Louis Herrera Jr. - Master Metalsmith
By Jesse Gregg
There is an air of predetermination that envelops Louis Herrera Jr. It’s hard to separate who he is from what he does. Starting his career at the age of 6, sweeping metal filings into piles at his father’s ironworks, he worked his way up to painting, then welding at 10, doing installations on jobsites at 12, hand forging, and finally taking over the business from his father.
“This is what I was put on this earth for. I came out of the dirt of that shop. It was hammered into me,” he explains. “I think I’ve come full circle. Somewhere down the line we were blacksmiths. Our name means blacksmith. A herrero is a blacksmith.”
But Louis Sr.’s father (Louis Jr.’s grandfather) was an itinerant laborer, working the cotton harvests. His mother’s family lost their land in Mexico during the Revolution and immigrated to Texas around 1910. His father didn’t learn the metalworking trade until after his discharge from the army after World War II, when he took advantage of the G.I. Bill to train for five years at the Boyce Ironworks in Austin. It was a small operation at the time, three or four people turning out decorative and functional ironwork mostly for affluent clients in west Austin. You can still see some of the fences, gates, and railings there today. The business grew with each successive building boom, branching out into structural steel for large buildings, and Louis Sr. grew along with it, rising to the position of shop foreman. Finally, in the late 1940s, he opened his own shop on Oak Springs Drive in East Austin.
As the oldest son, Louis Jr. took on the training of an heir apparent, but his father was decidedly “old school,” showing little favoritism at the shop. Anything Louis wanted, he had to earn. He was tempered by decades of hard work after school, each weekend and every summer. His father prodded him to “be the boss,” to give orders to men two or three times his age.
“Now I realize it made me really ambitious and really strong,” Louis reflects.
Louis quickly learned the business, but he wanted to know more, to learn new metal working techniques, to see what others were doing. He began to network with other smiths, like Joe Pehosky, who had a shop in Salado, Texas. Joe encouraged Louis to take a class with his teacher, Frank Turley, a ferrier who was then teaching blacksmithing in Santa Fe.
“It opened my eyes to another world,” Louis says. “If you focus on blacksmithing, it’s just another dimension. It’s a life-long learning experience.” Later he went to Boise, Idaho to study repoussé, one on one, with master craftsman Nahum Hersom.
“That’s the only way I’ll do a class. Frank would do the demos, then I’d try to replicate it.” With exposure to new ways of working metal, Louis’ creativity blossomed with the realization that “when it comes to smithing, it’s just your imagination that can hold you back.”
In 1985, Louis took over as owner of Herrera Ironworks Inc. and decided to focus primarily on hand-forged metal work. Over the years he has fabricated one-of-a-kind and limited-run ironwork for some of the Austin area’s finest custom homes, as well as public art projects such as the entrance gate to the Zilker Botanical Gardens. Instead of outfitting his shop with high-tech machinery, Louis sticks to the traditional ways.
“I make the tools when I need them,” he says, then adds this historical perspective: “The smith created tools for all the trades, woodworkers, stone carvers, everything. He was ‘the man’ back in the old days. He would be invited to all the weddings by the kings and queens because he was like a magician hammering metal together.”
For Louis Herrera Jr., working metal is more than a job, more than a calling. It is a metaphysical exercise. Just as the metallurgists of the medieval era labored to turn base metal into gold, Louis hammers nondescript pieces of steel into flowing vines with delicate leaves and blossoms.
“Organic forms aren’t as easy as people think,” Louis explains, “people think that because it’s ‘freeform’ it must be easy. It’s not just the hammering; it’s the movement. To make it look alive, that’s the trick.”
It is a labor that tests his physical and mental endurance; sometimes it's a trial by fire. He tells the following story:
“One night I was working late ‘cause I had to get all these pieces done ... repetitive stuff, you know. And I felt like the devil was watching me, and he was sitting there laughing at me. And I just kept on hammering, working hard, and I was getting tired and getting burned, and he was telling me, ‘That’s what’s waiting for you is that fire.’ I kept on working through it like I didn’t really care, and when I was done, I felt like I’d been pulled out of there, just lifted up, and it felt great.” .