marketing in the airline industry

Many people are familiar with Delesprie's lifelike bronze sculptures: the man sitting on a bench reading a newspaper at The Promenade at Westlake, his children playing nearby, and the proud Chumash Indian holding his bow to the sky atop a fountain at the Janss Marketplace in Thousand Oaks.

The petite, attractive sculptor's clients are as diverse as Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Nikki Sixx of Motley Crue and the Rev. Robert Schuller. Subjects include animals and angels, adults and children, the familiar and the unknown.

"All my inspiration comes from God," said the Westlake Village artist, whose name means "from the spirit" in French. "It's way too much for me. I look at my work and say, 'I didn't really do that, did I?' "

Delesprie started sculpting as a teenager, living in Montreal, gathering clay from the riverbank and sculpting natives.

She came from a family of artists: her mother was a painter; her sister is a sculptor of miniatures. Her dad was a photographer working for the Montreal Star and did photo engraving.

"We all worked with our hands," she said.

Her mother wanted to send her to art school, but there wasn't enough money.

"I had been given a gift and I knew I was good at it," she said. "I was trying to hone in on it on my own it without any direction. I didn't think I could make a living at it and so I got my degrees in other fields."

Delesprie worked as a flight attendant and attended Loyola University in Montreal and CSU Northridge, earning degrees in business and counseling, but also taking art classes.

"I was planning to go into advertising and marketing in the airline industry," she said.

"But I was sculpting on the kitchen table. People would say, 'I could sell that.' "

One of those early sculptures was seen by Michael Wayne, John Wayne's son. He commissioned her for a sculpture.

"From there, it just snowballed," she said. "It was that statue that the Autrys saw, and that led to the Autry monument at Griffith Park."

From there, she received more commissions to do public and private sculptures.But despite her success as a sculptor, Delesprie had felt unsettled in her private life since childhood.

"I always had a lot of nervous energy, always felt there was something missing from my life," she said. In 1981, she met a woman, a Messianic Jew, who invited her to attend Bible study classes.

Delesprie begins her pieces by meeting with the client and discussing the mission statement.

"The best ones are when they give the artist the go-ahead," she said. "If you come up with the idea, you're going to be a lot more inspired to accomplish it."

After she gets approval for the sketch, she builds the armature, then sculpts a flat silhouette.

"You have to get it right on the inside for it to be right on the outside," she said.

"The monument of Donald Pruner at Los Robles Hospital, even though he's fully clothed with a suit, tie, shoes, I sculpted him first without, with a flat sculpture, with the bone structure, muscle structure and finally the clothing. I roll almost sausage-like forms to create fabric."