James Tellen Woodland Sculpture Garden

James A. Tellen, who began his sculpture garden in his early sixties, a furniture-factory painter who spent summers at his family's cottage in the woods near Sheboygan, was inspired by concrete statues in a churchyard across the street, according to the Kohler Foundation. From 1942 until his death in 1957 he filled the surrounding trees with figures.

His method was laborious. In winter he made a clay model, a plaster mold and a concrete casting of each major head; in summer he mounted the heads on metal armatures with wire mesh skeletons and completed the bodies with what the Kohler Foundation calls "dishpan loads of cement". Most reports, it says, name "Fallen Log" as the first major work: a 65-foot-long trompe l'oeil of weathered logs with a large bear, two cubs and a Native American family. Travel Wisconsin describes the subjects as Native Americans and frontiersmen, religious and patriotic icons, and a mix of devout and humorous tableaux, in both life-size and miniature scale.