From the beginning of my career, I understood that sculpture wasn’t something you “learn” from a book—it was something transmitted from one pair of hands to another. My formation as a sculptor began when I worked alongside Dr. Avard Fairbanks, one of the last American artists trained at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in 1913 From 1970 to 1980, I collaborated with Fairbanks on projects that shaped my discipline, my values, and my commitment to a classical approach to sculpture.
As I look back across these early years, I can see how these experiences shaped the work of Peter Forster Sculptor in ways I did not yet understand. Fairbanks was a sculptor of extraordinary breadth, grounded in the traditions of the Renaissance academies and the rigor of direct observation. With him, I learned the discipline of measurement, proportion, and form—not as abstractions, but as living tools used by sculptors from antiquity through Michelangelo’s time.
During those years, we traveled, carved, and worked on commissions that demanded precision and endurance. Fairbanks showed me what it meant to work with integrity, to respect the stone, and to pursue excellence even when no one is watching. His influence has stayed with me for more than five decades and remains the core of how Peter Forster Sculptor approaches the classical tradition today.
I never went through a formal contemporary art school or atelier program; they didn’t exist in any meaningful classical sense when I started. My education has been fiercely independent, built through foundry work, stone carving, metal fabrication, and years of experimentation. I have spent my life approaching sculpture the way the old masters approached it: through observation, repetition, physical labor, and long practice.
While I value what the modern Classical Atelier movement has revived over the last 20 years, the truth is that my own training happened long before this revival existed. When I was young, there was no place to study direct carving in marble or granite. You either learned it from someone who knew it—or you taught yourself. Peter Forster Sculptor learned both ways.
These early influences remain the foundation of how Peter Forster Sculptor works: through direct observation, craftsmanship, and a respect for technique that has nearly vanished from mainstream education.
I grew up in Springville, Utah — a rural town by every definition, but with one profound advantage. My mother, Peggy, was the director of the Springville Museum of Art. For a boy without sophistication, I had what most young artists never get: daily exposure to world-class painting and sculpture. That museum became my first real teacher. It grounded me without my knowing it.
Around 1970, I began working with Dr. Avard Fairbanks, one of the last great American sculptors trained in the classical tradition. At about that same time, I was photographed sitting atop a pilaster base at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco — the great surviving monument of the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition. I had no idea what it meant. I was simply a fourteen-year-old kid climbing on the remains of something monumental.
In 1982, I was introduced to Margaret “Peggy” Calder Hayes, daughter of Alexander Stirling Calder, the sculptor who oversaw the architectural sculpture program for the 1915 exposition. Calder stepped into that role after the death of Karl Bitter , one of the giants of American sculpture. Learning that Calder acted as a stand-in for Bitter connected the lineage like a circuit.
Peggy Calder asked me to recreate her father’s Star Maiden.
At that moment, the circle closed.
As a boy, I had climbed the architecture of the exposition without knowing who made it.
As a man, I was entrusted by the sculptor’s own daughter to breathe life back into one of its central works.
It wasn’t reunion.
It was return — a path set long before I understood where it was leading.
That experience clarified what Peter Forster Sculptor had been searching for all along: a lineage of sculptors who treated geometry, proportion, discipline, and form as sacred grammar.
In the decades since, I’ve watched the institutional art world discard almost everything that gave sculpture its foundations. Technique became a liability. Form was dismissed as outdated. Craft was not just ignored but dismantled. Academic fidelity was replaced by shock value. The lineage of true stone carving — direct carving, observation, geometry, proportion — was abandoned in exchange for novelty.
While the Classical Atelier movement has revived fragments of traditional training in the last twenty years, the approach that I learned from Fairbanks, and from a lifetime of stone and metal work, was forged long before this revival existed.
A classical sculptor doesn’t “design and delegate.”
A classical sculptor carves.
Marble and granite do not tolerate guessing. They require a mental discipline, a physical certainty, and a visual honesty that modern education rarely cultivates. This is what continues to define Peter Forster Sculptor in both practice and philosophy.
As the years have passed, I have drifted toward defining something new born from something ancient. I call it the PureStream Method — a return to the source, the origin, the elemental grammar of sculpture. It’s not nostalgia. It’s clarity.
PureStream is:
direct observation
the unity of form and proportion
geometry underlying all structure
the discipline of hand, eye, and material
the pursuit of beauty as a form of truth
The PureStream Method reflects the philosophy that Peter Forster Sculptor has refined over a lifetime — returning to the origin, the source, the elemental truth of sculpture.
Every day uncovers a new revelation. Every day another piece falls into place. And recently, while revisiting Calder’s architectural sculpture — understanding him in his rightful place as Bitter’s successor — I recognized something deeper. I had finally found in Calder what I had been searching for all my life: a soul advocate, a sculptor whose work speaks directly to the place where craft, discipline, and spirit converge.
I am still in a state of astonishment.
Astonishment that a path begun in innocence led here.
Astonishment that classical lineage still whispers to those willing to listen.
And astonishment that, after a lifetime of work, the PureStream finally runs clear.
