Constable: Artist who started out with memorable snow sculptures tries new medium - straw

As a scrawny Wisconsin kid from the North transplanted in Jackson, Mississippi, Fran Volz drew funny cartoons to disarm bullies and amuse his nine brothers and sisters.

As a young adult in Arlington Heights, he created a buzz in January of 1987 by sculpting a giant Smurf out of snow in his front yard along busy Arlington Heights Road. After melting morphed his masterpiece into mush, Volz used a fresh snowfall to convert that former Smurf into a realistic likeness of Chicago Bear William "The Refrigerator" Perry with colored snow that drew even more attention.

Established as a snow sculptor who brought competitions to Chicago, Volz used concrete to craft that life-size bison that sits outside the Buffalo Grove Park District headquarters, made a fiberglass elk for Elk Grove Village, crafted a Polyfoam model of the Lincoln Memorial that toured for years before ending up in the Abraham Lincoln Capital Airport near Springfield, and has created several bronze works, including the 8-foot-tall statue of founder William Dunton in Arlington Heights.

In 2016, Volz expanded his artistic vision and his choice of medium by building a 21-foot-high Statue of Liberty out of straw.

"I ate, slept and drank straw," says Volz, 62, who worked on the piece for five months in a vacant storefront in his new hometown of Rochelle, an hour west of Elgin. And that's how he sparked the U.S. National Straw Sculpting Competition going on now in neighboring Mt. Morris.

"It's the only one in the United States," says Jeff Bold, chair of Encore!, the Mt. Morris volunteer agency dedicated to helping rural arts thrive in Northwest Illinois. "It fit our mission so well. You don't get much more unique and rural in arts than straw sculpting."

Now in its sixth year, the straw sculpting competition culminates Saturday on Straw Fest Day, with prizes for the top sculptures, as well as live music, food trucks, a blacksmith demonstration, mechanical bull riding, line dancing and a Round Straw Bale Race, in which two-person teams roll 700-pound bales of straw down the street as fast as they can. For details, visit strawusa.com.

The straw seed was planted in Volz's fertile mind decades ago when he was working on a plastic sculpture in his Arlington Heights front yard. A Swiss engineer, temporarily transferred to Elk Grove Village, stopped on his bicycle to chat with Volz. They became friends and the engineer invited Volz to Switzerland.

"So about 20 years later, I did go to visit him and his wife," says Volz, whose 2011 travels took him to Italy, England, the United Arab Emirates, and the hamlet of Höchenschwand, Germany, where he noticed "they had a brewery on one side of the street and a straw sculpting competition on the other side." He took plenty of photographs of how they constructed the frames and used straw to complete the pieces, and eventually got around to trying it himself.

"It's best to make a little clay model and that will be your 3-D blueprint," explains Volz, who builds a wood frame, screws that to a base and staples chicken wire to the wood in roughly the shape he wants.

"You look for long pieces of straw," says Volz, who has used a scythe to cut his own but also has gotten by with pieces from a typical bale of hay. Using a knitting needle and grasping the straw as if they were pieces of spaghetti, he basically sews pieces of straw into the chicken wire, uses baling twine to tie them in place, and applies an epoxy resin to attach tiny pieces needed for the detail work. He made the face of his Lady Liberty out of foam and then affixed the straw to it.

"We don't care what you do inside, as long as it's straw in the end," Volz says.

In some countries, straw sculpting competitions end with an art-destructing bonfire, but that doesn't happen at the local event. "There's always been jokes about fire," says Volz, who says artists make an additional $250 if they let the agency keep a piece for other displays.

"It was all self-taught," Volz says, whether he is talking about working with straw, bronze, plastics, snow or simply drawing.

Teased for being a Yankee and a Catholic during his boyhood in Mississippi, Volz wasn't allowed to read Mad Magazine, but a friend used to show him his drawings of that publication's cartoons. "I'd emulate him emulating 'Mad Magazine,'" Volz says. Those cartoons, including ones he drew for his high school newspaper, helped mollify the bullies.

"How can you pick on someone when they're making you laugh?" he says.

Volz got a bachelor's degree in religious studies at St. Norbert College in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and served in the U.S. Air Force, stationed in California. But it wasn't until he moved to Arlington Heights that he discovered the art he could make with snow.

"We didn't have much snow in Mississippi," Volz notes.

His first attempt at building a large Smurf didn't go as planned. "I was working on his mouth on a ladder and the whole thing collapsed," Volz says. "And so did my heart."

He learned how to build stronger bases and fortify his pieces. The winter after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Volz sculpted a 15-foot-tall Statue of Liberty in front of a large U.S. flag hanging at the office of his dentist, who gave him a free crown in exchange for the temporary art exhibit.

While he was working on Lady Liberty, he put out a bucket for donations.

"I made $1,100 in a couple of days," Volz remembers. "I bought my first computer with that."

Other memorable snow sculptures included movie star Marilyn Monroe's iconic pose with the billowing white dress as she stands above a subway grate, a schoolyard sculpture of a little boy and girl standing back to back, and several versions of Jesus.

Seeing something on which he works so hard just melt away is difficult, he admits. "But to me, it's like getting a new canvas to start another piece," Volz says.

As much attention as his snow pieces garnered, they didn't pay the bills.

"There's no money in snow sculpting. There's no money in snow," says Volz, who says his bronze pieces bring him the most income. He worked at a bank briefly and did shifts for the now-defunct Courtesy Home Center and Handy Andy home improvement stores. He's designed kitchens, paved patios and done other jobs between his paying art gigs.

As the new millennium began, Volz built a 6-foot, 4-inch animatronic robot with an aluminum skeleton, air cylinders, fiberglass skin and a computer control that moved its fingers, head, neck, legs, arms and waist. That robot toured the nation, appearing at trade shows and other events from Boston to Anaheim, California, to Toronto.

Volz says he is working on a couple of projects that incorporate his many talents. Obsessed with details and compulsive about getting things right, Volz understands he's a bit different from most people.

"People have said I have OCD," Volz says, referencing the mental health condition of obsessive compulsive disorder. "I like the word 'perfectionist' a little better."