It could not even have remotely crossed his mind as a young boy that he would one day have his name associated with the great artists of his medium. But today, 63-year-old San Luis artist and sculptor Huberto Maestas is just that; a man whose art sits in homes, galleries or public squares around the world.
“I’m still trying to figure that out,” Maestas chuckled as he drove a recently completed piece to its final destination. Sometimes, it’s only behind the wheel where the Valley’s best-known artist finds the time to chat about his work. The piece he’s delivering today is barely spoken of because his time is budgeted carefully and there are too many other things he wants to say.
Maestas may be best known for his town’s “La Mesa de la Piedad y de la Misericorida” or The Hill of Piety and Mercy, a shrine marking the Stations of the Cross that has stood in San Luis since 1990. But his work lives internationally with one piece firmly ensconced at the Vatican. He is constantly working not only to fill orders but to nourish his soul and the art, he said, that is the fuel that drives him.
The idea that he would one day be an artist was born as a young boy as he worked “with a group of guys cleaning the acequias,” or irrigation ditches as they are known in the Valley.
On a break he noticed an old man sitting alone whittling a piece of wood. “I asked him to teach me how,” he remembered. The man, he said, “taught me how not to cut myself and how to carve.” The chance encounter was an epiphany. “That was the sparkplug to my imagination, and I went home and started carving.”
Soon he was spending his free time in the library reading every art book, learning about every artist, their names, their creations. At the same time, he was carving, practicing, in a way, preparing for his life’s work. “I was fascinated.”
Another chance meeting, this time with a college art instructor, set him on a track for a life-long avocation. “He taught me how to cast in bronze.” The then young man was both enthralled and mystified how the masters could see art “in a rock.”
Of course, before becoming an artist, Maestas encountered life. He had to find a job which took him away from his passion. “I worked at a foundry,” he said. But despite being part owner of the shop, “I was miserable. I hated everything about everything.” While his art was beckoning, reality, real life, responsibilities were landing. It was then when serendipity struck again. He landed a commission and it “forced me into a position to become a full-time artist.”
While mostly known—at least in Colorado—for The Stations of the Cross, Maestas is currently working on several projects that will one day live across the country and around the world. Currently, he’s finishing a similar ‘stations’ piece destined for Washington state. Another original piece is earmarked for Germany. Each will leave when Maestas feels they’re ready. Only he will know the time.
We chatted about his ‘holy grail,’ the piece that will define his work as an artist. Like those who have lived their art over the centuries, it’s a search that’s both a curse if never realized or blessing if it lands just right. It—‘the piece’—is somewhere, he said. “I just haven’t found it yet but I’m always looking for the magic chalice.” But now and then, there are moments, he admits, when “there’s one little thing I create that just scrapes the surface.”
As an artist, said Maestas, there are ‘do-overs’ that are not always afforded to so many others. He keeps a mental inventory of all his work including pieces he has done that even though they have won great acclamation, to him are not ‘just right.’ Luckily, he also has the molds for many that he can actually return to and make the changes he thinks will add to what he originally imagined.
He says DaVinci and Michelangelo were the same way. “DaVinci is said to have paid attention to detail in an almost surreal way.” He constantly made changes to the Mona Lisa, a piece of art Maestas says the artist carried around with him for years and constantly made changes to. Michelangelo’s attention to detail—sometimes down to a fingernail or the tiniest vein—came from the study of the human form, living models and also from dissecting cadavers,” a well-known practice of renaissance masters.
While known for his religious artwork, Maestas says he does not engage in religion as a conversation. “My imagination,” he said, “takes me to an actual event.” Like Leonardo, he finds the study of people and those he conjures up in his own mind to be the inspiration for his art. “Religion, to me, is not applicable to creating art.”
Maestas is still stung by a 2018 fire in his San Luis studio. The fire destroyed years of his work, though he luckily managed to salvage a few of the molds. Those pieces, while perfect when they left the Valley for new homes and owners, are—at least in the artist’s eyes—minutely flawed. But the flaws, the imperfections, are known only to Maestas. But he says he will use the ‘scars’ embedded in them to work toward making them perfect knowing well that may never happen.
