Blue Nautilus
Gretchen Lotz
Orlando, FL
2018

Bronze
2.4’ x 2.25’ x 2.2’

Location: Blowing Rock Art and History Museum (BRAHM)

159 Ginny Stevens Lane
Blowing Rock, NC 28605

 

— 35th Rosen Sculpture Map —

Photos by Chase Reynolds

Blue Nautilus Detail
Blue Nautilus Sculpture
Blue Nautilus Detail

Artist Comments

I became a sculptor because I wanted to make the images I saw in my head when I closed my eyes. I knew what I wanted to create, but I had to figure out how to do it. I knew where I wanted to go— but how could I get there? This was not an easy thing for me to do. Untrained in three-dimensional craft, I struggled to recreate the pictures I saw in my inner vision. All my images seemed to be developing in a consistently personal way.

My sculptural influences have come out of myself, maybe from that secret place that connects us all to something greater. Here are words I like: rescued, ageless, primordial, symbolic, oceanic, mystery, arcane, mythical, wonder, original, timeless, sacred, corporeal, coil of transcendence, uncompromising, temple, undersea, ruins, beginning, unexplained, unsaid, depths, unknown, unspoken, unrecognized, unrealized, unborn, just is, control, out of control, invitation, message, whispers, Argonaut, baroque, pre-history, dreamy, fantasy, magic, organic.

About the Artist

Gretchen Neumann Lotz, by her own admission, had a very unenriched and uncreative childhood— she never drew, colored, or made anything that she would call art. However, she enjoyed making her own clothes— and she still does. She grew up in an old Miami, Florida neighborhood, which would later become historic Little Havana.

Lotz went to the University of Florida and inexplicably enrolled in a drawing class for which she felt she was totally unprepared. Obviously, art was not for her. Trying to offer solace, her teacher said: “You can always tell a Gretchen Neumann.” Eventually, she married that teacher, Steve Lotz, and devoted herself to emotionally supporting his blossoming art career. Meanwhile, she loved the “language” of “symbols;” so she became an English teacher. She
never thought much about “art” again until, two children later, she was watching them play along the shore of Lake Atitlan in the highlands of Guatemala, when she picked up two lava rocks and started shaping unexplained forms. That was when she realized that the written images she was working with wanted to become visual images— they demanded to be born.That was the beginning of consciously trying to give corporeal life to the pictures she saw in her head. She became the sculptor she always had been.