Canmore artist Cedar Mueller won so much hardware at the Calgary Stampede that even a team of draft horses would be hard pressed to haul it home.
Mueller swept the three-dimensional category at the Calgary Stampede’s 33rd Annual Calgary Stampede Western Art Auction on July 10 for Chevy, a metal sculpture of a draft horse made from rebar and parts of a Chevy truck.
Each award – Best of Show, Juror’s Choice for Best New Artist, Artists’ Choice and Collectors’ Choice – comes with a custom, Stampede-sized belt buckle.
On top of that, Chevy also sold at auction.
All that for a piece and a juried exhibition Mueller wouldn’t have entered except for a fortuitous turn of events, beginning with a grizzly bear sculpture she exhibited at the Canmore Art Guild gallery last winter.
That piece led to a profile of Mueller and her work in the Outlook and that, in turn, brought her to the attention of someone involved with the art auction.
“A lady involved with the art auction, not even on the jury or the committee, saw the article in the Outlook with the horse (Chevy). She saw that and emailed me and said, ‘you should submit a piece, you never know.’ I was thinking about it, but decided against it because it looked like they accepted only smaller pieces,” Mueller said Monday (July 21).
“She encouraged me to submit so I thought, ‘OK, what the heck, I will,’ and they accepted me, which is amazing because (Chevy) is huge.”
Chevy is the size of a full-sized draft horse and weighs about 500 pounds.
Winning all four awards and selling the sculpture has been a huge boost for Mueller. Metal work and sculpture is still relatively new to Mueller and she’s still trying to learn where and how to sell her pieces.
“That was really great and I was needing it, I was so nervous,” she said, adding she told her friend Ruth Pryor who accompanied her to the auction that, “This could make or break it.
“If I can’t sell it here, they are not that easy to sell, they don’t just sell to the person walking by on the street, so you have to figure out where do they sell and I haven’t figured that out yet,” she said.
Mueller has sold two other horses so far, both of which went into buyers’ back yards.
And she’ll be taking her latest horse, Pontiac, to Spruce Meadows this summer.
Mueller is always on the hunt for suitable scrap metal, including panels, fan belts and strapping.
“Metal strapping twists really well, so I’ve got the whole mane and tail made out of this strapping,” she explained.
“The horses are big and beautiful and they can handle chunky material, big rebar and the welds -– I use a stick welder, so it’s really crude. When you look in close it’s so crude, but when you step back it’s a beautiful horse.”
