Local artist commissioned out of state

Posted by: Abigail Wood

awood@klkntv.com

Jay Tschetter, the artist who designed the buffalo mural in the Haymarket, was commissioned to help out a Tennessee fast food chain. He created a 26-foot long chili dog and a 22 foot hamburger out of brick. It’s a new genre for the local artist who has created many brick murals in the Midwest.

"I did a big, huge nativity scene for Marion University in Indianapolis and another one for them previous to that, and they were both religious-oriented so this is quite a break from that, I don’t know if I like the direction my career is headed," he said, laughing.

Why the enormous fast food? It’s for a restaurant called Pal’s Sudden Service that wants to open a branch in Johnson City, Tennessee. The area is historic, so a certain percentage of their building needs to be brick. That’s where Tschetter came in.

"Usually I’m just setting up walls of wet clay and sculpting, but I thought this sounded like a rather fascinating change from what I’d been doing," Tschetter said.

Tschetter was actually a brick mason before he fused that skill with art. His studio has been at Yankee Hill Brick since 1989, and he uses their brick for his pieces.

"Oh it’s great, it gives us great exposure because we ship a lot of our brick out of the state; because a lot of the bigger cities use more brick, so it’s nice that we can get some of our exposure through art," said Larry Epp with Yankee Hill Brick.

It took Tschetter six months with 640 hours of work to finish the project. The hot dog and hamburger are actually mostly fiberglass and foam; only the outside is sculpted brick. All together, they weigh about 7,000 pounds.