Sagebrush, Saddlebags, and Sculpture

By Angie Johnson-Schmit

Like many creative people, it’s hard to pin Deb Gessner down to just one thing. Over the course of her life, she has been a jewelry maker, bronze sculptor, rancher, and musician. The thread connecting these pursuits is her deep affinity for the Arizona landscape, as well as the plants, animals, and people that inhabit it. After decades in Yavapai County, she still finds beauty and inspiration in the land.

Gessner is perhaps best known in Prescott Valley, AZ for her 10-foot bronze statue Not So Gentle Tamer. The project landed in her lap while she was working as “sort of the in-house sculptor” at Bronzesmith Fine Art Foundry and Gallery, which is also located in Prescott Valley. Ed Reilly, owner and fellow sculptor at Bronzesmith, first approached her about making a statue of an illustration by artist, author, and Arizona historian Bob Boze Bell.

The statue depicts a woman settler holding a headless rattlesnake and a shovel, capturing the fierce practicality of the women who helped settle the Arizona Territory. “Bob Boze Bell kind of based this on his own grandmother ... she was a feisty woman who just did what she did,” said Gessner. She collaborated with Bell and is quick to give credit to everyone on the foundry team. “In order to bring your original concept… to life in bronze, it takes that whole team,” she said.

Another of her large bronze statues, "Giddy Up Daddy", is a further example of that collaborative process. An homage to Bil Keane, the cartoonist behind The Family Circus, the statue was the idea of Keane’s two sons. They contacted the foundry and “sent me a drawing of daddy with the four cartoon kids on his back, you know, like playing horse,” said Gessner. “And they said, can you sculpt that?” She could.

Photos courtesy of Deb Gessner

Gessner said creating the piece was a challenge. Turning cartoon characters into a three-dimensional statue “is difficult because there’s not a lot of information there,” she said. About halfway through the process Keane’s sons added a new wrinkle by deciding to base the “daddy” figure on photos of their father instead of the cartoon dad character.

Challenges aside, she enjoyed the collaboration. During the sculpting process, she and Reilly wound up driving the sculpture to meet the Keanes in California. They rented a hotel room and she found herself “sitting there working on it” with input from them. “They said, ‘well, these cheeks need to be fatter, and this needs to be a little different,’” she said. “And we kind of just worked going around in circles…and it was pretty fun.” The statue stands today in Stillman Park in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Gessner insists she had no idea what she wanted to do when she was young, but notes that she was “the kid that had the napkin full of horse drawings.”

She may not have known exactly what she wanted to do, but Gessner was always clear on her creative preferences.

I took an art class, and I didn’t like it,” said Gessner. “I did not want to draw apples, I wanted to draw horses, I wanted to draw cats.

Her high school crafts courses were more to her liking, and that’s where she learned how to make jewelry. “I really liked making jewelry and I made a lot of it,” said Gessner. This eventually led her to working as a sculptor.

Gessner’s shift to sculpting is directly related to time she spent in Yavapai County. She was a fifth grader when she first attended Camp Maripai in Prescott and she remembers being enthralled by the vast herds of antelope she saw on the drive to camp. It was her first experience spending time in the area, and it left an impression.

Shortly after Gessner graduated from high school, she found herself interviewing for an office job. When asked what she liked to do, Gessner started “talking about horses and hiking and doing all this kind of stuff and artwork.” The interviewer told her to “do yourself a favor and never work in an office.” She took that advice to heart. “I took her word and I just went and did what I was going to do,” she said. “And I thank her for that because it did send me down my own path.”

Shortly after that office job interview, Gessner took her first big step on her path. Her father, an architectural draftsman, had met Prescott-based sculptor Hank Richter and urged her to contact him. Gessner followed her father’s suggestion and returned to the Prescott area where she spent a summer working as Richter’s studio assistant. She worked on waxes and touchups during that time, until Richter gave her a gentle push. “He gave me some clay one day and said, ‘here, try this,’” she said. Her first piece was “this pretty bad sculpture called Entertaining the Folks, and it’s an old guy playing a fiddle.” Gessner eventually had the original clay sculpture cast and still has the piece.

After graduating high school, she continued making jewelry and moved to Philadelphia. She applied and was accepted to the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts. She had a similar reaction to the program as she did to her high school art class. “There was art appreciation and art history showing us all this modern art stuff…and I’m going, I don’t get it,” said Gessner. “This doesn’t make sense to me.” When the bill for the first semester arrived, she decided she couldn’t afford it and dropped out. “I made stupid decisions,” she said. “And that was one of them.”

Still, she stayed in Philadelphia for four years and continued to sculpt. Her Arizona roots and love for horses were still very present when she took up work as a horse-drawn carriage driver in the city center. “I just loved nature and I hated being inside buildings,” she said.

Photocredit: Blushing Cactus Photography

Even while living in Philadelphia, Yavapai County was still a part of her life. Gessner continued to send her sculptures to a foundry there to be cast. Her parents would pick up the finished pieces and take them to a gallery. Gessner would then drive cross-country to pick up her originals.

Gessner returned to Arizona and was living on a horse farm in Levine when she decided she needed to live someplace cooler. Torn between a move to Sedona or Prescott, she visited friends at Palace Station in December of 1984. Her friends introduced her to her future husband, Don Charles. It was love at first sight and Gessner still remembers the exact date and time of that meeting.

Charles was living and working at Turkey Creek Ranch in the Bradshaw Mountains and worked for the Arizona Game and Fish Department. He shared Gessner’s love of nature and the two spent ten years ranching before moving to Mayer, AZ.

Gessner described her years on the ranch as idyllic, although she notes that it was an off-grid operation. “We had solar power, a gallon-a-minute well, which means you really had to conserve water,” said Gessner. For much of the year it was just the two of them and their horses, dogs, and cows. “Goodwin had a population of two,” she said. In the summer, the population swelled to four because “there was a cabin right where the two roads come together and this older couple had a forest lease on it.”

Now semi-retired from bronze sculpting, Gessner has had some time to reflect on her decades-long career.

The girl who felt out of place in art class has become the woman who sees herself as more of an artisan than an artist.

“What I am is a really good artisan,” she said. “I love manipulating the materials, I love the act of pushing clay and creating it into something.” What has never sat well with her are some of the other conventions associated with being an artist. “I can’t even write an artist’s statement,” she said with a laugh. “Seriously, I’ve tried.”

While her art legacy won’t include an artist’s statement or an interest in conceptual art, her bronze sculptures will undoubtedly last for generations. Like so many who found their way to Yavapai County, she has made her own way in life. “I love Yavapai County,” said Gessner. “There’s a lot of variety in it and it’s got the mountains and the trees that I love, and it’s got canyons and it’s got desert…I love Yavapai County.”