John Henry Waddell (February 14, 2021 – November 27, 2019)
John Henry Waddell, born in Des Moines, Iowa in 1921, began teaching art to adults when he was 16. After Army service, he achieved his MFA and MAE from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Waddell headed art education at the New Bauhaus in Chicago, then at Arizona State University, before retiring from university teaching at age 40 to allow full time for his mostly figurative art. March 25, 1949 Waddell married artist Ruth Holland who became the artist’s muse, inspiring him both in life and art. Through the decades Ruth appeared in many of his paintings and sculptures. John also became a primary muse in Ruth’s work.
The Waddell’s were integral members of a unique community of artists, architects and patrons pioneering the Wild West. This community included architects Frank Lloyd Wright and Paolo Soleri & artists such as Max Ernst, Dorothea Tanning, Philip C Curtis and Borislav Bogdanovich.
In 1963, the church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama that killed four young black girls, prompted Waddell to create a memorial monument entitled “That Which Might Have Been,” a grouping of four bronze figures, representing the women these little girls might have grown up to be. This work, now displayed at Carver Civil Rights Museum, marks a turning point in Waddell’s work. Though earlier he had been a social significance painter, representing the ills of society, his interest now turned to the beauty of individuals, and later, to their potential for positive interaction.
In 1964 Waddell and his family moved to Greece with a commission to create the public sculpture “Family.” During the following two and a half years, he exhibited his work in Athens.
As Waddell’s work in groupings of figures continued, the need for more studio space and creative serenity took him further away from America’s art centers and deeper into the remote wilds of the Southwest landscape. Here he built a magnificent studio. Apprentices came from all over the world to study with Waddell. The 12 over life size figure composition “Dance” was completed here in 1974.
Away from changing modes of the art world, Waddell entered what would be the most prolific period of his life thus far. He has sculpted over 150 life size, and over life size bronze figurative sculptures, many small figures, as well as paintings and drawings. In 1984 a devastating fire burnt his studio to the ground. All of Waddell’s sketch books from childhood on up, many paintings and sketches, the family home and the plaster molds that would have made multiple castings of his work possible – were destroyed. Nine months later the Waddells had built a new studio, and “Generations,” a new monumental sculptural grouping was in progress.
In 2007, tragedy struck again, when eight of the over life size sculptures in the now complete grouping “Generations”, a decade in the making, were stolen and melted down into scrap metal. John and Ruth Waddell, now in their eighties, made the decision to use their life savings to recast the stolen grouping, “Generations.”
It is this will to persevere, as well as their unique dedication to a life in art, that continues to lure many artists, patrons and interested individuals of all ages to the Waddell studio and sculpture garden year round.
In 1997, at the age of 76, Waddell began his third major multi-figure relief: “Rising“.
In 2007, Waddell revealed an image of this new relief at San Diego Museum of Art, where he had been invited to speak on the later stages of creativity and the brain, and his experience, now at the age of 86, of working toward completion of this epic relief.
February 14, 2016 Waddell celebrated his 95th birthday with family and friends at his home and studio in Sedona, Arizona. “Rising”, now complete, hangs on the walls of the Waddell studio in anticipation of its yet-to-be-discovered home.
Ruth and John Waddell celebrated their 70th wedding anniversary in 2019. Before his passing later that same year, Waddell continued to ascend the stairs to his studio, to reflect upon “Rising” and continue his life in art.
