Ellison creates large steel sculptures while battling ALS
Sculptor Robert Ellison has designed and constructed large public sculptures as well as smaller, more exploratory pieces for 30 years. He fabricates the works at his Sonoma Mountain studio. He uses a motorized wheelchair as he deals with ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), also known as Lou Gehrig's disease.
Mark Aronoff / Press DemocratPublished: Sunday, March 7, 2010 at 3:00 a.m.
Last Modified: Thursday, March 4, 2010 at 2:34 p.m.
Following sculptor Robert Ellison’s trail of huge outdoor artwork, made of steel and painted bright colors, is easy.
Drive past the Boulevard Cinemas in Petaluma and you’ll spot his “Cherry Soda,” which looks like it came from the soda fountain of the gods.
In Santa Rosa, you’ll see “Donut Diorama” and others at Wells Fargo Center, the giant scissors at Old Courthouse Square and his abstract shape crafted of steel at the Sonoma County Administration Center.
And in Rohnert Park, Ellison’s “Sweep” stands by the reflecting pool in front of the Spreckels Center for the Performing Arts.
His pieces are hard to miss. Some stand 30 feet tall and weigh 30 tons. But to find the artist himself, one must go to the top of Sonoma Mountain near Penngrove, where he has lived and worked for nearly three decades.
“I’m just at the threshold of the peak of my career,” Ellison declared at his two-story mountain home one recent afternoon. “The ideas are clearer and cleaner and cleverer than they’ve ever been.”
Diagnosed four years ago with the degenerative nerve disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, better-known as ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease, the 63-year-old sculptor started using a motorized wheelchair 18 months ago, but he and his assistants are still producing new work.
“You’ve got to have fun. If you can’t have fun, what can you have?” he said as he rolled his wheelchair through his home’s ground-floor workshop, surrounded by scale models for his whimsical sculptures.
“Even with this ALS stuff, I’m not going to let it get me down,” he added. “I mean, I’m not going spend my last moments being depressed. I just do what I do.”
To keep doing what he does, however, Ellison has had to make adjustments.
“To sketch my ideas now, I hold the pen in one hand and use the other hand to push it around,” he explained.
Soon, he hopes to start using a computer controlled by eye movements.
Some changes were relatively easy, like installing the hydraulic lift that carries him between the first and second floors of his home.
“We build things here,” he said, “so when we needed an elevator, we just built one.”
With silvering hair, lively hazel eyes and an easy smile, Ellison looks more like a distinguished television actor than a man who constructs gigantic, three-dimensional cartoons out of steel.
He grew up in Deerborn, Mich., and studied at Michigan State University in Lansing, where he received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in art and a master’s in physics.
In the early ’70s, Ellison followed a girlfriend to California, and settled first in Marin and then south of Market Street in San Francisco. He was still single when he moved to Sonoma Mountain in 1981.
“I didn’t want to rush into anything,” he said lightly, “so I didn’t get married until I was like 55.”
In 2001, he married jewelry maker Alison Bies, who shares the living and work space Ellison already had built on the mountain.
“Really, the living space is incidental,” Bies said with a philosophical smile, standing in the house’s small kitchen.
The mountain location, at the top of narrow road with no shoulder, poses some logistical challenges when it’s time to ship out a completed sculpture.
“With any semi truck longer than 33 feet, we have to use our crane to pick it up, turn it around and point it back downhill,” Ellison explained.
While his work is widely accepted now, Ellison’s sculptures have sparked a series of controveries. In the ’70s, members of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors demanded the removal of his “Four Times Daily” — adorned with what look like giant, twisted nails — from the city’s Civic Plaza.
“They thought it was ugly and they didn’t understand it,” Ellison recalled.
The piece now stands at China Camp Design Center in San Rafael.
Asked what kind of viewer reaction he wants, Ellison replied, “I want to them to laugh and say, ‘What kind of idiot made that?’”
And challenged to explain why he insists on working with steel on a grand scale, he came up with answer that’s both practical and philosophical:
“Steel is so permanent. I did ceramics when I was just out of grad school, but they were too breakable. Every sculpture I’ve ever built is still in existence. If I’m going to spend a lot of time and effort making these pieces, I want them to last forever.”
You can reach Staff Writer Dan Taylor at 521-5243 or dan.taylor@pressdemocrat.com. See his ARTS blog at http://arts.blogs.pressdemocrat.com.
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