Get local news delivered to your inbox!

Roger Hill has always loved art and he’s been around it his whole life.

“I always loved art classes in high school and junior high and always liked artistic things. My mother was very artistic. And my father was a fabricator,” Hill said.

He said it is both parents where he drew inspiration for his metal sculpture business.

“During an interview a while back when they asked, ‘How did you get into art?’ They asked me, ‘Did you get it from your mother, your father?’ And it dawned on me I got it from both because my father was a fabricator and machinist, and he was artistic in a fabrication sort of way. My mother was artistic. She was a cake baker and an artist and a painter. And it just merged,” he said. “It dawned on me, I guess I’ve always had it in me.”

Roger Hill helps put his sculpture in place at the Community Ever Green House on July 11. It is one of three sculptures that was commissioned as part of the refurbishing of the greenhouse.

He also found himself with more time on his hands to tackle sculpting.

“I own the radiator shop in town (Bud’s Radiator Shop in Scottsbluff). As radiators become more and more produced in China and Mexico, people buy them out of the box. I was getting phased out of that business,” Hill said. “I started in Bud’s Radiator in ’87 and purchased it in ’92. Things started to change probably around 2010. I started getting phased out, much like a blacksmith. It’s just very specialized. It’s a lot of fabrication and that’s where I got a lot of my welding skills and metal fabrication skills. Business just got slower and slower and slower.”

With business slowing down, Hill said he was looking for a way to stay busy and keep money flowing in.

Roger Hill does some work on a metal sculpture of a Yucca plant he is working on in his shop at Bud's Radiator in Scottsbluff on Tuesday, Sept. 6.

“I tried to get myself through the winter and I tried to keep the shop open and use the same tools. That’s why I started doing the metal sculpting. It wasn’t like leaving and going to another job and then the shop would have been closed and would have created more problems. I just kind of stayed in there. I had needed something I could kind of pick up and put down when radiators came in, or when that season came back I could put the artist side and that’s how it originally started,” he said. “I started tinkering with some garden art and then that got a little more sophisticated, got more sophisticated and more sophisticated.”

Originally, Hill had a different kind of sculpturing in mind.

“I always wanted to be a bronze sculpture artist but know nothing about it and figured it was going to be like going back to school. One day I was in Hill City and saw an artist doing some found metal art. That just resonated with me and in my mind was able to reverse engineer that sculpture. That was a big key for me too, was just to saying, ‘I think I could do that.’ Where everything else was always more, ‘I’d love to do that; I wish I could do that.’ That’s probably the key to anything in life. If you say, ‘I’m going to do that,’ rather than ‘I think I can do that.’”

Roger Hill's metal sculpture is installed at the Community Ever Green House on July 11. It is one of three sculptures that was commissioned as part of the refurbishing of the greenhouse.

Hill said he loves the idea of giving old metal objects new life.

“That’s what I love about it, repurposing that stuff. That’s the challenge that I’ve been pushing over the years is trying to get those pieces that people recognize that are junk, and not only repurpose them, but repurpose them in a graceful, beautiful way. That’s the dichotomy that I love. I try to make it more and more graceful and beautiful,” he said.

As his skills progressed, Hill started making a name for himself in the art community.

“I got recognized by a load of local artists here that helped me get into the Loveland sculpture show and then I kind of put me on the map,” he said.

Hill said it was 2014 when he first started tinkering with metal sculpting.

Gavin Wheeler (l to r), Ryan Blake, Jordan Schlager, Taylor Vance and Roger Hill install Hill's sculpture at the Community Ever Green House in Gering on Monday, July 11.

“I started to get really serious in 2015,” he said. “I always tinkered with it a little bit, but it started to take off around 2015. In 2016, I made it to the Loveland (Sculpture in the Park).”

Since his art has taken off, Hill has started making another home for himself in San Miguel de Allende in Mexico, where he has found a thriving art community. He sculpts in San Miguel during the winter months.

“(Living there in the winter has) changed my view on all kinds of stuff. I just live free and easy. I live tiny now. That wasn’t a concept I would have thought of before. They live small. They live tiny. They live free,” he said. “Then, down there everything is yes, you can. They’re the ones that encouraged me to (move there). They told me, ‘Why don’t you do your art down here?’ I remember my last hang up was I said I don’t know where the scrap yards are. I got a car this last year, so my Mexican friends take me to the scrap yard, but I don’t speak good Spanish. We go to the scrap yard and they talk to the the scrap yard guys and said, ‘This is Roger. He’s an artist. He’s going to come and buy stuff.’ They told them to tell him just to lay it on the scale when he’s ready. Now I go and we don’t even talk. They just wave at me and I go, that’s it.”

Since being back in the Scottsbluff-Gering area for the summer, one of Hill’s most recent works was a bee sculpture for the Community Ever Green House in Gering.

“They were wanting something that represented pollination, so I drew up a proposal with a couple ideas I had. I thought about a bee going into a flower. They liked the proposal and that’s the one they chose,” he said.

Hill said he immediately got to work on building the sculpture.

“I sketched it out first. I usually do found metal objects, so it was a little challenging for me to make something out of found metal. I wanted to keep it as accurate as I could, so it could be used for kids, for educational purposes. So I tried to make him anatomically correct,” he said.

The bee’s legs are even anatomically correct on the sculpture.

“I have piles and piles of broken wrenches and sprockets and chains. I looked online at up-close pictures because I didn’t know what a bee’s actual feet or legs look like. I saw the segmentations and then found that stuff in my art which is what I do I use found metal pieces to try to replicate things as much as possible.”

The sculpture can be seen in front of the Ever Green House. It was one of three sculptures recently installed there as the green house is refurbished.

Get local news delivered to your inbox!

Homecoming week is a time to celebrate the fall sports and school activities with the community. For the Trautmans, it’s also a time to instil…

Several people are displaced after a fire on Fourth Street in Gering on Wednesday, Aug. 31.

Gering will celebrate homecoming Sept. 6-10 with a variety of themed dress up days, a parade and pep rally, sports events and the homecoming dance.

The noise level rose at Lincoln Elementary Friday, Aug. 26, as teachers, staff and students began their final day of the week with singing and…

Western States Bank, a division of First National Bank of Omaha, announced the closure of the Gering Motor Branch for scheduled remodeling work.

Celebrations are being planned across Latin American countries in honor of independence from Spain and Portugal. This year, one such celebrati…

Gering High School seniors will learn real-world applicable knowledge through a personal finance course, which is now a state mandated require…

The thesaurus is my favorite dictionary. I often use it to find the best word for what I am trying to say. What if authors didn’t use the best…

Fifty years ago, women’s volleyball wasn’t even a varsity sport at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL). Fast forward a half century, and …

Roger Hill helps put his sculpture in place at the Community Ever Green House on July 11. It is one of three sculptures that was commissioned as part of the refurbishing of the greenhouse.

Roger Hill does some work on a metal sculpture of a Yucca plant he is working on in his shop at Bud's Radiator in Scottsbluff on Tuesday, Sept. 6.

Roger Hill's metal sculpture is installed at the Community Ever Green House on July 11. It is one of three sculptures that was commissioned as part of the refurbishing of the greenhouse.

Gavin Wheeler (l to r), Ryan Blake, Jordan Schlager, Taylor Vance and Roger Hill install Hill's sculpture at the Community Ever Green House in Gering on Monday, July 11.

Get up-to-the-minute news sent straight to your device.