Mount Zion teen expresses self in clay

MOUNT ZION — There’s a new Ripple moving through the world of art.

Fifteen-year-old Wade Ripple is a sculptor who works where he can and doesn’t have a fancy art gallery to display his creations. Instead, connoisseurs will find a modest selection of his slices of the human condition inhabiting a section of counter at Ripples’ Auto Body in Mount Zion, the business in which his dad, Chris, is a partner.

Wade’s clay characters include an older biker-type dude whose graying hairline is accelerating rapidly backward from his forehead but is regrouped in a limp but defiant ponytail at the rear. About 4 inches tall sitting (and maybe 7 inches tall if it could stand up) the veteran clay biker sports a tattoo on his left bicep that features a heart emblazoned with the word “Mom.”

Another figure is a smart professional-type in up-market clothes who looks prosperous and confident. “I don’t know about him,” Wade says. “Might be a lawyer.”

There’s a white-coated doctor with an encouraging smile and a cheerful mechanic sitting on a fat overturned tire with his baseball hat on backward and his hands holding a crumpled cloth and a wrench. They’re all brought to colorful life with an artist’s clay called Sculpey, which doesn’t require the fearsome heat of a kiln to fire it.

“You just bake it in a kitchen oven at 275 for 15 minutes,” Wade explains.

He first bakes the ideas for the art in his head, however, trying to come up with stock figures that have universal appeal, but he’s also more than happy to undertake custom work.

And Wade doesn’t charge much — the price range is $8 to $20 — while he labors at a speed that would have made Michelangelo’s head spin: “When I start something, I like to finish it right then, no matter how long it takes,” he says. “You are talking 20 to 30 minutes, although I recently had one that took maybe an hour because this customer came in and wanted an old lady at a desk with a computer, and I had to make the desk and computer as well.”

Jim Taylor, an office assistant at Ripples’ Auto Body, has become one of his biggest fans. He’s long watched the maturing of young Wade’s drawing talents but was even more surprised and impressed when he channeled his skills into clay. “He’s got quite a bit of artistic ability,” Taylor says. “And the fact he just picked something like that clay up and began creating things shows he’s the type of person who can just look at something and do it.”

Wade first picked up Sculpey when his grandmother bought some 10 years ago. Then he let time carve away a whole decade before he came back to it in the winter of 2011.

“Grandmother had found that same packet of Sculpey again,” he recalls. “She is a kind of a pack rat and just stumbles across things; and Sculpey never dries out, I guess.”

Not long after rediscovering the artist’s clay and its possibilities, Wade had to pause while some surgeons carved his body after he fell ill with suspected Crohn’s disease and needed his colon resectioned. Recovery has been fast, but there’s also been plenty of recuperation time he has put to good use, further refining his clay figure technique. He’s also picked up several helpful tips from Argenta artist Diana Manning, who has long perfected the art of similar figures.

Now all this portrait of the artist as a young man needs is some healthy sales so he can help defray the costs of his dream chariot: a 2002 Pontiac Grand Prix that his dad is busy reshaping and re-spraying for him in time for his 16th birthday on Sunday.

One tough lesson about the art world, however, is that it can be fickle. Wade tried to interest the older Ripple in buying the Sculpey mechanic but hasn’t made a sale yet. Later cornered and pressed on the subject by a relentless newspaper reporter, daddy Ripple appeared to bend, but only a little.

“I’ll have to think about it,” he says.