Big Will

Mastering the delicate balance between chaos and control.

I make art from what the world sets aside. A deck torn from a house becomes the roof of my studio. Three-hundred-year-old barn beams, planed and sealed by hand, stand four feet in the earth to hold it up. Stone from an old hotel pool floor, and rock donated by a local church, become a patio, a hearth, a path. My practice rests on one belief: you do not need fancy things to create something beautiful. You need to use what you have.

I grew up beside the railroad tracks on Fourth Street in Fairfield, Iowa. Our bathroom floor was gravel and the water barely ran. One Thanksgiving, our turkey was drawn in Sharpie on the inside of a pizza box lid. I laugh about it now, but it taught me that imagination is a resource no circumstance can take away. Even when there are not two sticks to rub together, I will make a fire.

My parents faced long illnesses with real courage, and many of their dreams never came to fruition. That shaped me. I learned that good intentions matter, but intention alone builds nothing. Action creates reaction. So I finish what I start, and I want my children to grow up seeing that things get completed.

Transcendental Meditation is the quiet center of my work. I learned it through Tom Bell, an older friend, and it is the one practice shared by many of the musicians I admire most. The creative philosophy of producer Rick Rubin has guided how I live and make. Meditation gives me the stillness to see potential in discarded material. The work gives that stillness a body.

The MakeTricks Artist Collective House is the heart of this work. It is the home where I cared for my mother for three and a half years. It holds her memory, her carousel horses, and the art she and my father began long ago. Today I am rebuilding it, stone by stone and by hand, into a studio and gathering place where people can create, rest, and find peace.

I also own a roofing business, and I work beside people who hold their families together through hard physical labor. Their reality is part of my experience as an artist, and it keeps my work honest.

My hope is to carry this practice outward. One day I want to sit in a hammock in my friend Heymu's village in India, teaching children to make spin art on simple motors. I want to show them, as a mentor, that beauty can be made from anything, and that joy grows when it is shared.

— Terrence William Schuldt II