'Construction with finesse'

Ben Pierce is not sure how he got on the road to becoming a sculptor, but a pair of Renaissance men definitely helped him with directions.

One has been dead for centuries, while the other is living.

Pierce creates public art, and his work accentuates the landscape in eight states, including a titled work that has been on display for nearly a year in Cape Girardeau. "Hesitant," near the corner of Fountain Street and Broadway, features one of his signature presentations of two steel beams and an oculus.

He's an artist of complex simplicity, capable of bending both metal and minds with a welding torch, turning pieces of steel into three-dimensional sculptures that stand as tall as 14 feet.

"Even though there's curves, there's straight lines," Pierce said, describing the composition of one of his current twisting projects. "To try to explain a piece to someone who is not a visual thinker, there's a lot of obstacles."

Artist Ben Pierce poses for a photo March 14 in Cape Girardeau.Andrew J. Whitaker

A 2002 graduate of Notre Dame Regional High School, Pierce obtained a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Southeast Missouri State in December 2012.

It was during a four-year stint in the Navy between the two that Pierce got a first-hand examination of the work of one of history's greatest artists. On a day off in Italy, he traveled to Rome and Vatican City and gazed upon Michelangelo's iconic work -- the Pieta. The large sculpture of the Madonna holding the corpse of Christ after the Crucifixion, a masterpiece completed in 1499, spanned the chasm of time.

"The marble is so smooth and slick and you could see the detail, like the way his hands reached out, the veins, the creases of the knuckles and the finger nails," said Pierce, a world away in his cold workshop on an overcast afternoon in Cape Girardeau. "Everything is just so well done, and I remember spending a lot of time there that day and looking at that."

For a man in his early 20s at the time and searching for direction, it made him question his own passions and pursuits.

He had always liked art, a doodler by nature, and he had always marveled at the blue-collar skills of his father, Steve, a third generation bricklayer.

"When somebody knows what they're doing, they make it look so easy," Pierce said about the skills of a mason. "My dad makes it look so easy."

While Michelangelo also was a master painter, Pierce's father also had the skills to do electrical work, carpentry and work on his own vehicles.

Nathan Pierce, his brother, also has pursued sculpture in the realm of public art -- he also has a piece on Broadway -- and Pierce said the hard work and skilled labor they were exposed to in their household were part of the dynamics.

"Sculpture is just construction with finesse, as I see it," Pierce said.

While he assisted his father at times, mostly doing grunt work in bricklaying jobs, he wanted to find his own path. He didn't realize it at the time, but a piece of the puzzle was put in place while assembling smokers at Ole Hickory Pits. He got a bite-size introduction to welding through tacking on parts. It would account for just two to five minutes out of his work day.

"I would just tack on the rod, the shaft, that the carousel sits on," Pierce said. "Just enough to know what it was about, but I didn't leave there with welding experience, really. Just enough to let me see what welding was all about. I wouldn't say I was skilled by any means."

He enrolled at Southeast, where he was undecided on a major but leaning toward pre-physical therapy.

While taking general liberal arts classes, he took "Drawing in Society," a class taught by Carol Horst.

"It had been so long since I had done any kind of drawing or any kind of creating, and taking that class, everything came back to me all at once, and I remembered how much I enjoyed it as a kid, and I remember seeing that statue in Italy, and so after that semester I changed my major to fine art," Pierce said.

A sculpture class later dialed in his career course.

A full-time student during the day, he took advantage of the school's welding apparatus in the metals workshop at night, often staying until 10 p.m. or midnight.

"It wasn't required, but based off my needs and my goals, that's what I wanted to do," Pierce said about working on his welding skills. "So I did it. The studio was open and available to me so I'd be in there working late."

He even ponied up the money for a welder despite tight financial conditions, which limited the physical scale of his work.

However, his final project included a 12-foot-tall piece titled "Growing Up." It contained two circles filled in by brick, a tribute to both his father and grandfather.

After graduating he took on jobs like surveillance at Isle Casino and security at Saint Francis Hospital to fund his large-scale public sculptures. While such jobs paid the bills, they also presented time constraints for constructing and delivering his sculptures.

"Sometimes they weren't able to accommodate me to do that, so I would just say, 'Well, here's my two-week notice because I've got to make sculptures.'" Pierce said. "I don't know if you would call it persistent or foolish, it was that important to me."

Public art, an alternative to gallery art, has been his focus. The works tend to be larger, so as not to get lost in vast public spaces.

"I think the whole idea behind public art is taking it out of the gallery and putting it right in people's front yards or backyards, where they feel comfortable approaching it and looking at it and forming an opinion about it," Pierce said. "That's the benefit of public art -- it's everybody's art, and not just people that want to go in a gallery."

His sculptures like "Propensity," "Wounded," "Steady," "Unsure," "Dissident" and "Triumph" incorporate the oculus -- a four-piece colored cylinder -- with steel beams in varying formations, and can be found along downtown sidewalks, riverfronts, parks, hospitals or colleges in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa and Kansas. He also has pieces on display in South Dakota, Mississippi and Louisiana.

His goal is to engage the viewer in his surroundings.

"By highlighting the oculus and making this focal point, it becomes as much about the environment it's in than the sculpture itself," Pierce said. "So the sculpture is a means to capture your attention, but the oculus, you're looking through that at your own community. You're looking through that at a local business, at a park bench, at a tree, whatever. It's not something I made; I'm just drawing your attention to it."

The oculus on "Hesitant" points toward the front of the historic Marquette Hotel on Broadway.

As for the works themselves, lines, angles and names are composed to reflect or suggest natural states and forms, such as tension, vulnerability and stability.

With limited variations from the basic elements available, some of his newer creations have evolved to include arcs and twists.

"I guess I challenge myself with taking as few elements as possible and re-inventing them and making something very different," Pierce said.

Nature serves as an inspiration, with forms often emulating sprouting plants and vines. Through the twists and turns he strives for precision and clean edges in his final product.

Just as organic is the creative process.

He said his ideas often sprout on a doodle pad in front of a TV, or sometimes in the middle of the night, waking to go to his office and sketch. He revisits them later for feasibility. Some are discarded, some are pursued. Some projects are built on a small scale, some constructed of metal and some paper to further scrutinize personally or to submit for commission. He tries not to force the process at any stage.

"Right now, I'm just making things that interest me, basically," Pierce said. "My personal aesthetic, which is very simple, kind of that modern, simple aesthetic. What I try to accomplish is to use as few elements as possible, which sometimes there's trouble with that, because with few design elements it's harder to accomplish a goal.

"The way I see it, when there's too many things it's busy and it becomes distracting almost. And I think the idea of public art is to not be distracting but to call your attention to it. But the sculpture itself should find its way into its environment, whether it's in a park setting or in a downtown setting, it should find its way to, like, there's this acceptance of the piece and the piece reflects the community and the community kind of reflects the piece."

Pierce will be inducted into the Notre Dame Hall of Fame for Visual and Performing Arts on April 8.

jbreer@semissourian.com

(573) 388-3629