Huberto Maestas is in a mood for reminiscing. It’s late November and the artist is inside his Alamosa studio talking about growing up farming with his father, Donaldo, and the green gardening thumb of his mother, Olivia.
“She could make anything grow,” he says.
His parents are on his mind because he’s working on a new limited edition series of bronze sculptures that depict acequia farming, like his dad’s work over two decades as a mayordomo, the person responsible for the distribution of water and maintenance of ditches in acequia community farming.
“I remember when we were kids picking potatoes from the farm. It was picked by hand, put into baskets, and then poured into sacos and loaded by hand onto trucks. It was the hardest job I ever did. Heavier than bucking bales. Hundred-pound sacks of potatoes all day long,” he says.
He plans on sculpting 10 different scenes depicting acequia farming and then cast in bronze a limited edition of each piece. It’s the latest project by the prolific artist who put the Town of San Luis on the map with his iconic Stations of the Cross Shrine back in 1990, and at one point gave every Catholic bishop and cardinal in the world a bronze Saint Francis of Assisi sculpture at the request of the Vatican.
These days, he spends a lot of his time sculpting in an Alamosa studio that he took over from Ed Clemmer, his former art teacher and mentor from Adams State who he first started learning from at age 14.
He lost his own studio in San Luis to fire in December of 2018, a devastating event that destroyed precious and valuable works of art that he and his wife, Dana, cherished and owned. He recovered to a nearby garage where he set up his foundry, but creating and sculpting wasn’t the same.
Until now, inside Clemmer’s studio.
“After that fire, I didn’t have time to stop and reflect and moan about everything. I just went to work, but I didn’t have enough space to actually sculpt, do original work. If I’m sculpting, I need to focus on that, and in that foundry it was too distracting because somebody would come in and say “Can you come help me weld this? Could you make a mold of this? Or I need waxes of that.’”
So last year he talked to Clemmer about working from his old Alamosa studio.
“He asked me, ‘Do you need a studio space to work in?’ And I go, ‘Absolutely.’ I didn’t even think twice.”
On the large wooden work table sit the clay outlines of four scenes depicting farming life in Costilla County – one of a traditional sheep herder, another of a woman digging into the earth for planting, a third that shows a young boy digging potatoes and placing them into a sack as Maestas himself once did, and a fourth of a man changing the water in the growing fields.
Any one piece was worth 10 times the value of that building, and I knew that we didn’t have a recovery for that. There was no way. And still that is the one part that does bother me, but a lot of artists when they lose something like this, they quit and go and find another career and just said the heck with this. I think artwork has drilled into my soul my very being. And if I wasn’t creative, I would cease to exist as a person. So I learned early on in my life and my career and starting from my childhood that I had to just drive forward and this is my passion.
Huberto Maestas
He has others in mind, all coming from his own life experiences and memories of growing up on the family farm and the community irrigation ditches his dad once ran. Now that he’s found a studio where he feels creative again, his appetite for producing new works of art like the acequia farming tributes is strong.
“It’s the most comfortable I’ve had to work in,” he says of the Clemmer studio space. It’s easy to tell. He has works of art in progress all across the studio, a life-sized Virgin Mary nearly ready for casting, the mold of a farmer’s face from Monte Vista whose son approached Maestas about showcasing his dad.
It’s all part of the artist finding a new space for creating, and through the acequia farming scenes wanting to reflect his own roots and life growing up in the San Luis Valley.
“I have fun creating these because nobody is there commissioning me or telling me how to do something. It is going to belong to part of the body of work that I create that is for my own satisfaction as an artist. And that doesn’t stop there because it’ll move on to other things from here forward, I believe.”
Listen here to our Valley Pod episode with Huberto Maestas and his wife, Dana, as he expands on his life story, talks more about the devastating fire in 2018 that destroyed his studio and foundry, and how he recovered and found the studio space in Alamosa.