Fifth is going to be a little different.Like you said, you can copy something interpreting or feeling the music at a given time. Or do you understand the time in which he was writing and why he wrote it?

Harry00:51:10

That's getting into the whole new criticism idea with what the author had in mind. This is what I can get out of it. I'm more of an originalist in that thing. I like to know what he had in mind, what he. But.

Arnold00:51:19

And a lot of times what's printed by the publisher, like dynamic or tempo markings is not really what the music says.

Harry00:51:25

And it's a very stringent area of art, is Music composed because of that very nature. If you want to pass it along, you pass it along in a printed form. James Taylor didn't know how to read.

Arnold00:51:35

Music, but he knew how to write.

Harry00:51:37

Yeah. And he can play along with the band. Because in that case not just the hand, the. The brain and the hand and the instrument all going.It's fascinating to me. And when they've studied how musicians learn pieces and it's. It starts out very left brain. No matter how fastful they are reading music.It is a left brain exercise.

Arnold00:51:58

That's correct.

Harry00:51:59

And. But when it's performed, it's a right brain exercise.

Arnold00:52:03

That's correct.

Harry00:52:03

It just happens.

Arnold00:52:04

It's the technical aspect we've always talked about when you move from being a technician to a musician. And it's the practice, it's the 80%. You're doing your things here and then it's there.And you can actually focus on what is this piece of music actually doing.

Harry00:52:18

Yeah. And I. There are a couple of. One of the things I love. Old fashioned boogie woogie, you know. And those guys that continually just riff on things.

Arnold00:52:28

Oh yeah.

Harry00:52:28

And if there are only a couple of people I would have liked to have been other than myself. I would have loved to have been George Gershwin.

Arnold00:52:36

And he's written some unbelievable kinds of things.

Harry00:52:39

I know. And he stole. Well, that's why I said to study our history. You. God. I'd like to be able to do that. But I'd like to be able to do that in my own style.Is it my own way of expressing? And I'm sorry. I don't know. There's old fuddy duddy coming out. But the late 30s and the 40s, great music. Fantastic music.The late 60s and 70s, fantastic music.

Arnold00:53:03

I agree with you.

Harry00:53:04

What we've got now is that even goes for the jazz. I love jazz music. I love Jimmy Jeffrey.

Arnold00:53:09

I was a big Charlie Parker fan. Yeah.

Harry00:53:11

Charlie Parker.

Arnold00:53:12

Yeah.

Harry00:53:12

Did you ever see Whiplash? That movie?

Arnold00:53:13

I have seen that.

Harry00:53:14

It was a great thing. Yeah. It's the whole idea that he recognized that this kid was a super talent. Yeah. And he just beat him to death.He told the story about Charlie Parker. There's a great line there where she's talking in the bar. He said. And Charlie Parker got up. Play a set. And he did okay. It was pretty awful.He was halfway through the set and he was. He was doing okay. And then I forgot who it was. Threw a symbol in his head. Yeah. Said get off the stage. And because it wasn't as good as he could do.And he said, he could have said, okay, thanks, son, good job. And he said, that's one of the most destructive things on earth. You can say to an artist, good job. You know, you got to be better than that.The end of that movie is so good. It was. It's a good old fashioned movie, but the very end of it, he's playing his ass off.I forgot the name of the piece that he was doing, but obviously doing it great. And the only time Simmons looks down, just this hit of a smile and that's the end of the movie. Yeah, yeah.

Arnold00:54:19

I think we've done kids a disservice by saying to them, yeah, good job, good job. And it maybe wasn't. And then there's the other extreme where you're just totally berating them.

Harry00:54:29

And that was the tension in the whole movies. Did he destroy him or make him right? And there's a point at which he could have destroyed him, but it I so far knock on anything theologically sound.I haven't had anybody come up and say, oh, that's, that's terrible, but yeah, that would hurt.

Arnold00:54:47

And some people need to be brought down to bring them back up when they think they're really good, but they haven't seen somebody who's really good. I think a high school football or basketball players or baseball players when they go to college and then everybody is that good.Or then when you go to the pros and you're like, wow, everybody's moving really fast here. Wow, It's.What percentage of people who play basketball in high school or football in high school actually get to college and then get from college to the pros who.

Harry00:55:12

Actually start that tiny percent.

Arnold00:55:14

And a big fish in a small pond and then you become. You're the small fish in the big pond.

Harry00:55:18

If you're a really good tennis player, thank God you can play against really good tennis players for the rest of your life and enjoy it, knowing that you're never going to be the top one. Roddick or anybody like that. Yeah, yeah. No, yeah. And to be able to recognize that there is that level. Yeah.I'm never going to be a Rodan or anything like that, but I'm going to be able to please myself and I'm pretty successful.

Arnold00:55:40

I think you're very successful, Harry. And I think part of it to me is pushing yourself as hard as we've talked about and being confident and then being satisfied.Because I think sometimes people, they're not satisfied with where they are. They're constantly driving Themselves. Or they're constantly trying to be the person who's like, the number one rather than accept where they are.

Harry00:56:00

My definition of my own success is I'm pretty good at what I do, and what I do, I like. There are a lot of people that are really excellent artists, and you don't separate them by saying, he's better than him or he's better than him.They are different artists, and they are really good at what they do. I could never do what Adam Long does. I don't think he could ever do what I do, which is fine. That's the way it should be.And that of being a musician. Wasn't that a fascinating scene when Mozart is dying in Amadeus?When he's composing a symphony and Salieri is transcribing it, he can't even get up out of bed.

Arnold00:56:32

Mozart was.

Harry00:56:33

And now the wood wins.

Arnold00:56:35

All these composers, even Beethoven, with. Even with his deafness, devising something where he could hear the vibration and.

Harry00:56:41

Right. Yeah.

Arnold00:56:41

Just what's going on in their mind. It's almost like it's got to spill out. This is my mind spilling out onto the score.

Harry00:56:48

Yeah. There's a great teacher, Greenberg, on music, talks about Western classical music.He's part of the great courses, but he talks constantly about what was going through their mind when they wrote these things, what they were getting, trying to get. Staggering stuff. I love anything that's done well. The guy that built that wall did it in a day and a half. Yeah. You did great.

Arnold00:57:08

I want to thank you for your time.

Harry00:57:10

Oh, I'm sorry.

Arnold00:57:10

No, don't apologize. I try to stay out of the way. We're on your turf here. When people come into the studio, I say, we're going to have a conversation in the living room.Like we're sitting on the couch.

Harry00:57:20

I've enjoyed talking to you.

Arnold00:57:22

I appreciate that.

Harry00:57:23

A lot of it wasn't about artwork, but that's fine.

Arnold00:57:25

But that's what it kind of imparts into your work. You can't separate those things.

Harry00:57:29

No. And, you know, in my off time now I'm writing my memoirs, which. Really cool.Everybody lives their lives in specific moments, and those specific moments are rooted in reality. You knew when that happened. But then your brain makes a narrative to connect the moments that might not be exactly truthful, but it's close enough.It's close enough.

Arnold00:57:49

Mark, what a privilege. Oh, yeah. To talk to Harry. And had a great time. We were moving around. We were in his house. We went to the studio. We were walking in a hallway.We were outside on a covered porch watching the birds. Was a beautiful set. And he's just a tremendous individual. Last time I was at Busch Stadium.

Mark00:58:08

I knew you were doing the interview. I looked at the sculptures that are down there, and they're all signed H. Weber. H. Weber. Every one of them. It's amazing how he's done this.And how old did you say he is?

Arnold00:58:20

He is. I believe he's 83.

Mark00:58:22

That's crazy, because he sounds like he's a young fella.

Arnold00:58:25

He does.

Mark00:58:26

He. He's quite a gem from St. Louis.

Arnold00:58:28

And what he has contributed to our nation and internationally. There's things all over the country and Pretty amazing, man. He never went to art school. He just started drawing when he was 4 years old.And the rest is history.

Mark00:58:41

In his heart, in his soul.

Arnold00:58:43

And it comes right out. He pours right into it.

Mark00:58:45

Yeah. That's great. Great interview.

Arnold00:58:46

Thank you. Thank you. I want to thank our listeners.If you've enjoyed this episode, you can listen to additional shows@stluntune.com consider leaving a review on our website, Apple Podcasts, Podchaser, or your preferred podcast platform. Your feedback helps us reach more listeners and continue to grow.Want to thank Bob Berthisel for our theme music, our sponsor, Better Rate Mortgage, our guest, Harry Weber, and co host Mark Langston. And we thank you folks for being a part of our community of curious minds. St.Louis in tune is a production of Motif Media Group and the US Radio Network. Remember to keep seeking, keep learning, walk worthy, and let your light shine. For St. Louis in tune, I'm Arnold Stricker.