Horse I, Bronze 14.5″ x 7″ x 12″ |
By Gretchen Reynolds
JIM BUDISH HAD JUST TURNED 40 WHEN HE HAD AN EPIPHANY. He was standing in his office one day at the real-estate brokerage in Denver that he’d founded 20 years earlier. The office, which you’d expect to have been cluttered with real-estate brochures and sales-listings print-outs, was dominated instead by a high stand on which lay a lump of clay, an incipient sculpture at which Budish desultorily had been noodling. As he stared at the clay Budish suddenly realized what he wanted to be doing, and it wasn’t developing and selling buildings.
He wanted to be sculpting full time. “I took a deep breath and called in my oldest son, who worked with me,” Budish recalls. Squaring his shoulders, Budish looked at the young man and said, “If you want it, this place is yours.” He then handed over the keys to the office and marched out of the building without a second glance, determined to devote his life to sculpting.
At the time, he had no formal art training, no track record, no gallery representation, and no chance, at least in the immediate future, of any income from art. But he did have determination. “It was either succeed or live out of my car,” he says. “And I did not want to live out of my car.”…
Featured in April 2007
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