French Art Network

Artist Paul Wegner is blessed with a musician's soul, a master craftsman's heart, an athlete's drive, a dancer's sense of balance and movement, and an engineer's mind. The unique combination of these traits has enabled him to create a remarkable and diverse body of distinctive, moving, and meaningful artworks over the past 20+ years.

Paul Wegner credits his parents, and the variety of people he met as his family moved about the country for shaping his life as an artist. His mother taught art classes and his father was a career Naval officer who was also an artist. After a back injury squashed Paul's dream of becoming a professional athlete, he began studying business in college in Los Angeles but soon found his passion in the arts and turned to graphic design. Then he answered an ad for a sculptor's apprentice, and his life changed forever.

The ad led Wegner to the sculptor Bijan, and the two began a journey of explo ration that would last five years. Wegner concentrated on developing sculptural concepts on paper and then creating methods to execute the designs (a practice he continues to this day.) Bijan and Wegner pioneered several techniques, including a unique process for etching metals on two sides and working them into three-dimensional pieces. From the experience, which he credits for its educational value beyond schooling, Wegner gained a new way of thinking about the medium of sculpture, and the materials that can be used in its' pursuit.

Paul and his wife moved near Washington, D.C. after his apprenticeship, where he began to develop his own style apart from Bijan. Those first sculptures were mostly figurative works that depicted Americana - a theme that serves as a foundation to almost all of Wegner's works, and reflects his deep-seated patriotism. This led to his first major commission.

It came from the National Geographic Society, which was seeking an artist to do a series of life-sized sculptures of prehistoric man for a permanent exhibit. The success of the exhibit led to other commissions: ''Moravian People" figures for the Old Salem Museum in North Carolina, life-size sculptures of George and Martha Washington for the Mount Vernon Museum, an 8', welded-steel American Bald Eagle for the Grand Coulee Dam in Washington state, and the heroic bust of Admiral Rickover for the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland.

Wegner developed his trademark fragmenta tion style while working on the "Discover ing Prehistoric People" exhibition. Paul came across a book by American sculptor, and Rodin protégé, Malvina Hoffman containing photos of disassembled body castings and noticed that just a few pieces of a body could tell an entire story.

Perhaps the ultimate expression of the fragmented style has been Wegner's bronze depictions of classical, jazz, and blues musicians including Pete Fountain, Louis Armstrong, John Lee Hooker, and Billie Holiday. Paul's depiction of W.C. Handy sits in the First Heritage Museum, which appeared in the motion picture, The Firm. Currently, it is this design that is used as the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Blues Foundation in Memphis, TN. The success of these works, and others, has led to Wegner becoming a two-time recipient of the "Keeping the Blues Alive" award from this organization.