Charlie Stagg

Bottle Environment and Sculpture

Vidor, Texas

Created early 1980 - present

(text courtesy of Rare Visions and Roadside Revelations) 

At the end of a long and winding lane sits the house that Charlie Stagg built. It's a sprawling complex of beams and bottles and concrete, with a big domed building that serves as his studio—built on land that once belonged to his mother, some 13 acres of trees, surrounded now by the boom that is Beaumont, Texas. Charlie built it himself, hauling all the materials in by hand, and, as he likes to say, it beat the snot out of himself in the process.

"I just built it. I didn't relate to anything, no measurements or anything. I built it under the influence of watching little bitty old bugs. You know, the way wasps make their nests. They taught me how to be able to work along and get something done. You just stay at it. You don't stop and you get something done," he says, with a seriously contagious laugh for punctuation.

Charlie's not only a house builder, he's an artist as well. He creates DNA-like strands from whittled wood, then paints them with bright colors. They twist and turn, and take on a very organic kind of nature, and in a sense, the house is just an extension of that.