Sculptor Bill Morrow originates from a family of Colorado pioneers and survivors who worked with their hands in the Roaring Fork Valley and beyond, just as Morrow has all his life.

Now, at 78, Morrow aims to sell each of his remaining creative — and stunning — sculptures.

He is a kind-spoken man full of rich and fascinating stories in addition to his artwork. His dad was born in Aspen in 1911, and Morrow’s aunt happened to hold the first birth certificate entered in the state of Colorado in Basalt on Jan. 1, 1910.

His family moved when the silver business went down the drain in Aspen — his dad worked as a weigh master at the mine — and they lost their ranch. They moved to Rifle, where Morrow grew up from the age of 2. He ultimately bought and lived on that same farm until he moved to senior housing in Rifle.

His work today remains visible, and for sale, right off I-70 as vehicles enter Rifle’s off-ramp going eastbound, on a property his aunt owned for decades.

Morrow fashions everything ranging from small, life-size pine cones to enormous motorcycles, people and abstracts from found objects. His artwork often includes humorous titles, like the motorcycle named “The Insane-a-cycle,” which stands outside the co-op in Carbondale.

“Some people are just insane about their motorcycles,” he said, adding that many riders are “musclemen,” so he made the large piece partially out of old exercise equipment.

His other Carbondale display tells all in the title, “A Split Second of Free Air,” as it depicts an abstract torso with one hand holding onto a handlebar as the front wheel sits in concrete on a hillside visible from Hwy 133, like the rider blew a tire.

“I used to have a motorcycle, and there’s a split second of free air before you crash,” he said.

Morrow began constructing metal sculptures as an artist in the early 1980s, after Exxon pulled the plug on its oil shale project in Mesa County, where he lived before purchasing his parent’s farm in Rifle.

He had started welding professionally in 1973, when Carbondale built its sanitation facility. He started his own welding business in Grand Junction in 1976, though at times he worked in coal mines and other jobs to support himself. Around then, he started playing around artistically.

“When I wasn’t working for someone else, I always had something going on in the garage,” he said in a 1991 episode of Aspen Grassroots TV production’s “Artists of the Roaring Fork Valley,” which also aired on Rifle Community TV in 2000.  

By the time Exxon pulled out and he lost his structural ironwork business and his home, he had about 30 sculptures. A friend and Grand Junction artist saw one of his first pieces, a 3-foot lizard built from steel rods, and was impressed. He encouraged Morrow to participate in the city’s new Art on the Corner initiative, designed to help liven up the town, in 1983.

Morrow started with five pieces and continued to contribute to the project for about 10 years. His last work for Art on the Corner looked like a junkyard of miscellaneous iron and broken tools, so he named it “The Junkyard Jungle.”

“You have to have a sense of humor and have fun with titles,” he said on Rifle Community TV.

Case in point: A couple brought him a sack of vintage copper nails with dates stamped on the heads, used on railroad tracks and telephone poles. They wanted him to make a flower arrangement. He used the nails for the centers of daisies, placed them in an ore bucket and, with the help of his wife, titled it, “Your Daisies Are Numbered.”

While recovering from the economic downturn, he continued to create artistically under his company, Visual Discoveries, while building hand railings, fireplace surrounds, gates and other ironwork for Myers & Company Architectural Metals in Basalt for a couple years. Throughout the years, he also took other jobs, including working for fisheries in Alaska.

“Bill is an incredible mechanical engineer without formal training,” said Jim Bell, a former manager of Rifle Community TV and an advocate of Morrow’s work. “He loves a challenge. Give him a design problem, and he’s creating a solution. He built a mechanism on the second floor of a house in Aspen that holds a bed and folds to the outside so someone can see the stars and sleep in the open air at night.”

Morrow considers himself a metal fabricator, as opposed to a blacksmith, because he uses welding techniques extensively. He’s a self-taught artist with a college background in math and science that influences his sculptures.

“It’s very hard to put a finger on a particular style because I just do things differently,” he said on Rifle Community TV. “Part of the reason I do things differently is that I have never studied art. I’m approaching it from a totally different angle than other artists.”

He loves the process of being inspired by old metal pieces, from a snail made out of a roller chain and broken shovels to pipes he discovered he could make look like campfire logs with his wire-feed welder. He described the act of creation as a single-minded focus.

“It’s some of the most fun times I’ve have,” he said on Community TV. “I’ve often said that artists aren’t made, and they aren’t born; they are cursed with it. Because to me, it is a very compelling thing. I have to create something regularly, or I just don’t feel right.”

He might see a face in a piece of junk and build an entire foot soldier wearing shoes of a joker. After serving two tours in Vietnam in the Navy, he has personal viewpoints on war, society and politics. One sculpture features someone kneeling on the base of a dollar sign, under an upside-down flag. He described the piece as a distress signal because he said the country, and the world, is in trouble due to the misuse of money.

“Bill’s metal sculptures are unique. I have never seen anything like them. They all make a statement, whether satirical, humorous, abstract or aesthetic and reflect a lively mind always active and creating,” Bell said. “Metal can be hard and cold, but Bill makes it sing. He can look at a pile of scrap metal and visualize something engaging, intriguing and beautiful.”

He even transforms insects into compelling sculptures. He finds the creatures fascinating, saying they predate everything living on our planet today. Decades ago, he had a pet spider in his shop and watched it daily, even teaching kids to gently touch it. As it was dying, he paid homage by constructing a spider out of ball bearings, pressure balls and steel rods. Likewise, he caught a wasp in his shop on a cold February day, studied it under the microscope and fashioned “one of my better pieces” back in the 1990s, he said.

Morrow is now retired, due to severe emphysema, and he wants to sell all of his sculptures to appreciative collectors. He plans to give the money to his two grandchildren as his legacy.

“I’m selling everything I’ve got,” he said, underscoring the fact that his father didn’t die until he knew his farm was selling to Morrow in two days, and he himself doesn’t plan on leaving this planet until he sells his 30-40 large-scale sculptures, as well as smaller ones, like pine cones made of about 100 horseshoe nails assembled on a rod. “I can’t leave it to them. It’s a burden.”

Just like one man’s junk, one kid’s burden is another person’s fortune. 

Aspen Times Article  July 24,2023 https://www.aspentimes.com/news/local-sculptor-aims-to-liquidate-his-pieces/