A native of Minnesota, Robert Wilde studied art in high school and at the University of Minnesota before his entry into private industry, where he developed advanced metal working skills, broad experience in plastics and metals manufacturing processes, mechanical and electrical design, drafting and technical illustrating. Returning to artistic endeavors in mid-life, he completed a BFA (age 50) and MA (age 52) in sculpture at St. Cloud State University, then taught at the College of St. Benedict / St. John's University, in St. Joseph & Collegeville, MN for ten years.
Wilde works in various media - including photography, drawing and sculpture - depicting his view of God's incredible creation, with a specialty in sculptural portraiture ranging from busts to full-figure portraits in scales from miniature to monumental. Wilde also operates an art gallery and digital print and custom framing studio in Dassel, Minnesota.
That's the condensed form - a bit too condensed to cover 60+ years of life... I grew up in the northwest exurbs of Minneapolis, born near the end of WWII, after the early enlistee's bunch and before the Baby Boomers. We of that age were few and far between, especially out in the country and almost country. So I learned to entertain myself. I did it by building things in the dirt and drawing pictures. My earliest memorable art experience occurred in kindergarten. I drew a picture of a house with a chimney because our house had a chimney. The kids sitting next to me seemed to like it so I added another chimney - they liked it more. So I kept adding chimneys and kept getting more laughter and attention. My first fifteen minutes of fame.
While I liked drawing and making things in clay, as I moved into my teens I began to lean more towards math and engineering, chemistry was interesting also especially when the results were violent chemical reactions. By age 15 or 16 I thought I would like to be a physicist. This was before calculators; hand calculating pi to two or three pages seemed quite fascinating. Then I took my first high school art class. Newtonian physics was nice, neat and predictable ... life was not. Nor was Art.
OK, theory of relativity, quantum mechanics, uncertainty principle... these had been around for decades. But nobody had mentioned them to me. I suppose my high school physics teacher had so much trouble getting Newtonian physics across to most of his students that he never dared approach the real-life stuff. If I had known - I would probably be a tenured physics professor now. But what life I would have missed.
