The story below is from our May/June 2023 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!
Photos By Dan Smith
You likely know Lawrence Bechtel’s Roanoke work—’Officer Down’ and ‘Calling the Powers’—but you probably don’t know the man behind them.
Lawrence Bechtel’s route to becoming perhaps the most celebrated male sculpture artist in the region has been, in a nutshell, circuitous. It began as a near-obsession with whittling and drawing as a kid and worked its way through carpentry and other building trades, boat building, tree-carving, found-object artworks, working with soft clay and finally settling on the difficult art form of figurative bronze sculpture, mainly of human figures — though he also does abstract works occasionally.
His artwork is a family affair: wife, Ann, has a fine arts degree and paints; their daughter, Rose, works in the TV/movie industry, and is a singer/songwriter; and their daughter, Haley, in Roanoke, majored in oil painting at Radford University and has developed a wide following on Instagram for her oil paintings and block prints.
Bechtel’s mother, he says, “stressed creativity as a virtue,” and her approval of his early efforts greatly encouraged him. His brother, Stefan, a serious art collector in Charlottesville, purchased a $2.50 figurative wood carving when they were children which sparked Lawrence’s interest. “I tried to copy it, though badly,” he says.
Says Dorsey Taylor of LinDale Arts in Roanoke, “He’s the real deal. He instinctively can dig deep inside himself to pull out the ‘art’ so the viewer can grasp the art piece’s meaning and the reason Larry decided to create it. This is where the art is, it is hidden within, and you must be able to bring it out. Good technique alone is not good art.”
When Bechtel began shaping figures in clay in 1990, with tools he made himself, he says, “it was therapeutic, helping me get through a divorce. I was really hooked, then.” It became romantic when Ann made cassette tapes of her favorite music for him to listen to while sculpting.
“I had seriously considered going to art school,” says Bechtel, “after college in 1972 at the Art Institute in Chicago. But I hesitated, and instead yielded to a friend needing help remaking an old pool hall into an auto shop in a crumbling neighborhood.” He traveled with friends for a couple of years in his ’65 Chevy van, backpacking and adventuring, and landed a job at a boat-building company in Oregon.
Bechtel’s most recent retrospective, “Look Forward, Look Back,” ran through December at the Montgomery Museum of Art & History in Christiansburg. It presented the opportunity to examine many of his works.
One of Bechtel’s best-known sculptures is “Calling the Powers” in Vic Thomas Park as a tribute to Roanoke environmental activist Ann Masters. “That [work is] kind of a mystery, even to me,” he says. The work may indeed become the inspiration for a short dance piece by the Roanoke Ballet Company. The work is often the setting for meditating women. Many of his works have the soft, even flow of a dancer.
In December it was announced that Bechtel was given the commission to create a sculpture of Roanoke-born Henrietta Lacks for the plaza newly named for her. He is working with Roanoke artist Bryce Cobbs on the six-foot-tall bronze statue, which, with the plaza, has a price tag of $160,000.
Of his public commissions, he says, “It is satisfying to create a sculpture that expresses a community’s values and represents something of lasting importance. I allow myself to become receptive to inhabit, as it were, the figure I am representing.”
Bechtel has a master’s degree in English from Virginia Tech (hence his Blacksburg home) and is an author. “The two art forms intersect for me in the development of character, whether in fiction or in clay,” Bechtel says. He has published the first two books in a historical fiction trilogy, “A Partial Sun” and “That Dazzling Sun,” and a collection of short stories. “I’m working on ‘A Slow Eclipse,’ the last volume of the trilogy.”
“I am grateful for and energized by the recognition I have begun to receive for my work,” Bechtel says. “I feel like my best works are ahead of me.” The adulation he has received would likely make his mom glow.
The story above is from our May/June 2023 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!
