JAL - Cowboys expected to arrive in Jal next year will be rather large. Try 21 feet tall for a start.

This is no tall tale.

The larger-than-life riders on horseback will be silhouetted against the Southeastern New Mexico sky as they herd cattle toward the nearby Muleshoe watering hole.

It's all part of a massive cowboy sculpture project - conceived in the mind of a local artist, Brian Norwood - and now in the planning stages. The 20-foot black metal sculpture, which will extend across 300 feet on a ridge overlooking the north on Highway 18 and the east and west on Highway 128 will serve as official greeter of this small oilfield community, welcoming people into town.

One of the many cowboys in the sculpture display will be pointing cattle - part of the Jal ranch herd from which the city takes its name - toward water. The Jal name brand will be painted on some of the livestock.

This eye-catching sculpture, which will be seen from five miles away on all sides, is expected to do much more than fill up some empty space on private land owned by the Woolworth Trust Fund, established by a prominent family who helped start the town's Woolworth Community Library. Norwood sees this venture as a major economic development tool.

"My hope is that people won't be able to resist it. They'll have to stop and maybe even take pictures," Norwood said. "I thought of this idea about four of five years ago when the Chamber of Commerce started looking for something to do to draw people in. People said we needed something to get people off the highway, to make them want to stop."

"It will present a lot of opportunities for marketing. If people stop and look at the sculpture, then they're more likely to want to stop and eat in town, fill up with gas and do other things," Norwood quickly pointed out.

In addition to about five mounted cowboys, the sculpture will include a dozen cattle constructed from one-quarter-inch steel and supported by oilfield pipe and concrete. The sculpture is expected to be completed in about a year and will be formally dedicated during Labor Day weekend of the year 2000 during the big Jal school reunion which will include every class that ever graduated from Jal High School.

Forty-two-year-old Norwood wasn't sure what kind of landmark to create for the town he has called home since 1964, but then he thumbed across a feature story in Southern Living magazine about a similar sculpture in Oklahoma that was attracting 150,000 visitors a year. He knew that was just what Jal needed, though realistically, it wasn't likely to draw that many visitors, but certainly some.

Since publicly announcing the project in January at a chamber coffee, with the backing of the chamber of commerce, of course, Norwood said almost all of the $10,000 that he has projected will be needed for the sculpture has been raised. Donations have come in from residents he spoke to at the senior citizens center, from alumni of El Paso Natural Gas, which was once a major employer in Jal (Norwood put a notice in their newsletter) and from former Jal residents who learned about the project through a Jal reunion Web page.

Donations are still being accepted, however, through a sculpture project fund set up by the Jal Chamber of Commerce to offset any unexpected expenses that may come up. Norwood also said the layout is being done so it can be scaled back if necessary.

Carolyn Moore, the special projects administrator for the City of Jal and a member of the chamber, has been an avid support of Norwood's project. She said, "We're so excited about the creativity of this. It's just been amazing that someone can come up with this idea and how the community has gotten behind it."

"Brian has really put a lot of thought behind this and really researched it, where he's going to place it and everything," she added. "It will be close to the highway, and if people want to get close to it, they can take the country club road, which intersects with Third Street and leads to downtown," she said.

Like Norwood, Moore also feels the project will have a link with the Lea County Cowboy Hall of Fame at New Mexico Junior College in Hobbs and will make people want to visit that also.

Moore said, "We hope this is a start. Brian has put so much into this for the community. He is really a community leader and is dedicated to the city. He's painted murals on the west side of the chamber of commerce on his own time, not taking any money."

Norwood describes himself as a starving artist. He lives with his parents, who once owned a frame shop here and makes his living selling paintings, doing finger weaving and commission work such as signs, logos, T-shirts and other things a small town would need an artist to do.

Nevertheless, the major undertaking is all a volunteer effort on his part. He is donating labor, which would otherwise cost the city about $150,000 if they commissioned an artwork this size.

Norwood, though a reputable artist, admitted he is getting out of his league because he is more of a painter than a sculptor. He took a sculpting class in college but has never done anything of this magnitude. In spite of this, though, he is not afraid of messing up since it's all being laid out on paper first, and he will enlist the help of skilled welders.

Norwood has been active with the chamber, and last year was asked to be part of an economic development committee. He had been toying with the idea of a sculpture for some time, and decided he finally had to move forward -- otherwise it would remain just an idea in his head. So he told the committee about his idea, and they offered their support.

"I hesitated at first because I thought people wouldn't be interested in supporting this, especially with the economy like it is. But I concluded that if I didn't start, it would never happen," Norwood said.

Norwood has begun the project by first penciling out the larger-than-life figures on large pieces of brown paper in his small home studio.

"Brown paper and tape have basically become my life right now," he joked.

He used local cowboy Bert Madera, known for his blue boots, as a model.

A number of people have offered support. One welder is willing to cut the metal figures for him and Fulfer Electric has volunteered to dig holes needed to support the figures. Also Tom Seyler has donated spurs to be auctioned off for a fund-raiser.

While Norwood doesn't expect to make any money off the sculpture up front, he will own copyrights and may sell sculpture souvenirs. Though it will be situated on private land, he's hoping that, down the road, they can build some kind of area where people can pull over in their cars.

"I've had people ask me 'why do you need these sculptures to be so big?'" Norwood said. "But I know that once I put them out here, they're gonna shrink fast. It's gonna have a frame from one end of the sky to the other."

Donations for the project can be sent to: Sculpture Project, Jal Chamber of Commerce, P.O. Box 1205, Jal, NM 88252.

Readers can e-mail their comments to Helena Rodriguez at lifestyles@hobbsnews.com or call her at 397-4556, ext. 132.