George-Ann Tognoni, as a sculptor, gives form to natural forces in a classical tradition passed on to her by two American masters.

She devoured, as a student, Malvina Hoffman's book, "Sculpture Inside and Out," and at Iowa State University, she studied under artist-in-residence, Christian Petersen. "Sculpture should be the most exceptional of the arts," wrote Petersen. "It should eternalize only the rarest and most absolutely beautiful moments of life."

For Tognoni those moments have come from the Midwest of her upbringing and the Southwest to which she was transplanted by marriage and by a romance with cowboy life.  She (then, George-Ann Neudeck) and her sister and friends spent many happy hours horseback, under the starry skies of her family's Iowa farm.

"I sculpt horses because they are something I know. To make sculpture real to people, an artist must do something she understands." Exploring the endless facets of these noble beasts and their relation to man, Tognoni strives to depict accurately the fluid motion of equine musculature.

Tognoni likes to work from her mind's eye, transferring her idea directly to clay. Her talent for conveying the personalities of her subjects has landed portraiture commissions in full figure and bas relief - most notably her portrayals of Jesus in the series Last Days in Jerusalem, of Wall of Fame honorees* on Arizona's Herberger Theatre Wall of Fame, of Christopher Columbus for the quin-centennial Columbus Day celebration in Phoenix, and of Helen Scott on Maud for the Scottsdale Historical Society - a sculpture to which she has recently added a life-size Winfield Scott.

Most cherished of the artist's many sculptural proposals is her Peace Monument for which she has had a model on display for years in her studio. She shares her sentiments about war with her mentor Petersen who felt very deeply that war should not be memorialized in heroic statues. His half-size figure entitled "Price of Victory" is so quietly powerful in its portrayal of a standing soldier's last breath that it was removed from display in the Memorial Union of Iowa State University after WWII and brought out only briefly in the 1960's during the Vietnam War.

*Hugh Downs, Pat McMahon, & Leslie Nielsen