Sculptor Dan Massopust and some of his creations at his Eau Claire studio. You may recognize his work from last year’s Eau Claire Sculpture Tour.

To the Eau Clairian on the street, Dan Massopust is best known as the artist who won the People’s Choice award on the Sculpture Tour last year for his large concrete work entitled “Blind Spot.” Or as the Eau Clairian on the street tends to put it, “the guy who made that great frog.” Massopust, a research engineer-turned-sculptor who also holds a master’s degree in vocational and adult education now runs a workshop on the north side of Eau Claire, where he is beginning to offer classes in sculpture.

Instead of concerning himself with talk of concepts or abstraction, sculptor Dan Massopust is distinctly interested in the observable impact of his work on the people around him.

Massopust’s workshop is housed in a small commercial building and is a pleasant space very much reflecting the personality of its occupant. Massopust’s combination of engineering problem-solving and energetic imagination can be seen everywhere. Large windows light a set of rooms furnished with worktables and lined with shelves holding a jaunty collection of work in various stages of completion or wreckage. On the back wall an orderly line of shiny wrenches hanging in ascending order over a workbench contrast with the shelf above which holds a jumble of horns, wax horse parts, and cracked plaster blocks, while buckets overflowing with horseshoes are tucked neatly under the bench waiting to be turned into a commissioned piece. Rows of chairs and adjustable tables stand ready for the first classes, facing a half-sculpted white horse. Above are hung brightly colored simplified forms of maple leaves and dragonflies in aircraft aluminum, and an odd amorphous cloud is tucked up in the corner with bright yellow cheer. The room hums with an air of buoyant optimism. Shifting from a 30-year career in engineering and education to setting up as a freelance sculptor in a new town is no small decision. Surrounded in his workshop by the evidence of many successful and well-received sculptures, Massopust said, “I expected it to be really difficult. But Eau Claire has been great. Maybe it’s the Wisconsin work ethic, maybe it’s Wisconsin helpfulness, but I have met so many wonderful people, just excellent folks, and with their help found it easy to get started.”

Classes for this fall at the workshop are geared toward beginners. The single-day class “How to Sculpture a Horse” runs from 9 to 5 on Saturday, Nov. 2. For this class Massopust has taken the 67 precise measurements he made of the horse model for his current Sculpture Tour work on display – the bronze titled “Gentle Strength” – and translated them into an armature, or skeleton, of his own creation for beginners to use when learning about modeling. Massopust jokes that it’s something like “sculpting by numbers,” allowing novices the opportunity to both get used to the material and also create a well-proportioned horse figure that they can be proud of. He says, “This class is especially for those who’ve never touched clay.” Massopust is also offering a more involved set of beginners’ classes on sculpting the human head that will lead into classes offered this winter that culminate in sculpting a portrait. The first of these begin Saturday, Nov. 29. He also has plans to offer classes that kids and parents can take together.

Massopust is a sculptor of exuberant curiosity, down-to-earth and interested in physical process and structure, making realistic portrayals of predominantly animal and human subjects. Instead of concerning himself with talk of concepts or abstraction, Massopust is distinctly interested in the observable impact of his work on the people around him. In recent years he has been commissioned for several pieces by Mayo Clinic Health System, designing for the pediatric departments. “Children have such excitement and attention and they always want to touch things,” Massopust says, and it was from designing for these commissions and seeing how children interacted with them that the famous frog was born. Deciding to make his piece for the 2012 Sculpture Tour specifically with children’s responses in mind, he created the concrete work that tells a little story of a frog who doesn’t notice the fly on his back, intending to make it durable enough to endure the affection of an entire city’s worth of children. “That thing is bulletproof,” he laughs. But the return was worth the investment: When speaking about the experience of talking to groups of elementary school students during the Sculpture Tour, Massopust, a true educator, says, “All those big eyes looking at you when you tell them how to make things, when you tell them they can make things – that’s what you do this for.”

To find out more about Dan Massopust’s work or for more details about the classes, visit www.dmassosculptures.com or call the workshop at 503-779-6342.