Statue-Casting Foundry Giving Stature To E. Oregon

JOSEPH, Ore. - The local cowboys and loggers thought Glenn Anderson was crazy when he started Valley Bronze with a book on foundries and a half-dozen people casting statues in the corner of a logging-truck repair shop.

Not any more.

"We gear up for their Friday payroll, and boy, do we cash checks!" says Keith Lytle, president of the Bank of Wallowa County.

In just nine years, Valley Bronze has turned into one of the nation's leading art foundries with 65 employees. It produces works large and small by world-class artists for millionaires' mansions, corporate headquarters and Japanese golf courses. Along the way, it has revived the economy of this town of 1,100 people in the remote northeastern corner of Oregon.

Folks walking down Main Street still have to watch out for horse manure, but storefronts that were empty just a few years ago have been snapped up as art galleries and studios. Artists are moving in and driving up the real-estate market. Three other foundries have spun off in the Wallowa Valley.

Artist David Manuel moved to town from Walla Walla in 1980 to be closer to the land claimed as home by Chief Joseph, the Nez Perce leader who made fools of the U.S. Army in a dramatic dash for freedom in 1877 before he surrendered just miles short of the Canadian border. The town, a towering peak and a creek are all named for him.

Manuel sold a set of three bronzes depicting Chief Joseph and two other Nez Perce leaders to Anderson, who was trying to retire after moving from La Pine, where he'd been in real estate. Anderson sold the bronzes for a nice profit.

The way Manuel remembers it, Anderson offered to build the foundry so Manuel wouldn't have to drive six hours to Portland to have his work cast in bronze. Anderson says Manuel was the one who talked him into it. The money from the bronzes went to starting the foundry in 1982.

"It just got big," Manuel says. He is known for his statues of the late actor John Wayne, as well as Native American pieces that draw from his $1 million collection of artifacts. His Western lawman commemorating the centennial of the U.S. Marshal Service is at the Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City.

The foundry got too big to be a hobby for Anderson. In 1988, he sold it to David Jackman, a lawyer who owned a cattle ranch in the north end of the county and had done some legal work for Valley Bronze. He brought Lyle Isaak in from Maiden Bronze outside Portland to be executive vice president.

Valley Bronze was helped by Joseph's spectacular location on the edge of the Eagle Cap Wilderness in the alpine splendor of the Wallowa Mountains.

Lytle estimates that several hundred sculptors, painters and other artists now live in the county of just 6,950 people. They bring in a vital influx of cash at a time when the logging and cattle grazing that built Joseph are being dragged down.

The foundry is one of the few enterprises that can compete nationally from a place like Joseph, Jackman says. Valley Bronze has found more success training local people to do the intricate work that transforms a clay sculpture into a monument of bronze than bringing in experienced hands.

"The ones we solicit in from other areas of the United States may have the foundry skills down," Isaak says, "but they haven't adapted well to the environment here - the long winters and remoteness. This is the frontier. Our gourmets must be cooks."

Dennis Brennan grew up on a local ranch owned by his grandfather, the late actor Walter Brennan, who also built the motel and opera house in town. Dennis Brennan was getting a bad back bending over to shoe horses and now sits down as he applies the subtle patinas that bring a bronze to life.

"It pays better than cowboying," Brennan says. "I'd rather put up with any artist than 20 below on a horse."

It also has a brighter future.

"With all the environmental stuff going on now," he says, "shutting down the logging and making it rough on ranchers to graze cattle on public lands, it's a boost to the local economy."

Lytle marvels at the way the artist colony has transformed the town.

"I can name a half-dozen buildings that were empty and now are occupied and up to code," he says.

One of them is occupied by Ramon Parmenter, who moved from Eugene five years ago and now works in what used to be a grocery store. He produces graceful sculptures of dancers and athletes that command prices of as much as $300,000 each.

"The whole building was empty, except for Bud's Hardware and a shirt store," says Parmenter's sister-in-law and gallery director, Nancy Parmenter. Her office is in what used to be the freezer.

She likes being able to live with small-town comforts while still getting recognition in the art world.

"We can go back to New York now to an art expo, and they say, `Oh, we know about Joseph.' "

Getting to places like New York isn't as hard as it might seem. A pretty 1 1/2-hour drive north takes Isaak to the airport in Lewiston, Idaho, where he can catch a commuter flight to hub airports.

Isaak says the classic 19th-century Western works of Frederick Remington and Charles Russell kept alive the idea of bronze sculpture in America, but now the medium is branching out and growing like never before.

"Monuments, large pieces, seem to be taking off not only in the United States, but also Japan, Europe, what I like to call the pleasure islands, like Hawaii, Tahiti - anywhere tourists are there seems to be a regeneration of monumental sculpture," Isaak says.

They include Chester Fields of Spokane, whose soaring eagles command prices of $600,000; Lorenzo Ghiglieri of Portland, whose work has been presented to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev; and George Carlson, president of the National Academy of Western Artists.

In the shop devoted to the big stuff, Isaak runs his hand across the bigger-than-life casting of a galloping mustang that is part of "The Freedom Horses" by Veryl Goodnight of Santa Fe, N.M. One of the six editions of this work will be kicking up rubble at the Berlin Wall.

"Tourists from Switzerland or England will be looking at this monument and have no idea it came from a little town in Eastern Oregon," Isaak says.