Village Artists

 

Roger DeGueldre - Village Artist

It's iron imagery. It's symmetry in steel.

It's amazing to see how a machinist turned artist releases fluid motion from iron bars and pieces of metal.

Roger is an anomaly. He combines a mechanist's technical knowledge with an artist's uncanny flair for design.

Up to the early nineties, his decades of mechanical background at various companies had served him well. When his mechanical working career abruptly stopped.

"The corporation I had worked with for many years was suddenly ceasing operations in this province and not going to have an manufacturing location here. I was an expert machinist out of work.

There followed a couple of years of doing everything and anything. Before long Roger returned to the material and the methods he had worked with most of his life. A request from his wife for him to make some metal candlesticks planted an idea that blossomed.

He saw an opportunity and combined his machinist's knowledge and his artistic abilities....giving birth to the stylized, yet functional steel creations that are now so popular.

"I make machines do things they're not supposed to do," he says. "I have the background to design the equipment - to do the things I want to do." Usually, he says, he knows where the piece is going to go right from the start. "You have to be able to visualize it, to picture a coat rack with a coat hanging on it. I have an advantage because I see the beauty in iron."

Whether you call his works functional structures or art, it's all in the eye of the beholder.

His iron renditions of form and function are international in scope. His work sells to visitors from every Province as well as across the USA and beyond. beauty has no boundaries.

Roger's innovative answer to a wine rack appeals to people far and wide. Each piece is unique.

Handcrafted from the man who creates in his own way.......by the hands and from the heart.