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Collection of (4) Solid Bronze Miniatures

Currency:USD Category:Firearms & Military Start Price:250.00 USD Estimated At:500.00 - 1,000.00 USD
Collection of (4) Solid Bronze Miniatures
All by Tom Knapp and all are mounted on wood bases. (1) "No Tikki No Laundry". Statue is of an irate Asian man holding an iron and stomping his feet. Marked 1985. 6" tall. (1) "Road Agent" by Tom Knapp, depicting an old man using his side-by-side as a crutch. Marked 1983. 6" tall. (1) "W.M.S. Hart" 18/100. The base has a plaque reading "Saturday at the Westerns". 1992. 6" tall. (1) cowboy bust 7-1/2" tall 1977. Tom Knapp is a bronze sculptor recording the modern Western scene. He was born in Gillette, Wyoming in 1925, and since 1971 has lived in Ruidoso Downs, New Mexico. His wife is artist Dorothy Bell Knapp. He is intensely interested in the contemporary Indian and strives for ever-fresh way to depict the dignity and culture of the present-day Indian and Westerner. This interest in Indians dates to his adolescence when a Plains Indian tribe camped near his family's ranch every summer. There were no museums near him when he was growing up, but Army service during the Korean War exposed him to sculpture and painting shows. After the war, he attended the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland and the Art Center School of Design in Los Angeles when he was nearly 30. He was a Walt Disney artist for many years, and also had a job as an animation artist for Mountain Bell Telephone Company in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Knapp casts his own bronzes in the backyard of his studio, as part of a neighborhood "Pour In" that has been described in New Mexico Magazine. His series of contemporary American Indian ceremonial dancers was featured in Art of the West, which quotes Knapp as claiming that "vitality, movement, is the most important thing in sculpture, not the detail." His work is in five public collections. He is listed in Who's Who in American Art.