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Tim
Klabunde was born in Washington state in 1947. He spent his early
childhood watching his grandfather work in the cedar forests ear the
blue-collar fishing town of Aberdeen. A
stint in the Air Force taught Klabunde the skill of welding. He enjoyed
working with the fire and steel, but found that his maintenance job
often lacked imagination. So Klabunde began to experiment by playing
with shapes and making small sculptures. After
finishing his military, Klabunde attended the University of Minnesota.
He then purchased his first “steel horse” (a Harley-Davidson
motorcycle), and took off to see the world and discover his own place in
it, becoming both an observer and a student of Life. Klabunde
continued to weld, building bridges, repairing boxcars and taking on
other commercial welding jobs for money, while creating steel sculptures
for pleasure. In 1981 one of his pieces won an award at the Santa Fe
Festival of the Arts. Klabunde began to take his sculpting more
seriously. His work has been seen in public and private collections ever
since. From
ancient times, artists and alchemist have worked with the transformative
power of fire to create changes in form and substance. Klabunde sees
.himself as part of this lineage allowing the work to come through him. The
labor is hot and dirty, and steel is a weighty medium. Yet Klabunde
feels called to it, using flame and vision to ‘release the Soul of the
Earth’ and transform what was once flat and motionless into
graceful new energetic beings, dancing between Earth and Sky.
In
addition to enhancing our own gallery and sculpture garden, Klabunde’s
work can be seen in the book ‘Abstract Art’ by Ashman and Deats, and
at La Familia Medical Center, The New Mexico Academy of Math and
Science, and The Center for the Contemporary Arts, all in Santa Fe. His
work is also in many private collections throughout North America. |
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