VERO BEACH — In creating his 10½-foot-tall masterpiece, “Perseus with the Head of Medusa,” the Renaissance-era artist Benvenuto Cellini likened hot bronze to the sculpture’s lifeblood.
Much went awry in that fiery act of creation.
The heat from Cellini’s furnace set his workshop on fire before the bronze finally heated to a bubbling liquid. The maestro then found he had shortchanged himself on material.
Like a madman, he dashed about grabbing pewter plates and kitchen pots to heave into the furnace.
Local sculptor Pat Cochran is familiar with the blood, sweat and tears inherent in foundry work.
“It’s a lot of hard work. It’s not for the lazy, that’s for sure,” he says.
At least he has a leg up on Cellini. Powered by natural gas, Cochran’s furnace is not subject to the temperature variations of a hardwood fire.
Cochran is better than Cellini at calculating the amount of material needed for a pour, though he does admit to cutting off the sprues (the bronze residue that marks passages where metal entered the mold) from a newly cast piece and throwing them into the furnace to top off a mold.
Unlike Cellini, who had to write about his triumphs and travails with a quill pen on paper, Cochran has a website that proclaims his Shadetree Studio “The Only Full Service Foundry on the Treasure Coast.”
“I have two furnaces, a large one and a small one,” Cochran says.
For a recent commission – a 6½-foot tall standing figure – he had to upgrade his pouring capabilities to fill the mold for the largest of the statue’s six sections, the figure’s lower torso.
Unlike Cellini, who poured the entire figure of “Perseus with the Head of Medusa” at one go, most large-scale sculpture is poured in sections that are later welded together.
For his statue commission, Cochran had to upgrade his facility to handle a single pour of 220 pounds of molten bronze. Up to that time he had been able to pour only 150 pounds of metal at one time.
His largest public commission to date, “Leap of Faith,” weighs 3,000 pounds and was cast in upwards of two dozen individual pieces.
Commissioned by the City of Fort Pierce for its “Art in Public Places” program, the 24-foot-high sculpture is located in a small plaza between City Hall and a public parking garage in downtown Fort Pierce.
The artwork depicts a portly man in swimming trunks poised on a springboard that all but teeters on the uppermost limb of a tree (also of bronze). The diver’s target is a posy of gargantuan red roses that sprout from a limb beneath him. Although the landing looks soft, Cochran says that each one of the bronze roses weighs over 100 pounds.
In a statement about the sculpture, Cochran wrote that his initial inspiration came from “my almost 60-ish soul and its personal desire to slow down, dive in, and smell the roses.”
As his work on the commission progressed, he says the piece changed its focus.
Now “the piece is all about the city and how it’s coming up rosy,” he says.
More portable examples of Cochran’s bronze sculpture can be seen at Darby Fine Art on 14th Street in Vero Beach.
There, one can observe how the artist has fashioned immutable bronze into the temporal forms of a yellow hibiscus flower, two Bird of Paradise stems and a lovely bunch of coconuts.
Their large scale belies the delicacy of their tenderly rendered petals, juicy-looking stalks and spiky stamens.
Also on display are two of Cochran’s narrative figural sculptures. Each one features a bowed human figure treading on a small and inhospitable- looking planet. The orbs in turn are balanced on an undulating wisp of bronze in “Walking a Lonesome Road” and on a skinny, truncated pyramid in “Pathway to Peril.”
Hard work has steeled Cochran’s sinews; hot metal runs through his veins. Born and raised in Missouri, Cochran is the son of a lumberjack and the grandson of a blacksmith.
His father was never into art, says Cochran.
“He was talking to someone recently (who said), ‘I understand your son’s a decent artist.’ He said, ‘He’s a good welder,’ ” Cochran says.
While Cochran made enough money working after school in a lumberyard to buy a tractor at age 12, he says that he grew up in his grandfather’s blacksmith shop.
He began to weld by 8 or 9, soon after his grandfather bought a new welder from Sears.
“He let me learn to weld on it until I started using up all his welding rods. Then he cut me off,” laughs Cochran.
After a stint in the Army, Cochran attended Southeast Missouri College on the G.I. Bill.
There he received undergraduate degrees in art and art education.
In his second year of college, he entered the sculpture program, where he found an affinity for woodcarving.
For the following decade, wood was his primary sculptural medium.
Cochran learned to cast bronze when he took a job as manager and sculpture finisher in sculptor Luis Montoya’s West Palm Beach foundry.
With his artistic collaborator, Leslie Ortiz, Montoya is known for groupings of oversized bronze fruits, vegetables and hors d’oeuvres.
Three years spent with Montoya was followed by one-year turns teaching art at Jupiter High School and Northport Middle School in Port St. Lucie.
According to Cochran, the emotional labor of teaching all day proved to be fatal to his artistic motivation.
“When I got home I didn’t feel like working on art,” he says. “I was more tired when I got home from school than when I get home now.”
He was ready to open his own studio with another sculptor, Edgar Straeffer, by 1990.
They located Shadetree Studio in a Quonset building on Old Dixie Highway in St. Lucie Village.
“I’m told the Quonset part was built by a beer company to store beer in – and we still do,” says Cochran.
The structure had no electric service and was only half the size that it is today, says Cochran. But it was just what the two sculptors were looking for.
“We (wanted to) build a little foundry just especially to pour our own pieces,” says Cochran.
It was not long before they started getting calls from artists who wanted their own works cast but did not possess the equipment or the expertise for the undertaking.
Cochran and Straeffer soon had enough outside work to employ them full time.
Among others, Vero Beach sculptors George Paxton and Cathy Ferrell have relied on Shadetree Studio’s services.
Straeffer moved on after two or three years, says Cochran, who continues to operate the studio. Through the years he has remained busy and hired assistants as needed for big projects.
When asked what made him practice his craft in this area for over 28 years, Cochran’s response is swift.
“For me it’s a great place to work,” he says.
While the opportunities to show his work might be greater in more populous areas, he says, the congestion of big city life does not appeal to him.
Shadetree Studio is not far from the art-filled house on the Indian River that he shares with his wife, Rosa Lee. That’s important to Cochran.
“I work late but I’m still home in five minutes,” he says.
