As a student at Ohio State University in the early 1970s, Jon Hair was listening to a Moody Blues record with two blind friends when they asked him to describe the album cover. His word-picture did little to satisfy them.

So Hair went to art class, created a relief sculpture depicting the cover and presented it to his friends.“Wow!” he recalls one of them saying as he ran his fingers across the sculpture. “Now I can see it. ”Forty years later, the Cornelius sculptor still loves making people say, “Wow!”

Hair’s towering, lifelike sculptures have landed on college campuses, the pages of art magazines and the Olympic training center in Colorado Springs, Colo., where he has been named an official sculptor of the 2008 U.S. Olympic team. The words that top his Web page proclaim his popularity: “America’s most highly commissioned monumental sculptor.”

In his spacious studio off Old Statesville Road sits a 15-foot-tall clay lion. Visitors can see the ridges on the roof of the lion’s roaring mouth and the outline of his rib cage pushing through the fur. Nearby, an Olympic diver is upside down, in the middle of a half twist. “The Fairy of the Eagle Nebula” – an anthropomorphic depiction of a phenomenon captured by the Hubble space telescope – looks to the heavens through her own lens.

Overlooking it all is Hair’s second-story office, which contains an unfinished bust of a smiling Jim Carrey. The comedic actor – like several other famous people in Hollywood – commissioned him to do the sculpture.

Turbulent start
For Hair, life didn’t begin this way. Born 58 years ago, the second of six children, he says he was raised in a dirt-poor family, with a dad who juggled three jobs and was rarely around and a mother who didn’t always make child-rearing her first priority. For several months, he said, he and his brothers spent time in an orphanage.

Art was young Jon’s escape. He filled the pages of his school notebooks with detailed drawings of horses, jets and Spanish galleons. By middle school, he was working part-time jobs outside St. Petersburg, Fla., and approaching business owners with offers to design signs and posters. One of his first commissioned pieces: a snow cone for a restaurant window.

Later he learned to play drums owned by his stepfather, who played in a Miami Beach band. Hair got so good he, too, was invited to join a 1960s rock band – the Clefs of Lavender Hill. Still a teenager, he left Florida for New York’s music scene, where he got a chance to play with Jimi Hendrix, Frank Zappa and other luminaries. (Today he continues to sit in with local bands when he travels.)

But the visual arts retained their hold on him, so he began studying fine arts at Ohio State University and later enrolled at the Columbus College of Art and Design. His talent landed him jobs as an art director for ad agencies – a career that led him to an agency in Charlotte.

He opened his own design business in 1988, but after about nine years of the work, the novelty wore off. In the late 1990s, he was driving from one meeting to the next when it dawned on him: It wasn’t what he wanted to be doing when he was 50.

“I told my wife, ‘I’ve got this thing inside of me. And I’ve caged it up my whole life. And I’m thinking of letting it out. But when I let it out, it’s going to change our lives dramatically.’ ”

He began visiting art shows. At an art expo in New York, he watched with fascination as an artist worked on a relief sculpture of African animals. “That,” he says, “is when I knew it.”

He bought a stack of books about sculpture, took a weeklong class for would-be sculptors and began trying his hand. One of his first pieces depicted a man with windblown hair who, despite the storm surrounding him, retained his composure.

He asked a stranger to help him tote the sculpture from his second-floor studio to his car. The man took a look at the piece, then asked if he could buy it. Hair had made his first sale.

Making a big mark
In the decade since then, Hair has sculpted more than 30 monumental pieces.

“Olympic Strength,” a 35-foot bronze and steel monument that welcomes visitors to the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, depicts four Olympic gold medalists – an ancient Greek, a female Pan-American games participant, a modern male Olympic bodybuilder and a participant in the Paralympic Games, an international competition for athletes with disabilities. They’re shouldering an enormous globe that highlights all of the cities that have hosted the Olympics.

His “Boilermaker,” a brawny 18-foot-tall ironworker, sits outside Purdue University’s renovated Ross-Ade Stadium. And a bronze casting of his lion, standing on a pedestal and rising 27 feet, has recently been unveiled at Queens University’s athletic complex.

Many more sculptures are in the works. One, entitled “The Human Link,” will show three bronze figures helping one another climb an 18-foot steel helix. It will stand at the entrance to UNC Charlotte’s new health and human services building, where students study nursing and physical therapy. He dreams of one day creating the world’s largest cast-metal sculpture.

His monumental pieces command hundreds of thousands of dollars. While they’ve gathered lots of recognition, not all of it has been favorable. Critics accused him of airbrushing history this year, during Jamestown, Va.’s 400th anniversary celebration, when he unveiled a two-armed sculpture of Christopher Newport. The Jamestown founder had lost his right arm in battle, and that, some insisted, was the way he should have been depicted.

“In the middle of a community that tries so hard to get it right, here’s a 4-ton ‘Oops, we got it wrong,’ ” one Christopher Newport University graduate told the Associated Press.

Hair, however, notes that Newport didn’t lose his arm until midlife and that Christopher Newport University, which commissioned the 24-foot sculpture, wanted to portray him with two arms. Besides, he says, most of those he’s talked to in Newport have raved about the sculpture.

“If the people from his hometown love the statue, everybody else should just shut up,” he says with characteristic bluntness.

Art wars
But he reserves his sharpest words for art critics. Many have been slow to embrace work such as his, and he thinks that’s largely because realistic sculptures are considered passé in much of today’s art world.

“It’s not considered by the powers that be – the New York art critics – real art,” Hair says. “They call it non-art. Bunch of idiots.”

Hair brings out a thick book about sculpture and admires the cover. It is a photograph of Michelangelo’s “Dying Slave,” a majestic marble sculpture of a nude male in deep sleep. “This is the sculpture I love,” he says.

He offers a different assessment of other pieces pictured inside the book – a sculpture resembling concrete drainage pipes, a rabbit that appears to be constructed of silver-colored balloons, three slabs of nondescript stone in a heap. Hair rails against such pieces.

“To me, visual art should be visually stimulating,” he says. “When you need a three-page description to explain why a pile of scrap metal is art, it’s not art anymore. The problem is, it’s not artists determining what is art. It’s the art critics.

“The reason I’ve been able to make it is that people love my stuff. They don’t listen to the art critics.”

With help from his wife, two sons and daughter, Hair works 14-hour days, often late into the night, with tunes from Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughan and other musicians booming on the stereo.

What keeps him pushing so hard? He recalls how a woman in her 60s approached him not long ago to offer her praise for his “Phoenix Rising,” a sculpture at North Carolina’s Elon University depicting a magical bird emerging from flames.

“There’s something so magnificent that moves me,” he recalls the woman telling him. “Every time I see it, I see something different.”

Later, the woman asked Hair what he considered his favorite part of being a sculptor. It was hearing that his work brought joy to people like her, he explained.

“I’m doing something that has the power to move people,” he says.

“That’s what makes me love it.”

Want to Know More?
To learn more about Jon Hair and to see more of his sculptures, visit www.jonhair.com.