(tool whooshing) (gentle music) - I love the challenge of using new materials.

I love the challenge of trying things I've never done before.

And I love expanding on what I've done in the past and making bigger and more interesting.

So a while back, I was asked to submit a proposal for this new event center in Fort Worth.

- Fort Worth, Texas, out on the plains.

A town that has fought hard to retain its history and celebrate its history.

What makes a great public artist is when they can look at the place, understand what's happening, look at the building, think about who goes there, who's the community, who are the visitors, and then start to work back through all of that information to still create something quite beautiful.

- The thing about Willy's work that sets it apart is the same thing that sets apart the work of Frederic Remington.

Willy sees the West in ways that other painters don't, and to me, that is the essence of what art is about.

It's the truth beyond the fact, the truth beyond the word.

There's a truth out there that we never do quite get hold of but it takes something like Willy's kind of painting, this kind of eye to get us close to it.

(gentle music) - The project started with some dimensions that kind of draw out what the opportunity is.

Big long wall, there are three segments to it.

There's a 60-foot wide section and two nine-foot sections, and they're all 12 feet tall.

These are big spaces, but they're 55, 60 feet in the air.

And for Willy to start to think about what kind of story he wanted to tell on this building was really the beginning.

- [Willy] I brought in some of the people who I thought would best tell the story of West Texas, when we sat around the table for three and half days just talking and telling stories.

- It evolved, and we all had endless ideas of how to portray Texas, and what that involved.

- This is a story of the land and of the succession of peoples that have been through here for the last 12,000 years.

And a succession of animals who have been through here.

- We wanted to focus on the horse.

The horse is such an important part of Western culture, similar to electricity in the Eastern seaboard.

You know, it really transformed the Great Plains in a way that is impossible to even imagine at this point.

The main mural is wild horses coming through sage, and coming through grasses with a sense of West Texas around them.

On the left side is a mounted cowboy tipping his hat to welcome you in.

And on the right-hand side is a Comanche warrior, in a 19th century look with a spear that's 14 feet long.

- Once his designs were finalized, we had to go back and start to think about all the ideas about materials that we had talked about.

One of the really interesting things about this project is that we're employing sort of ancient techniques and ancient materials with contemporary art, on a modern building for a modern public.

(light music) - This entire project really is steeped in tradition.

It's a tradition that Fort Worth is really proud of.

They're really proud of their equestrian events.

They're really proud of the city and the architecture in the city.

We were chosen to do the south end of the building, which gets direct sunlight from dawn to dusk.

And that hot Texas sun would be brutal on a painting, on a mural.

So we knew we couldn't use paint.

The only alternative really was glass tile mosaic because they were maintenance-free and they'll survive for hundreds of years.

- The bas-reliefs, those really came out of the fact that there are already bas-reliefs down on some of the buildings that surround this campus, but they don't have that dynamic nature that Willy was looking for.

So he started to really think about the bas-reliefs that were there, and how we could do ours better.

- For the cowboy, I used my great friend Jon Griggs who is a ranch manager in Nevada, and then I called my old friend Henry Real Bird.

And I asked him if he could help me, and he got his nephew Jasper Half, who is Crow, and they both really represent exactly the spirit and energy that I wanted from these.

For years, I've worked in classical, English watercolor.

And as the march of time moves along, I still love exactly what I do.

I love the traditions, and I love the traditional materials.

And there's nothing more traditional than these glass tile mosaic murals and bronze sculptures.

The mural and the sculptures are gonna be 50 feet up, so people are gonna be looking at them in the same way that you enter Rome and you see some of those great friezes.

I wanted the viewer to get a sense of monumental power out of this.

- Once the designs were accepted, and materials were identified, the next step is to really do research and figure out who are the best craftsmen in the world to do these things.

(gentle music) - This is a family business.

It started in 1949 by my grandfather.

My grandfather said, "Let's have something where the family can have a job "for all the generations, "and something that can be beautiful and artistic."

It was always thought we should have something to do with glass.

(speaking in foreign language) (speaking in foreign language) We do artistic murals for hotels and airports.

We've done work for the subway stations in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles.

We work with different artists in different commissions.

So every work is different.

That's the challenging part and the beauty of the work we do here because there's nothing that's the same.

- [John] When it came to the bas-relief, he called the same guy that sat with us for those three days, Buckeye Blake, his old friend of 40 years.

- I did paintings to show him what I wanted, and then he and I collaborated on it.

And Buck really did pretty much all of the sculpting.

- So from the watercolor forward, Buck works to build quarter-scale model.

And he'll do, not full detail on that, but he'll get the gross idea put together, and he'll do as much detail as he needs to do to make sure that he can find his place as it gets enlarged.

Then the brutal act of cutting that up, and getting it scanned happens.

And then it's enlarged up to its full size, it's one to one scale.

Then it's hand-coated with clay.

Buck comes back at that point, and he starts hacking at it and chopping at it, and redefining it.

- As it enlarges, the design elements change, so you have to adjust the sculpture.

And these are being placed on the face of this building, 60 feet above the viewer.

So, I must sculpt this at the same angle that the viewers sees it.

You have to cheat it, you have to do things with the clay that make it look right from that angle.

- Once Willy and Buck started to work together, then they could start to change the concept a little bit, move the head a little bit, make sure the horse's tack was exactly correct.

You know, Willy would come in and put the right scarf on.

They'd change the way the rein fell, changed the way the feathers on a spear worked.

A lot of great, beautiful, and important details are refined at that time.

- I had no idea how it was gonna work, and he had no idea how it was gonna work.

- That's what made it appealing to me because it was something I hadn't done before, working with another artist's ideas, and so, it is a blending of the two.

(soft music) - And then comes the brutal act of cutting it up again.

And they start the casting process for the bronze.

The first thing they do is they coat it in rubber latex, and they make that initial mold.

Then they put a plaster backing on that, and gives it a little bit of structure.

They start a process laying in wax, so they have the rubber mold, and they apply wax to that rubber mold.

Once many, many layers of the wax are laid in, they have really a new positive.

That new wax positive is what we create the bronze from.

And then they'd cast that entire thing in a shell, a ceramic shell.

Those are then heated at super high temperatures, and the wax disappears, runs out.

At that point, you're ready to get your bronze materials melted down.

You pour it in, you crack the molds apart, and these pieces emerge.

(tool clinks) (piece thuds) Then all those little pieces, because they're cast in manageable sizes, are then hand-welded together, and all those welds are ground down and chased.

(tool buzzing) And all the detail that runs across those welds is redefined by the foundry.

And they slowly reassemble it.

And when it's done right, the bronze casting really casts a fingerprint.

So when you look at it, you can find thumbprints and fingerprints throughout the bronze casting.

And some of those are Willy's and some of those are Buck's.

It's a great little piece of DNA about this process.

(horn honks) (light music) - [Malena] Glass starts with silica sand mixed in with a raw material that will give the opacity, another one that will give the color.

Once you have the formula, you will take it to the kiln.

- The way they're making it is with smalti tile.

It's hand-poured glass tile, all about a consistent 3/16 of an inch thickness.

(pedal tapping) They're all cut into little squares about the size of your pinky.

And then they chip them and cut them, and hand-hammer them into the finer details.

Willie has finished a scale version of this final artwork in watercolor.

So they will take the digital file, they'll print the digital file out on a plotter at full scale in sections that they then tape together.

(gentle music) - The nature of mosaics is unprecise.

It's an interpretation.

It is having different dyes, it's having different views.

We don't like it to look perfect.

It's human.

And you can see the variegations and the movement, and will sometimes give you wonderful surprises and wonderful colors that are very difficult to repeat because every piece is unique.

(speaking in foreign language) - You know, the problem getting, for me, getting a lot of these things right in this drawing, and then blowing it up eight times, reveals inaccuracies.

- The biggest challenge I think with Willie was to get all those sharp edges, meaning he wants the contrast.

And his work is like movement, there's a lot of movement involved.

We needed to have the legs of the horses look like they were running, and they're going through the grass.

- [Willie] There are 40 people working directly on our mural.

I love being down there, and I love working with all the people down there.

And as I walk around on the many visits we've had down to see the progress, I feel a real connection to those women.

- Art is at its core, a very individual thing because a great deal of the leap that goes from things you know to the things that you don't know, and create something new that no one knows, that happens in a way that's very mysterious.

So letting people into that mystery is a tough thing to do.

- Herein lies probably the most difficult part of this entire project, which is creating brand new types of relationships that allow artists to work comfortably with someone else as their hand, someone else to be the author of that gesture, of that little move.

That's not so easy.

And so, finding someone that you can work with that closely, that intimately on something this important, this big, is not an easy task.

This company, these women, are doing an amazing job.

(gentle music) - [Willie] I've been painting by myself in the studio for years and years and years.

And it's been really exciting to use so many outside collaborators.

The fact is I've been looking at bronze sculptures all of my life.

I've been looking at mosaics all of my life.

This is a real dream come true for me.

- Oh, my God.

God, I wish people could see this up close.

It's just so beautiful.

- [John] We've been making these things for a thousand years this way.

What I think is rewarding is that people are still responding in a really, really excited way about seeing these things.

You'd think we're moving backwards in this project, but really we're bringing people forward and their ideas about how these materials exist in our world.

We have always sought them, we found them in our most sacred spaces.

And we're using them in this new, sort of sacred space in Fort Worth.

- The piece is remarkable.

Its scope matches the size of this huge building.

It's going to command attention, and draw attention to the horse.

And this is a building about events, about rodeo, about the West.

It's just perfect for that.

- There's a quality in the handmade aspect of it.

That's what give it its breadth.

There's a difference between living art and dead art.

You can portray something, but if you're not able to put its soul in it, then it's dead art.

- The architecture calls out for a human partner to be part of its success.

Art is the same way.

Art in a dark box is not art.

It's art when it's revealed and we look at it, and we are part of that experience.

The potential power that public art has is to create a place to start conversations it punctuates a time that we live in or content that it's referencing.

It can be the common language that defines a community.

It can be that long brushstroke dragged across that paper of time.

(gentle music) (soft guitar music)