Dave Messing has spent more than fifty years building a life in art. He pairs craft, artistic vision, and an entrepreneur's instinct for building businesses, which is why his career runs through so many creative industries: television, film, interiors, set design, and sculpture commissions. Whether it was a prop for a television campaign, a set for a feature film, or a prototype for a product that would end up in millions of homes, Dave used imagination and creativity to make things that inspired people.
He earned his BFA from Wayne State University with a split major in Sculpture and Advertising Design, and he began taking commissions almost immediately.
Teacher & Entrepreneur
While in school Dave noticed something wrong with the way it was being taught. Too many programs were starting young artists without rigorous fundamentals. Students arrived able to express themselves but unable to build accuracy or structure, without a working command of color, and with no serious study of anatomy. They were being asked to break rules they had never been taught.
And there was a second blind spot. The dominant institutions also dismissed wildlife art as lowbrow, and entertainment and pop culture art as beneath consideration. Dave loved ancient and biblical art, popular entertainment art, cartoon illustration, nature, and wildlife. He could not find the argument for treating some as art and the others as noise.
He started teaching out of his home in 1979, slowly building a curriculum that put fundamentals first and welcomed every genre. By 1981, he had enough students to buy a commercial space. He and his wife, Sandy, took a leap of faith and set out on their own to build a place where people could get started in art.
Today ART 101 Studios operates two Michigan locations and has trained many thousands of artists, from adults drawing for the pleasure of it to students building portfolios for creative careers.
Creative Agency Artist & Sculptor
In the mid-1980s, Dave's commissions grew fast, ranging from graphic design and illustrations for five magazines to fine art commissions. He also became a writer. His popular art column, ARTIFACTS, appeared in the Observer & Eccentric newspapers in fourteen cities and ran for eight years.
Dave’s commissions for sculptural work also continued. He created 3d product prototypes for several manufacturers. The work spanned small appliances, games, and toys. Several of those products launched successfully, and some became household items.
This led to commissions for props and one-of-a-kind pieces built for the camera rather than for production. This work introduced him to the agency world of advertising and film production. And those communities kept calling. The commissions eventually became his full-time sculpture studio.
Between 1985 and 1998, Dave worked with every major advertising agency in Detroit, including Campbell-Ewald, J. Walter Thompson, McCann-Erickson, Young & Rubicam, BBDO, W.B. Doner & Co., and Ross Roy. Projects that began as props for print campaigns and television spots grew into full sets and environment builds for the Detroit Auto Show, one of the largest auto shows in the world. He built props, sets, and miniatures for the highest-profile creative work coming out of Detroit, including campaigns for Harley-Davidson, Corvette, Chevrolet, Jeep, Ford, Dodge, Home Depot, and many others. His work was published worldwide and seen by millions.
Dave's artistic ability and his speed at turning ideas into physical objects made him a first call for photographers and art directors, and, as usual, his versatility paid off. He could build a beautifully modern aesthetic for campaigns like the launch of the Corvette Z, then turn around and make you laugh. When Tim Allen fronted a series of commercials for Home Depot, Dave made props like a leaf-blower jetpack and other props that became the visual punchlines of the ad campaigns.
Through this period, he and a handful of his partners were among the hardest-working and most sought-after artists in Detroit, often working through the night on passion and coffee. Dave will still share harrowing and funny stories from this stretch of his career, a period that was intense, often chaotic, and responsible for building so many great relationships with creative professionals across industries.
Film Set Designer & Sculptor
In 1991, Hollywood arrived in Detroit to shoot Hoffa, Danny DeVito's film starring Jack Nicholson, and Dave was brought onto the production. He led a team of set artists that transformed the Detroit Public Library into the United States Senate for the film's iconic hearing scenes, sculpting the props and furniture and producing hundreds of square feet of faux marble and wood to hold the illusion at full scale.
The surface techniques he had developed for film, including marbling, woodgraining, and aging, turned out to be exactly what restaurant designers and architects wanted for signature interiors. He worked to spec for themed restaurants, painted murals for Detroit museums, and kept taking sculpture commissions throughout that time.
Book Illustrator
When the digital era arrived, it slowly thinned the industry commissions that had employed him for so long. Stock photography, computer rendering, and 3D imaging reduced advertising's need for physical sets and real objects. Large-scale work shrank to miniatures, which he did for a few years, and then tapered from there. The film sets and props held on for a while, but Dave was feeling the need for a change.
Most artists in Dave's generation watched the digital art era arrive and felt overwhelmed, which is easy to understand. Dave had the opposite instinct. He had spent a career learning that every tool carries its own nuance and its own craft, and that an unfamiliar tool is an opportunity. He taught himself digital illustration the way he had taught himself everything else: by working at it until the tools felt natural. Between 2000 and 2021, he illustrated twenty children's books and won awards for his work.
The Making of Living Stone
Through every one of those chapters, Dave never stopped sculpting for himself and his friends. Between commissions, after hours, in a studio with no client and no brief, he kept sculpting and kept learning, refining his mold-making and working out the inspirational figurative pieces he had been imagining for decades. He did not know what that body of work was for, other than for himself.
Living Stone Sculpture Company is what it was for.
Dave has shown in galleries, but a gallery never felt like where the work belonged. Sculpture, to him, is meant to be lived with, sitting in the room where a family actually spends its evenings, carrying a story that the people who own it recognize as their own.
Every Living Stone piece he’s created is an original, sculpted by hand and made to inspire people for generations. That is what Living Stone is: a way to bring sculpture out of the gallery and into the rooms where people live.
“I’ve always loved the way a great sculpture can change a room. I wanted to take that feeling out of the gallery and put it in people’s homes, because art should lift you up every day, and it can only do that in the places you actually live.”
