Biography of Emil A. Sauer

Emil A. Sauer was born in Deming, New Mexico, in 1956. His family moved to Tempe, Arizona, and Emil’s earliest memories are of the farms behind his house – cotton, corn, and alfalfa fields. He chased jackrabbits, ran through the fields, and often walked two or three miles to visit friends. The irrigation ditches were full of water and life. Emil loved the desert landscape, the skies, and the entire environment.

At the age of seven, Emil was visiting his aunt and uncle in Pittsburgh when his mother died in Arizona. He, along with his brother, was adopted by their aunt and uncle, Teresa and Michael Rozewski, both artists who shared their love of art with him. By the time he was thirteen, they had introduced him to oxygen acetylene welding and bronze casting and had enrolled him in drawing and sculpture classes. Emil also won First Place Honorable Mention in the Western Pennsylvania Humane Society Poster Contest, an achievement that gave him a three-year scholarship to Saturday morning art classes at the Carnegie Museum, with Joseph Fitzpatrick and approximately one hundred fifty students.

Emil was accepted to Carnegie Mellon University, majoring in sculpture, minoring in drawing. Receiving the Paxton Summer Travel Award, he had the opportunity to live and do research on the Navajo Reservation of Canyon de Chelly, Arizona. The drawings and bronze sculptures that resulted from this experience were exhibited at the Ellis Gallery at Carnegie Mellon. He graduated from that university with honors and went to work as a special bell assembler for Paolo Solari in Paradise Valley, Arizona. Returning to Pittsburgh in the winter of 1981, he received from the dean of the fine arts department at Carnegie Mellon a two-year appointment as artist-in-residence in the sculpture department. During this period, he was represented by the Zenith Gallery in Pittsburgh, which sold his work to various private and corporate collectors. He returned to Arizona, rented a warehouse, and produced three public art projects in two years, winning Best of Show at the Arizona Biennial at the Tucson Museum of Art in 1984 and selling still more work.

Emil then moved to Santa Fe, created a fourth and national project to bring artwork to military bases, and started a fifth project, this time international, to acknowledge textile and garment workers. He completed this project in Pittsburgh, where he studied welding and completed a series of ninety-four life-size charcoal portraits of Pittsburgh residents.

Emil worked in seventeen companies in the United States as a certified welder. In Cinncinnati ,Ohio he created a series of welded-steel sculptures, taught continuing education classes, and met his wife Nancy on a bus. He took classes in anatomy and physiology, embryology, and microbiology. At the University of Cincinnati College Of Medicine with the permission of Dr. Richard Drake the Gross Anatomy course director , Emil drew the cadavers as a form of research into human anatomy. In Cincinnati he completed three art projects: A Torch of Whimsy (sixty-three steel sculptures), A Portrait of Cincinnati (forty-four life-size charcoal portraits), and A Show of Hands (thirty-three life-size graphite drawings of people’s hands).

Emil and Nancy embarked on some adventures – to Ann Arbor, Las Vegas (where he continued to take classes for five consecutive years in cadaver dissections and drew these dissections as a form of inquiry of human anatomy , also he practiced other forms of scientific illustration and had medical illustrations published in one book and one medical journal and then to the Chicago area. Over the last twentyfive years , Emil has created ten public art projects he is presently working on the tenth public art project an fourteen-year art project entitled “Figure Skaters” that will be a series of fifty composite life-size pastel drawings created from motion studies drawn from live skaters at ice rinks, an acknowledgement of the figure skaters for creating an expression of the beauty and passion of the human spirit , he is also creating realistic figuretive and modern abstract sculptures using bronze , clay ,plaster ,steel ,and wax and continues to practice medical illustration.