Designer Sculptor

Sculptor Morgan Robinson has been working since 2:30 this morning, and as he rushes into the coffee shop, his elegant bearing tussles briefly with his exhaustion, with the former claiming victory as he folds his tall frame into the seat across the table, coffee in hand. He has just completed a complicated and large privately-commissioned sculpture installation at a Stillwater home.

“I feel like I am on my own path. I’ve accepted it and am comfortable in my own skin,” Robinson says. Getting to this point took him around the globe, from tiny towns to vast cities, and through several artistic disciplines.

“I became a professional artist in 2009. My career has gained momentum from there. It really started to blossom in Japan,”

he says. He also learned a great deal about himself in the time he spent in the Australian bush country, but that story comes a bit later.

Robinson grew up in rural Oklahoma – Perkins, to be specific. He attended Perkins schools and then transferred to Ripley, Oklahoma, in high school. His graduating class numbered a whopping 36 people. He is a self-described ‘omnivert,’ meaning he fluctuates between introversion and extraversion. “There was no art in Ripley, but I found my way into home ec classes where I could create. That side of me has always been there. I was also a pitcher and went to college on a baseball scholarship, but I’d make jewelry for the baseball team, and pretty soon other teams wanted some, too,” Robinson says.

He took a jewelry making class and had what he describes as a ‘finding moment.’ “Once I found jewelry, the way forward made sense. Terms were set. The world loves beauty, and I could supply it. I dropped baseball and changed my major to jewelry. I fought for it.”

Soon, though, the budding sculptor began showing up at the jewelry program with sheet metal. “My idea was that I would create ‘wall jewelry.’ But someone said ‘no, that’s sculpture,’ and I got kicked out of the jewelry program.”

Sculpting had an immediate, strong connection for him, and the young artist began welding and woodworking. “When school was over, I didn’t really know how to be an artist. I’d never been to an art gallery or studio. So I approached an entrepreneur to help me protect and

distribute things I’d made, to patent them,” he says. “He sent me to Australia for six months where I worked as a jackaroo, shearing sheep, while I figured out what I wanted to do.”

Suffice it to say that Robinson’s jackaroo days were few, and he returned to the states clear-minded and ready to work. “It was time for me to simplify and slow down. I wanted to be very conscious about what I was doing in life, and what was in my life,” he says.

He went to Santa Fe with the thought of putting down roots, but didn’t feel a connection to the city. Back in Oklahoma, Robinson landed in Stillwater, where he remodeled and lived in a bona fide tiny house and spent his days sculpting and working for a cabinet maker. The winds of fate soon saw fit to send him to Japan. “I did a house swap with a Japanese girl who had a house in Japan. She loved my Stillwater house, so we traded houses and I lived in Japan, trading work for studio space. I started to get a few commissions, and I met my wife. We have a daughter, who is six. They currently live in Japan, and I travel back and forth and am in Japan about five times a year.” His early commissions led to a solo show and more commissions.

Today, Robinson creates beautiful, minimal furnishings and sculptures for clients around the world. His work is represented in galleries in Aspen, Denver and Vail, Colorado , and also Palm Desert, California.

He’s just received his largest commission from an architectural firm in Washington, DC, where he will create a 70-foot-long bronze piece for an executive office building on L Street. His work is curvy, organic, complex and approachable.

He has also been tapped by Oklahoma City University to serve as a visiting artist, working in a studio on campus, and interacting with students in the school’s fine arts department. A solo show in the spring at OCU’s Hulsey Gallery will feature some 25 works of his. He is at once global and hyper-local, and now that he’s found his truest path, he’s just getting started.

by Christine Eddington