Steve Blaylock is blasting out music in his farm outbuilding-turned-studio while he keeps fit on his multi gym. A magpie sits by the door in an open cage and sends out an alarming squawk. Quirky doorbell.
The sculptor has joined forces with the Harrogate International Festival to create bespoke sculptures to present to the arts charity’s premier partners: Cicada Communications, the Harrogate Advertiser, Harrogate Chamber of Trade & Commerce, Marshall Zoing Ltd, McCormicks Solicitors, R Stride and Co and Theakstons.
“I actually feel fairly honoured to be asked to do it,” Steve said of his involvement with Yorkshire’s leading arts festival. During the Festival, he’ll be exhibiting a few sculptures but mostly putting his written work and poetry on display – a first for him – at the Royal Hall.
The role of sculptor is one that seems to infiltrate Steve’s approach to life as well as art – not only does he mould what have become iconic pieces across Yorkshire, but he shapes his physique and cuts his own path. The son of working class parents, Steve had struggled with weight as a child. Now he lifts weights daily and looks, well, sculptured.
One of his four owls flaps up into the roof as Steve searches for a coffee cup complaining he spends his life searching for stuff he’s just put down. A brass bulldog falls perilously close to his computer that reveals his Facebook page featuring a photo of him surfing on a spider sculpture. He jokes if you fall over in his workshop you won’t need to bother with the ambulance, just call the undertakers.
He first got into art as a teenager. “I did a lot of embroidery work on biker’s jackets, I used to chop people’s jackets up and do design fashion work I guess although I didn’t think of it as that at the time.”
In the eighties his then girlfriend suggested he applied to Art College. Aged 21, he got a place with the intention of becoming a commercial graphic designer. But then his life changed direction forever.
“I went to Paris in the spring of 85,” Steve smiled whimsically. “It sounds like a song…The spring of ’85. I did a college trip and I went to the Rodin museum. He was, is, the best sculptor in the world with his natural ability. Rodin is far more talented than any of the old masters and present day sculptors for that matter. I didn’t know him; I hadn’t a clue who he was. I walked into his museum and silhouetted in a tall window was a sculpture called The Cathedral…and I just couldn’t stop staring. The hairs stood up on the back of my neck. It was almost like having an outer body experience, and that second, literally that second, I became a sculptor.”
He moved into welding steel because it allowed him to create the kind of sculptures he was interested in quickly.
But despite finding his artistic passion, he “wandered in the wilderness” after college for seven years, restoring pocket watches, wheeling and dealing antiques, selling scrap metal. “I fell into stuff,” Steve explained, “I had a natural radar for collecting antiques. Underneath it all I still had this hankering to want to do sculptures.”
So what was the trigger into becoming a full time sculptor?
“I got a job as a milk man. Fantastic company, but I hated the job. I loved the customers; I’m a people person so actually serving my customers that was my job satisfaction. I had to get up at 3 or 4 am every morning. I didn’t just deliver milk, it was milk, cheese – everything and anything.”
But you were basically unhappy?
“Oh I was mega unhappy. I used to do a lot of writing. I carried a notebook in my back pocket and I’d write my thoughts. I delivered to a lot of nursing homes and listening to the old people in the nursing homes…I mean little things like you’d walk past a nursing home day-in day-out at half past five in the morning and the old chap at a particular nursing home was always up and always sat in the window and as I walked past he’d always wave hello. And one morning he wasn’t there. And I enquired and of course he’d died. Its things like that make you think, streuth …there’s got to be more in life.”
He applied for a BA.
“I felt I needed to do that if I was saying to my family I’m jacking the job in to become a sculptor because they would of all gone, ‘you’re mad’. So I thought if I go to college, get a degree, I’ve got the qualification to then turn round and say I’m going to follow art. If you have one chance of a midlife crisis mine was at the age of 29.”
So he carved his own unique path.
Working and exhibiting at the level he does, Steve sees himself predominantly in the contemporary arts/ garden sculpture market. He plans to build a 12 foot wing-span Liver bird and ask Liverpool’s football club to pose with him to promote an exhibition on the Wirral.
Steve thinks big.
“I want to build monumental sculptures.” His dream is to sculpt a 200 foot wing-span stainless steel eagle owl flying over the city of Leeds – the symbol of the city. “Try and envisage the owl, and underneath the owl would be a visitors centre, a sculpture park, there’d be a lecture hall…you’d be able to go up inside the owl and look across the Leeds cityscape. It could be the home of the Northern Arts awards…
“If the Leeds owl was built it would be the biggest sculpture of its kind in the world. It would show what can be manufactured in this great country and county of ours, and boost the economy of the area.”
One area where Steve becomes really impassioned is art and its relationship with everyday people. “One of the things I’ve always wanted to get off the ground since leaving university is the Northern Arts Awards – which would be the true grit version of the Emperor’s new clothes that is the Turner awards. Real art. One of the things that encourages me when I have a good exhibition somewhere, especially my bigger pieces, people like my mam and dad come up to me and say, we like your work because we understand it. It looks like what it looks like. If I make an owl, it’s an owl. A dragonfly is a dragonfly. It’s not three or four pieces of steel rammed together 60 foot high called ‘the Concupiscence of Being’,” he laughed. “There’s nothing pretentious about it. …”
There’s no doubt that the elitism of some art can be alienating. But if you’ve never experienced the Harrogate Festival, if you’ve ever questioned the ability of the arts to transform our lives or doubted music, art and literature are hardwired into our all too human make-up, Steve’s final story illustrates why the arts do matter.
“I once had a lady ring up, she’d seen an exhibition that I’d organized at Harlow Carr and wanted to buy a few pieces of sculpture in the middle of the exhibition. I explained to the woman that she couldn’t have the pieces in the exhibition till it ended…she said, she’d really like to buy the pieces she’d seen in the exhibition, it was important to her. And I said, ‘well it can’t be that important it’s not as if you’re dying.’ Long pause. ‘Actually I am.’ Long pause from my side. ‘Gosh I’m really sorry, are you being serious?’ She said, ‘Yes I’ve got less than six months to live and I want to spend the rest of the summer looking at your sculptures.’ At that point you realise a few bits of steel that you’ve made – a pale reflection of creation – will actually enhance and enriche people’s lives. I pulled the sculptures out of the exhibition and made similar pieces to go in and the lady had the summer with the sculptures, and passed away with her family and her thoughts. That’s one wake-up call. That’s really humbling and makes you think about the bigger questions in life.”
