Doug Thielscher

Self-taught American artist Doug Thielscher has created an impressive body of sculptural work in carved stone, bronze, and other materials. With each piece, his intent is to tell enduring and archetypal stories of human emotion and interaction. He is committed to honoring the ancient and noble tradition of figurative stone carving and pulling it forward into the 21st century by creating contemporary and original pieces that resonate today. 

Growing up in Santa Barbara, Thielscher had little interest in the arts. “I was not that kid who drew,” he says.  He was drawn to the outdoors, and that passion was a consuming one.  As a young man, he could not imagine that one day he would be carving rocks instead of climbing them.

At U.C. Berkeley, Thielscher created his own major, Urban Development – a mix of sociology, geography, and business. He worked for a commercial real estate development company after college, and by his late 20s, he had started his own development company in Oakland, California. He always was moved to build things.

 Thielscher’s large-scale development projects sometimes had breaks of several months in between phases, and he would often travel during these downtimes. In 2002, he contrived a several-month sojourn to Italy, with the intent of renting a house on a hill, learning Italian, and sipping wine.  But this didn’t seem like enough, so perhaps get a block of stone and chip away at it – continue to build something but in a different way.

 Thielscher made his way to Pietrasanta, an ancient Roman town on the Tuscan coast famed for its magnificent marble quarries as well as its bronze foundries.  He found lodging with a couple in an old farmhouse outside of town.  The woman was an artist, and Thielscher told her his dreams of working with stone. She tempered his ambitions of diving straight into stone carving and instead encouraged him to start working on a simple clay model. They set up a small makeshift studio alongside the house, and Thielscher was immediately captivated by the process of creating. From the clay model, he was able to reproduce the piece in plaster, which was eventually transformed into wax and then bronze. 

He moved closer to town and went on to meet two Italian brothers who manufactured balustrades and other marble architectural elements. They gave him a space to work, a couple of work tables and an air hose, where he set up his plaster model in hopes of recreating it in stone.  Behind Pietrasanta, the quarry pours down into the river, filling up the riverbed with rounded hunks of marble. Thielscher recruited friends to help him drag one of these river stones up the side of an embankment with a blanket and bring it back to his new studio. Then the carving began, starting with diamond blade saws, continuing with hammers and chisels, and finally finishing with dental tools, fine diamond rasps, sandpaper …and often bloody fingers.

 He gained much inspiration and knowledge from the local “artigiani,” and for the next ten years, he would spend six months of each year returning to Pietrasanta to immerse himself in his artistic practice. Currently, Thielscher’s studio is part of an artist collective on an old naval base in Alameda, California.  He says that a bronze piece, depending on complexity, might take 80 hours to complete, whereas the same piece in stone could take 1,500 hours – a year-long endeavor. As an example, in a recent work, “Existension II,” a 3,000-pound block was reduced to 275 pounds, a mammoth undertaking. The solitude during the pandemic allowed for a great deal of work to be completed.

 After many years of working in stone, Thielscher has come to realize the surprising similarities between what it takes to bring a real estate development and stone sculpture to fruition. They both demand a vision of what the end result should look like and the persistence to show up every day for many months (or years!) and chip away at the details until the desired outcome is achieved.

 In creating his pieces, he cites several “filters” through which he puts his ideas and models, the first being originality – creating something that has not already been done.  Also integral to his practice is to make something visually strong that will hopefully provoke an emotional response from viewers. The piece should have meaningful “content” or tell some kind of a story.  Ideally, it should be interesting from all sides, pulling the viewer around to experience it in 360 degrees.

 Doug Thielscher lives in Berkeley, CA, with his wife and young son.