Artist Profile: J. Doyle Rogers

Man of Steel

By Natalie del Valle

Drawing from his own inner reflection and personal experience, local Georgia artist J. Doyle Rogers uses his artistic eye and keen skills with a welder to create unique metal sculptures. I draw inspiration from a desire for art to be mesmerizing, whimsical and nostalgic, Rogers explains.

Born in Atlanta, Georgia, J. Doyle Rogers grew up with his artistic passion. I took a bunch of art classes as a kid, from age 5 to age 12, Rogers says. But it wasnt until age 15 that Rogers started working with metal. I started working in my fathers mechanical contracting company as a teen, Rogers states. Playing around with scraps of metal in his fathers shop, he discovered his enjoyment of working with metal as a sculpting medium. From there, Rogers decided to follow his passion for art and study for a degree in art history at the University of Georgia. Only a year before graduating in 1997, Rogers narrowed his focus down to sculpting with steel. Now, I work with stainless steel 100% of the time. All my sculptures are made from it.

For the past 20 years now, Rogers has been creating his photorealistic sculptures using welders, water jets and a CNC (computer numerical control) machine that cuts, grinds or drills into material with mechanical precision. I must have officially started back in the 1990s time frame, he says; Since then, Ive been networking with galleries and entering into competitions to get my work out there for the public to enjoy. Much of the art that he enters into competitions eventually gets sold to collectors or ends up on display at an art museum or gallery. Ive received several types of awards for my art including Best in Show, Peoples Choice and Merit Awards. Winning an award on a piece makes that piece more valuable to the collectors, which then makes it easy to sell.

Although Rogers takes pride in all of his different art pieces, he holds a special admiration for a piece titled No. 13 at Sawgrass Canyon, which has been put on display at Booth Western Art Museum. The train depicted traveling over a canyon in Rogers sculpture shows his meticulous attention to details and his skill with metal. It can take anywhere from months to years for J. Doyle Rogers to complete a single piece of art. No. 13 at Sawgrass Canyon took 9 months to make. It took over 3000 hours of work to complete it because of its size. It ended up being 9 feet long, 3 feet wide and 4 feet tall, Rogers says.

No. 13 at Sawgrass Canyon is not the first, nor will it be the last piece of J. Doyle Rogers art to impress the art community and the public. Im currently working on getting a sculpture of mine into another Georgia museum, Rogers says. His sculpture, entitled Aftermath, was installed for the grand opening of Cashins Sculpture Garden in Alpharetta in 2015, and it was awarded the Peoples Choice Award. He also has a sculpture in the Elm Street Cultural Arts Village Sculpture Garden in Woodstock entitled Homage. To learn more about J. Doyle Rogers, or to see more of his sculptures, visit: JDoyleRogers.com