This page is just the start. I will update it with content about his display at Center for Western Studies and more about his work and life. Thanks for your interest, Connie

Jim Savage was my father and mentor during his life and in my memories since his death in 1985 from cancer. Shirley Savage Jones retired about 3 years ago closing the Western Art Gallery of Sioux Falls, SD. His studio and permanent display can be viewed at the Center for Western Studies at Augustana College in Sioux Falls.

I have many requests for information about my father three years ago when my web site went up. The following biography was published in "Contemporary Western Artists" by Peggy and Harold Samuels. Copyright, 1982

"Jim Savage, Sculptor and painter of Western figures and Indian portraits in wood, born on a farm near Sioux Falls, South Dakota in 1932. (He died in January, 1985) During 25 years as a carpenter and foreman of a construction crew, his hobby was collecting antique tools. When he acquired a hundred-year-old woodcarving set in 1967, he tried modeling some small pieces of wood including 'a goofy little witch's face as a joke' on his wife. She displayed the carvings in her home until she ran out of space, then took them to a Sioux Falls gallery where they were accepted and sold. The first piece to go was the witch's face.

In the initial exhibition he entered, he won Best of Show, and at the National Woodcarvers Convention he won first place. In 1975, he was awarded the gold medal for sculpture at the Phippen Memorial Outdoor Show, after saying that 'there were 33 bronze sculptures and mine was the only wood. I didn't think I had a chance.' At that point, he decided to make carvings his full-time vocation.

To get color in his carvings, he rejected the idea of polychroming in favor of the 'natural look' resulting from inlays of different kinds and colors of wood. He uses as many as sixteen varieties in a single sculpture that may be composed of 2,200 separate pieces of wood. He says that how to put wood together is almost as important as the carving because it's necessary to know about shrinkages. For this reason, he prefers hardwoods. When he became a professional carver, he had to begin serious research on the history of characters of the early West, and to acquire memorabilia to go along with antique tools that have long since been replace by more effective tools. His 'Grabbin Leather' is in the collection of the Favel Museum, which represents him as does Kern Collectibles."