Rick Lazes is a three dimen­sion­al artist who works in a vari­ety of media includ­ing wood, plas­ter, stain­less steel, glass, plex­i­glass, and mar­ble. Lazes’ first stu­dio was heat­ed by a coal pot­bel­ly stove on a West Vir­ginia moun­tain­top, where he spent much of his time try­ing to stay warm while craft­ing his sculp­ture. A grad­u­ate of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia, today Lazes lives and works on Lake Nor­man near Char­lotte, North Car­oli­na. Lazes is an inven­tor and the hold­er of sev­er­al patents for inno­v­a­tive tech­nol­o­gy includ­ing the Auto Boom, which is a state-of-the art tech­nol­o­gy employed for mit­i­gat­ing off­shore oil spills worldwide.

Lazes’ pro­fes­sion­al career includes his work in the enter­tain­ment indus­try where he has pro­duced hun­dreds of con­certs and live music fes­ti­vals in in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Live Nation, as well as TV shows for HBO and Cin­e­max. He recent­ly direct­ed a fea­ture length doc­u­men­tary about the undis­put­ed heavy­weight-box­ing cham­pi­on Lennox Lewis titled “Tough Love” which will debut at the Sun­dance Film Fes­ti­val in 2020.  In addi­tion, he devel­oped the Music Fac­to­ry, a 30-acre enter­tain­ment com­plex in Char­lotte, NC (ncmusicfactory.com), a 20-acre mixed use enter­tain­ment cen­ter in Irv­ing, Texas (toyotamusicfactory.com), owns and oper­ates two amphithe­aters and two live music venues, and is devel­op­ing a 1,000-acre well­ness liv­ing  and zero car­bon sus­tain­able sec­ond home com­mu­ni­ty at Daw­son Lake in West Virginia.

Artist Statement

“I cre­ate vibrant and sen­su­ous sculp­ture that is a man­i­fes­ta­tion of my pas­sion for music.”

The “Liq­uid Art” series fea­tures works that are reverse paint­ed on acrylic pan­els, which are oven-heat­ed and shaped by hand, and works in stain­less steel that are laser cut, shaped, and pol­ished by hand. Each piece is a unique emo­tion­al state­ment com­plete with the var­ied dynam­ics of a musi­cal composition.

The “World Is Bend­ing” series are made up of hard woods (wal­nut, cher­ry, maple and poplar), which are steam-bent into organ­ic forms expos­ing the nat­ur­al beau­ty of the wood’s grain. The series fus­es bal­ance with ten­sion, cre­at­ing struc­ture and elegance.

The “Paper Dolls” series are com­posed of hand mold­ed acrylic pan­els with mul­ti­ple lay­ers of images. The works inter­weave antiq­ui­ty and nos­tal­gia with con­tem­po­rary fash­ion, tak­ing the view­er on a provoca­tive jour­ney from a chil­dren’s toy to adult voyeurism.

The “Indus­tri­al Tri­bunal” series fea­tures works in hand-sculpt­ed mar­ble and gran­ite, and marine-grade 316 stain­less steel with a mir­ror-pol­ished fin­ish.  The series fus­es fig­u­ra­tive incli­na­tions and move­ment with­in a lex­i­con of mechan­i­cal ele­ments — invit­ing the view­er to con­tem­plate both util­i­ty of pur­pose and trans­for­ma­tion of form over time.