Amber Jean:
Rustic Sophistication Captures
the Spirit of the West
by Taylor Fogarty

Amber Jean proves there is big money in making beds these days. About $38,000 per bed, to be a bit more precise. Perhaps a hefty price for most of us, but her breathtaking creations are award winning sculptures designed to capture the true spirit of the American West in a very big way.

Shortly after the 33-year-old sculptor from Livingston, Montana attended the Western Design Conference in 1999, she became the recipient of the People's Choice award and the Best Western Spirit award for her wild mustang bed. (Since that time she has sold three.) Her work continues to garner wide appeal through its symbolic and mythological references, and has been exhibited at The Smithsonian Art Train, the Art Museum of Missoula, and the Custer Art Museum.

Asked where she gets her inspiration, without hesitation Amber Jean replies, "Montana. I grew up here and I'm inspired by a lot of local materials, like the juniper trees they are incredibly beautiful once you get through that rough exterior. They have a hard life, the trees are all twisted and gnarly, and I think they really symbolize life in the West."

That inspiration became uniquely seasoned by her formal art training which began while she was an exchange student in Germany. "That's where I first saw carvings, the formal kind of carvings in the cathedrals. That definitely played a role in what I do. I kind of mix that formal approach with the laid-back Western thang," she chuckles.

As a child Jean says she always knew she would be an artist someday. She won her first national art contest in first grade at the age of six. "It was a project for the bicentennial. We had to design a bicentennial bookmark. Then when I was in high school, without my knowledge, one of my pieces was selected and shown at the state capitol. And then another piece was actually selected and sent to Washington, D.C. to represent American Youth."

How much, then, did winning that award in first grade feed into those inner desires to become an artist?

Amber Jean's voice bubbles with enthusiasm, her humor is as sharp as a chisel. "Well, honestly, I remember back then wanting to be a nurse...because I was really curious about naked bodies." She laughs and explains, "That was a kid thing. A girl never thought about being a doctor back then. And then I thought against that and decided I wanted to be a vet because I love animals and I sort of felt like Doctor Doolittle. But then that stage faded really fast and from then on I thought I would be either an artist or a writer."

In fact, Jean left high school with fifteen art credits and twenty-seven English credits. When the results of her college tests came back showing she had scored very high and nearly the same in both English and Art, it didn't exactly come as welcomed news. It presented a unique dilemma to the then seventeen-year-old.

"I remember really being upset because I just knew my scores were going to be high in Art and that meant I was going to be an artist. But when the results came back and showed both scores were very high and I passed and I got all the college credits, then I just sat down and bawled." Jean laughs, "I wanted the art score to be exceptional. I didn't want to have to choose between the two. It was definitely one of those puberty stress moments."

While in high school, Jean decided she was going to be a sculptor. "I felt strong about working three dimensionally but the interesting thing was that in all my college education I only took one sculpture class, and that was while in Philadelphia. Instead, I ended up taking a lot of drawing classes, and so even though I knew I would someday be a sculptor I never actually studied three dimensionally."

But working three dimensionally takes major money, so for the time being her dreams of sculpting were put on hold while Jean worked to put herself through school. She graduated with honors from Montana State University in 1994 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts and an Honors Degree of Distinction. Upon graduation she found a job as a wilderness ranger, working in the backcountry of Montana. It wasn't long before destiny and opportunity collided.

"I had been wanting to work large scale. I had worked in making some jewelry and other small pieces, but I just didn't have the money to create large scale pieces. But the district that I was working was selling firewood for five dollars a cord.... so it just kind of dawned on me that I could buy a tree for five bucks!"

Jean had worked as a wildfire fighter the previous summer. The friendships forged during that time would now prove to be an invaluable component to realizing her quest.

"I got together some of my smokejumper buddies and we basically harvested a truckload of big dead trees and hauled them to Bozeman." The sculptor says of her friends, "They were so good! They were so funny! You know, it seemed like I had to pick the trees that were hardest to get. And I sounded like such a girl about it!   ...I want that one, underneath that one over there... No, no! Don't cut it there! It needs to be cut under this curve. I want the curve... Amber, that curve is going to add an extra hundred pounds... Yeah, that's fine.

"Then we would haul these trees down the hill, through the woods, and to the truck."

Once they hauled the logs back to Bozeman, Jean selected one and set to work. But before beginning the carving process she first had to weld a special stand for the log to keep it up off the ground. With that done, Jean bought a Greyhound Bus ticket and headed for Seattle to look at the totem poles.

"I allowed myself $200 to buy tools, so while I was there I bought four really nice chisels and a mallet. And that was it, the two hundred was shot. So I came back with my tools and stood there looking at this log. Unfortunately it was a twelve foot log... and I wimped out." She laughs. "So I went to the wood pile and picked out a little log. It was four feet tall and very skinny."

Since it was in the middle of November, Amber Jean decided she could sculpt a Santa Claus from the little log, which she would later present as a Christmas gift to her mother who collects Santa figures.

"So I started hacking away on this little log and I was getting so bummed out because it seemed like it was taking me so long just to get the form to look like a Santa. Then one of my smokejumper friends stopped by and suggested I use a chainsaw."

Having blown her entire tool budget, purchasing a chainsaw was beyond Jean's means. Borrowing one, however, turned out to be the perfect solution and soon a Santa and and an award-winning sculptor were born.

Confidence on the rise, Amber Jean's second piece was a totem pole made from that twelve-foot log she had once found so intimidating.

Since then, the scale seems to have become larger and more grand with each new creation. Only now do her friends occasionally encourage her to return to jewelry-making. And perhaps for good reason. Imagine what the moving parties are like when Jean's work is headed to a major art show.

Jean chuckles. "The headboard alone for the Wild Horses bed takes at least four men to move. It's easier with five. The grandfather clock is a definite five-man project."

Many of Jean's personal experiences can be found in her work. Some earlier pieces were actually carved from wood harvested from some of the wildfires she fought on Crazy Mountain. The Grandfather clock, a project nine months in the making, is a piece that has brought her great personal satisfaction, in that one can find within it "what I've learned so far on my journey, all together in one piece."

Among other personal favorites is the wild mustang bed, which reflects her stint as a firefighter in the Prior Mountains of Montana where the mustangs roam. Jean noticed how the mustangs' coats were very dusty and dirty. "But when they would run," says Jean, "they would sweat, revealing streaks of color underneath all of that grays and blues and reds and creams."

That's when it struck her how much the juniper is like the mustangs. "I wanted to capture that feeling of the grand and graceful, powerful West. I wanted to feel peace and convey that we are bond together. So that was the first time I worked with juniper. It just made sense to me. It's like when you find a stone and polish it and then you begin to see all these beautiful colors inside. The horses were just like that, and I wanted to find some way to bring that together using juniper."

Occasionally the wood whispers to her an idea of what the next project will be, as was the case of her latest creation, recently shipped to its new owner. "I picked up a log and saw a streak that looked like ivory." In its finished formed the log became an elephant bed.

"Amber Waves of Grain", a fountain which pays tribute to her grandfather, is another piece born from a story. "Because people would ask me how I got such an unusual name... and it seemed I should have a story. So I made one up. My grandpa was a wheat farmer in Nebraska, so I would explain to them that he was out in the wheat field when I was born and somebody ran out and told him. I had him standing in the wheat field, a tall man silhouetted by the setting sun... A very romanticized version. The funny thing is, I was one of 53 grandchildren, so it's not like anyone would make a trip out to the field just to tell him about me.

"When I made that piece I didn't consider myself a Western artist then. Not at all. I grew up in the west and I think I got inundated by Western art. I saw so much of it, and like with anything you see a lot of, you don't always see the real good stuff and it all gets kind of watered down. I went away to school because I wanted to be cultural, you know, I wanted to study in Europe. ...Basically, I left Montana because I didn't want to be a hick," she laughs.

Jean incorporated the concocted story into the piece, as well as some genuine elements from her childhood, such as her fascination with rattlesnakes. She felt the piece ended up looking somewhat Oriental in composition. Although, she admits, at the time "I really didn't realize that rattlesnakes were something that the rest of the world didn't know about."

Imagine her shock and dismay when she learned that an art critic had gushed about her work as "breathing new life into the whole Western art thing."

Jean laughs. "When I read that I thought, western? What Western thing? I was horrified. I was in total denial.

"And then I realized that if I use elements from my life, of course my work is going to be Western, so now I've really embraced it. Now I live in a little cabin and I'm such a hick, it's funny! I get to travel a lot, but my heart is a hick. I'm a hermit. I travel and I scoot back, and I'm glad to be here."

A hick? A hermit?  Well, it's hard to say. But it's fairly certain Amber Jean, the artist, is always looking forward to the next adventure. It's the kind of stuff that fuels the creative visions which spring from her soul. She produces highly sophisticated pieces that are functional, yet behind the wood stain and polish are the stories of her life, proving she has indeed become both an artist and a writer after all.