Nationally Known Sculptor John Medwedeff Finds Small Town Charm in Southern Illinois

Southern Illinois University at Carbondale brought sculptor John Medwedeff to Murphysboro and the small town charm that keeps him coming back.

"SIU has one of the premier metal-smithing programs in the country, so I came to go to school. I got my bachelor of fine arts and master of arts there," Medwedeff said. "And, then I was one of the legions of people that decide it is home."

Medwedeff, who is originally from Tennessee, said the decision to permanently locate in Southern Illinois was not immediate, but after attending SIU he found that he liked the area. Then, he said, when he got married, he saw how quickly his wife, Cynthia Roth, adjusted to the region and decided to stay.

"We got married and within six weeks, Cynthia, who is also from Tennessee, had met everyone in the county," he said. The friendliness of the community led to the decision to build a business in Murphysboro and, "Once we decided to build, there was no turning back."

The decision has been a good one for Medwedeff. His company, Medwedeff Forge & Design, opened in 1988 and has been building an international reputation ever since.

"One of the factors that helped keep us in Illinois was the Illinois Capital Development Board in the mid-1990s. The Arts in Architecture program dedicated one half of one percent of the cost of new state buildings to artwork from Illinois artists. As a young artist, why would I want to leave a state that wants to buy my work?"

Medwedeff said some people have complained about the arts program, but he sees it as a necessary part of any new structure. "You wouldn't build a new house without putting up some sort of art," he said.

And, unlike some states, Illinois promotes the use of art created by artists within the state. "Some states hold national competitions for their artwork, but in Illinois we are lucky enough to have a large enough population base and a large pool of really good artists, so the state can buy Illinois artwork," he said.

Since his first public art project, Medwedeff has won several national and international competitions for public art and has his sculptures prominently displayed throughout the state and nation including well-known pieces in Carbondale and Murphysboro.

Despite traveling a great deal for his work, Medwedeff said he is very content and happy to have chosen Murphysboro as his home. "Lately, I've gotten in the habit of riding my bicycle to work. I can't imagine doing that in Chicago or anywhere else and I can't imagine now actually having to drive a car to work," he said.

"Murphysboro has a kind of quiet, sleepy feel to it, but there is something really nice about that," especially after traveling. "It's a really nice environment to have your family in."

It means his pets, Ivan and Pepper, can accompany him to work each day. "Ivan is actually a working animal. He's not as good a mouser as the cat we had before him, but he does a pretty good job." Pepper, a big black lab, doesn't work at the forge, but is there anyway most days. Medwedeff Forge & Design is in the Murphysboro Industrial Park, near a soybean field, so having a good mouser on the property is a necessity.

In recent years, the forge has also become a family-affair, with Roth taking on the role of office manager. "We had an employee who worked with us while she got her finance degree at SIU. She started as a gopher and became a wonderful metal smith and ran our office. By the time she left here, she was trained to be a stockbroker. About a year ago, she gave Cynthia a crash course in running the office," Medwedeff said.

Roth handles the accounting and payroll and taxes and "all the things they don't teach you in art school," Medwedeff said, including maintaining the company website. He does a little bit of everything else. "I spend about half my time actually blacksmithing," he said. "The rest is split between a little of everything, including cleaning the bathrooms. When you work for a very small business, everyone has to do a little bit of everything and when you're the owner, you do a little bit more."

"You have to learn to delegate, or you'll go crazy, but you also have to be willing to do some things yourself," he said.
As the business continues to grow, Medwedeff finds that he is spending more time on a newer aspect of the business, meeting with clients. "When you deal with public art, a lot of what you do is influenced by the client. They may not have the vision or the design capabilities to create the piece, but often they have as much to do with what the piece ends up being as the artist does. I spend a lot of time with clients, working out what we want a piece to be."

In addition to large-scale sculptures, most about 20-feet tall, Medwedeff and his crew do architectural metal-work ranging from new designs to repair and replacement of classic metal-work. At any given time, the staff can be working on several different projects. "Right now, we're working on two public art pieces, some furniture and two railing projects."
One of the railing projects is for a home with an ocean view, just outside of Boston. The flowing design in worked bronze is meant to complement the natural beauty of the area and the railing will consist of six separate and distinct pieces, each a piece of art in its own right.

That project allowed Medwedeff to see the hometown of one of his employees, Jared Smith, and appreciate that Murphysboro might not be so small after all. "We were driving to Boston since some of the work we needed to do on that project had to be done on site and we went to Jared's house in Maryland. The post office is a shed in his mother's front yard. So, this [Murphysboro] doesn't seem so small."

Smith is one of three employees at the Medwedeff Forge, all transplants to the area. Andy White is from Austin, TX, and Matt Hall is a graduate student at SIUC originally from Quincy.

"Blacksmithing, traditionally, has involved journeymen training at one forge for a few years and then moving on to another several times before starting their own," Medwedeff said.

His proximity to the metals program at SIU has allowed him to continue that tradition. "We have an intern from SIU and 2 employees affiliated with SIU. Our on-going relationship with the metals program has allowed us to have a ready supply of people looking to further their experience."

Medwedeff is proud of the traditional and modern methods he uses in his metalwork, a combination of the history of the art as well as a contemporary business sense. "When we first started, I thought we had to do everything the old fashioned way. Now, we combine it."

He still does his design by hand, in large part because he has not taught himself computer-aided drafting programs, he said. But the metal is now cut to size by machine. "We used to cut everything by hand and that was an imprecise method. Edges were rough and we would spend so much time sanding edges and making pieces fit together right."

For the sculpture to stay together right, the pieces had to be perfect and the old way simply meant more work. "We still bend and form the pieces by hand," he said, but they also have some modern, and not so modern tools to assist in the process.
An air-driven metal press near the forge was designed in 1909 and built in 1943.

Then it sat idle as government surplus until the 1990s. The gas forge, though similar to a traditional open flame, has a computerized-thermostat control so that it can remain at a constant temperature for melting bronze. "Bronze is very soft, so you have to be real careful about the metal getting too hot," Medwedeff explained.

An anvil near the front of the shop is identical to one designed two centuries ago and is itself probably about a century old, but the modified tongs Medwedeff used to work on a small scale bronze sculpture are a Murphysboro original created last week to help with a current project.

That project is to replicate a larger sculpture as part of the fund raising for the bigger project. Medwedeff is making one-eighth scale replicas on a bronze design headed for Lewis & Clark College in Godfrey. When completed, the replicas will be sold to raise funds to pay for the full-size sculpture.

This is somewhat akin to doing the project backward. Whenever Medwedeff creates a new sculpture, he first does the project in a smaller scale. Twice, in fact.

"The first time I did a large piece, we didn't do the one-quarter scale model, but since then I've learned it really helps me get a feel for what I can expect with the full-size project," he said. The smallest model is designed to showcase the piece. The one-quarter scale model is identical to larger version, so Medwedeff can anticipate problems with the welds, unwieldiness of the pieces or unforeseen design flaws.

"One of the things that happens when you build 20-foot sculptures is that you realize, even if you lead a good long life and are very productive, you're not going to have a lot of pieces out there, so they all better be really, really good," he said.

That isn't to say other artists aren't turning out the best work possible, he said, "It's just that in some other mediums you have a lot more opportunity to produce work. I don't want one of these leaving here half-baked. Each one gets a lot of special attention."