A Mac Worthington piece of art is almost instantly recognizable. Worthington’s work (he’s best known for his metal sculpture) can be found in public, private, and corporate collections across the country and around the world. His unique cityscapes, flags, urban landscape paintings, and modern interior decoration have captured the attention of the art community since even before he opened his gallery in the Short North arts district of Columbus 35 years ago.
“Here’s what I think it is,” Worthington says. “Most — not all, most — guys that are doing metal sculptures and making functional art came from a welding background, from fabricating sheet metal. I was the artist first, and had to learn to weld.”
And just as he taught himself welding, he also taught himself to build frames and stretch canvases when he took up painting. “That’s what it means to be self-taught,” he says. “You learn this stuff as you need it.”
"Celebrity" - one of Mac Worthington's signature looks. He is best known for his metal sculptures.
Worthington was born in Canton, the son of artists. His father, Jack, made many of the bronze busts in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. His mother, Marion, worked with enamel and silver.
Before turning to art, Worthington built washing machines, served in Vietnam, and worked for a finance company — all good experiences that proved useful when he opened his own galleries.
His current gallery is unlike most of those from his past, and certainly night-and-day different from the one he operated in the Short North for 35 years. Right before the pandemic, he decided to relocate to Ostrander in Delaware County, where he’s a member of Mount Gilead-based Consolidated Cooperative. “It wasn’t a decision; it was just luck,” he says. “But it’s worked out fine.”
His Houseman Road property is replete with trees and sculptures. He hires high school students to clean the artwork. And now, he has only to step out his front door to give visitors a tour of his shop, his studio, his gallery, and the sculpture park that’s also his yard.
The art and the visitors’ parking lot suggest a public park, and passersby frequently pull in to take a walk. When that happens, Worthington often offers the full tour. That includes the gallery, a space packed with paintings, metal works, and other pieces of the functional art he’s been known to create, including a table and chairs.
Guests may browse, flip through the stacked canvases, and consider a T-shirt featuring Worthington’s image, which looks like some sort of mashup of Einstein and John Lennon; he resembles them both.
With the more spacious location, visitors not only can see his artwork, they can observe the process as well.
In his shop — a little shed that grew — stands a recently finished sculpture, a piece that suggests a silver musical note hanging in midair or a dancer holding a pose. Nearby, a multicolored waterfall of paint has been allowed to drip and dry on the edge of a workbench, and the contrast between the paint ribbons and the sculpture is stark.
Is the sculpture standing in his shop waiting for paint? “Oh no, it’s done,” Worthington says. How does he know when a piece is done? Worthington shrugs.
“At some point, you just have to stop,” he says.
It was during his time in the Short North that he took up painting. “Everybody there’s a painter,” he says, “so I bought some supplies and said, ‘Well, we’ll see.’” Worthington, now in his mid-70s, does more painting than sculpture these days. He paints abstracts and cityscapes, flowers and butterflies, hearts and faces. He creates as the spirit moves him.
But, as a working artist and an interior decorator, he also knows it’s a business. “People say, ‘I like this, but …,’” he says, as in “But they want it in blue; but they want it bigger; but they want it smaller.”
“I do this for a living. It isn’t a hobby,” he says. “I have to do what people like,” he says. “This is something for you; I’m not making this for me.”
Mac Worthington’s studio-gallery-sculpture park is at 5935 Houseman Road, Ostrander, OH. For information, call 614-582-6788, email macwartist@aol.com, or visit www.macworthington.com.
