Jeff Decker is a renowned sculptor widely known for his subject material of motorcycles but he has a new series of work based on reclaimed objects. Decker will be exhibiting many of these pieces at Inspiration Los Angeles beginning today, February 12. Decker lives with his family in Utah.
Talk about making the jump from artist to full-time career artist. I suppose the moment I became a career artist, was when I stopped working at the tiny restaurant my wife and I created, to work at a foundry. The foundry paid a few dollars an hour less than we paid our kitchen employees. Art classes at university didn’t motivate me, yet I kept finding excuses to stay in the arts. I suppose a selfish drive pushed me to stick with something that was counterintuitive to my own common sense. I was driven even more by hunting and gathering old stuff, than even creating, and the foundry offered a skill I could use in restoring motorcycles as well as casting sculpture. My bronzes have never garnered interest in the art world, but I did address a subject that most serious artist had ignored. It is easy to be relevant, when you are only fool doing what you do. Of course, any clever explanation I my provide for my art or myself, is just in hindsight. I never have much or had any method to my progress.
What’s next for your career? I don’t know what is next in my career. I’ve had grand decisions that carry me away, and crippling doubts that bring me back. In this very moment I find my attraction to hard/soft, mechanical/organic strong as ever. I’ve found a new way to justify my compulsive hunting and gathering. My incessant urge to collect has supplied me with an abundance of objects that are strange to a current visual vernacular. I am having a lot of fun marrying these objects to sculpture in a way contrary to the objects purpose.
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Images courtesy Mark Owens and Jeff Decker.