There's a lot more to Wilfer Buitrago than a fallen statue of a famous football coach.

Buitrago, one of three regional artists who created the 7 1/2-foot statue of Penn State icon Joe Paterno that was recently removed from the school's football stadium, creates many other animate forms using varied materials.

He sculpts realistic animals and winged human figures in bronze, and creates three-dimensional paintings in which forms rise up from the flat plane of a canvas.

Buitrago will demonstrate his sculpting technique Friday night, Dec. 7, at the Chestnut House fine-crafts store in Lancaster's Hager Arcade as part of the monthly First Friday arts event.

Buitrago, 40, who came to the United States from his native Colombia in 1989, lives in Ephrata and works in a studio he shares with his cousin, artist Yesid Gomez, in Reading's GoggleWorks Center for the Arts.

Buitrago sculpts a fair number of female nudes — both full bodies and torsos — in bronze statues and reliefs.

"I love the human body, in all forms," he said.

His pieces, he said, are inspired by "pictures, magazines, books, whatever. My girlfriend. I use her a lot, when I need a model."

After seeing a photograph of a woman in a leaning position, Buitrago was inspired to create "Survival," a life-sized sculpture of an injured, stumbling, winged woman who's being pulled up by a disembodied hand.

"It's like God's hand," Buitrago said. "She's got a broken wing, and that's God's hand lifting her up.

"I do a lot of innocent people, and I put wings on them to make them look innocent. They look like angels," he said.

A North Carolina car accident he and his son survived 10 years ago, which killed both of his parents, inspired "Why Me," a dark sculpture of a howling, anguished face, rising from a formless mass of bronze.

"That's how I felt," he said. "It's like the whole world crumbles, and I'm right there screaming."

While the details on his sculptures tend to be realistic, "my paintings are more abstract," Buitrago said. "It's like a three-dimensional painting. I paint with plaster."

A silvery, sinuous female torso emerges from a dark background in his 4-by-7-foot "Venus" painting on one wall of the Chestnut House.

Facing her from the opposite wall is a 3-by-4-foot painting of another 3-D woman's form, titled "Te Conozco" ("I Know You").

After sculpting plaster figures that protrude from the canvas, Buitrago paints over them.

"I use all kinds of stuff — stains, acrylics, metal leaf … even latex paint."

Buitrago's portfolio also contains 3-D paintings of a chess set and an angelfish, and a bronze hunting-dog statue he cast for a park in Maryland.

Buitrago studied art in Medillin, Colombia, and in New York, where he worked with Gomez in a foundry. With relatives already living in Ephrata, the cousins moved there in 1998 to open their own foundry.

Along with Mount Penn artist Angelo Di Maria, Buitrago and Gomez created the Paterno sculpture, and the bronze-relief football players on the wall behind it, which were erected 11 years ago outside Penn State's Beaver Stadium.

"We dressed up some local kids from Ephrata" in football gear, Buitrago said, as models for the players.

Amid controversy over Paterno's legacy, stemming from the Jerry Sandusky sex-abuse scandal, university officials decided to have the statue pulled down in July.

After the cousins lost their Ephrata business, Buitrago cast his work in foundries in Maryland and Colombia for a few years. A little less than a year ago, Gomez and Buitrago established their Bugo Studio at the GoggleWorks.

Kim Warner and Kenneth Ehrhart, friends and business partners who bought the 32-year-old Chestnut House a couple of months ago, decided to carry Buitrago's work in their store after a friend showed Warner photos of his work on a cell phone.

Ehrhart and Warner reopened the store, which carries jewelry, woodwork, pottery, glass and other work by mostly American artisans, on October's First Friday.

Buitrago said he has been producing some smaller 3-D paintings, and sculptures that range from 5 to 16 inches tall, for display in the store.

"My medium is bronze," Buitrago said, "but I'm doing a little bit of bonded bronze as well."

That process, which involves casting a form in resin and covering it with bronze powder, results in a sculpture that looks like bronze but is less expensive to make, he said.

Though JoePa's monument is gone, sculptures on which Buitrago and Gomez collaborated — with and without Di Maria — still stand tall, literally and figuratively, around the region.

A Nittany Lion mascot statue greets visitors to Penn State's sports museum; a 9-foot bronze bear towers over a dining area at Kutztown University, and an 11-foot figure of Christ hangs on a crucifix at a Catholic church in Annapolis, Md.

"We do a lot of stuff together," Buitrago said of his cousin. "But in our personal work, he does his paintings and sculptures, and I do mine."

Buitrago and Gomez are in the process of restoring a crumbling peace statue of a broken-winged dove in Reading's City Park.

A restoration, it would seem, is much better than a dismantling.
Wilfer Buitrago will demonstrate his sculpting during First Friday at Chestnut House, 25 W. King St., in the Hager Arcade. First Friday runs 5 to 9 p.m. in various art venues around Lancaster. For more information, visit lancasterarts.com.