It's the later 90s, I'm working pretty steadily, with and without assistants, making foundry tooling, industrial stuff and the occasional more artistic thing, a reasonably steady flow of smallish work.

I had a customer of long standing, Trystan, who had started doing trade shows in the US. Trystan makes 'site furniture',  or outdoor amenities like benches, tree grates and fountains. I had done all their masters and tooling for cast iron and aluminum since they got started in the early 80s. They sent a thumbnail of a hare jumping over a tortoise, wondering what it would cost to get this done about 9' long in cast iron.

It has always been my practice to try to add value to customers' ideas. I figure that if I give away some expertise off the top that I will show that I have the chops, and that I'm happy to collaborate. I wrote this back as an aluminum casting, cutting the cost substantially, adding other ideas to make it fly. The rabbit was going to be mounted on a pole, and I was really nervous about the idea of kids jumping up and down on that long fulcrum.

I did get the job. It was pretty exciting. Up here in the Frozen North, New York seems like a big deal. They were trusting me to do this sort of grand, sort of cartoonish project. The landscape architect for the NYC parks system sent a clay maquette, perhaps 17" wide for me to work from.

I have no idea how I quoted this job. I guess I just figured out surface area and threw some guesses into a hat. I planned to build this directly in epoxy clay, cutting it up for foundry patterns. It seemed like a brilliant idea, at the time.

I hired an assistant. We spent untold hours building the original in styrofoam, shaping as close as possible to the final surface. I added plaster on top, making the surface smooth and even more detailed. I waxed the surface and started laying epoxy clay on top, gauged by eye to be roughly .3" (8mm) thick.  

This is the time when I feel most competent, mainly because I can start with nothing and build this turtle shell until it looks not bad in a matter of hours. I might swagger a little on the way home.

Don't try this at home: endless mixing of epoxy and micro beads to get clay that sets pretty quickly, forcing me to work really quickly, especially if it's hot. Then there is a lot of sanding to improve the shape and get those foundry patterns to work in the foundry. I suspect that at this point I've already spent the money designated for labour.

I have skipped over another 150 hours of messing with plastics to make the parts of the piece fit into the foundry. It's best glossed over. Jeepers, I could have been learning the violin or studying law...

Here we are, grinding the castings that have been welded together. Lots more shaping with the 4 1/2" angle grinder. This is not fine sculpture. But it's Aesop for New York. At the time, I still felt excited and, well, important, perhaps.

Somebody had posted the location of the sculpture on Google Maps. I did visit this location in the summer of 2001, a few weeks before the world changed. I guess my life changed a bit when this project came my way. The designer was happy with our work. He asked, at some point, "how high is the ceiling in your studio?", and for the next decade or so I did a number of 10' (3m) high Park Features for the NYC Parks Dept.  The elation over working for the city lasted for a while. Still, my hands would ache when I got the subsequent calls for more stuff. The challenges just got bigger, and I didn't get smarter quite as fast as I'd have liked.

As a guy who claims to be self-taught, I've had a number of mentors.  A dirty, hot, noisy business like the foundry would seem to be populated with rough folk, reticent, even cranky.  Generally, I have found the opposite. I'll pause in a day and swap recipes with a guy dressed in protective gear, face covered in smoke and grime. I'll discuss wine favourites with a fellow who probably didn't finish grade 10. 

When I showed interest in foundry ideas many years ago, the local foundry owners and workers seemed all too happy to help. I was just a starving woodcarver who wanted to cast stuff. Before I knew it, I was in the foundry world, carving various objects for casting in the memorial and giftware field. Every project I brought in for casting would bounce back at me for modification. It was a long journey, learning to prepare three dimensional work for casting. Still, I was a woodcarver with two hungry kids, a guy with one small gig. It was learn or go and work at Home Depot.

I was sort of raised in the business by the original owner of Riverside Brass, right across from my studio in the late 70s. Subsequent owner/managers have been great mentor/collaborators. 

About 10 years ago I was approached by Artcast to mentor a young sculptor from St. John's Newfoundland. He had created his own project, found his own funding, and was looking for a way to cast this large piece in bronze. Artcast thought he might benefit with a  little help creating the master pattern. Morgan MacDonald arrived in January and spent much of the winter in my studio.

Morgan turned out to be an amazing anatomist. I had little to suggest in the way of improvements. As I remember, he just worked steadily away, learning my tricks with styrofoam and wax, but mostly bashing away on his own. My studio was big enough that I could do my other work around him.

There are some good photos of the casting in process at Artcast, and some shots of the unveiling here on Morgan's site.

It's been fun, working with other artists. It was always a challenge working with assistants, as I don't have the policeman gene. If helpers were going to survive in my studio, they would have to love working alone, coming and going according to the workload and the challenges of the day. I liked the teaching part. So, now I just teach for fun, and work alone. It's better for business!

Still, I think I've added to the creative community a little and hope to do more. There is always hope that those that follow will do things with less struggle, fewer mistakes.

I'm often looking at project postings on Custommade.com, a place where people look for solutions to their furniture and jewellery ideas. I came across a person in Oklahoma looking for someone to approximate a design for table legs. The original was done by Adam P. Gale in California. These were made from sheet stainless, assembled, welded and polished into a solid-looking random surface. 

These look to be done beautifully, but they were out of the person's budget at US$40,000 for the legs. I understand the price: this is a huge project. The table is most of 8 feet long.

So, this is one of my favourite things, designing within parameters, price, materials, finish, weight. I thought I could cast these in aluminum with some substantial change to the design, while, perhaps hanging on to some of the sense of 'roots'.

It's taken some weeks of playing with ideas inside Rhino 3D. I had to learn how to generate connected planes and be able to move them around together, then creating the look of a solid. It was fairly easy, in the end, but we generalists learn slowly.

The potential customer contacted me again today, so I've just stopped carving a portrait, slightly tedious work, plugged in my headphones to Songza, and got to work at the computer. Sigh, it's just a lovely thing to do in this little life. I'm at a standing desk, brain alight, dancing a bit to Songza, looking occasionally out into the trees and sunshine. Here's what I sent to the customer:

The first morning in Croatia, in Split, I woke up to this sound, just meters away, the voices echoing around the ancient walls of Diocletian's Palace. This video shows it perfectly, way better than I got. I ran to that spot, navigating by ear down endless narrow corridors, open to the air, until I found this. It was one of those "stop my life, I'm OK right here" moments.

Graeme bought a couple of bikes, and we spent many happy, strenuous hours exploring the coastal hills near Split.

I knew that my earliest inspiration, the sculptor Ivan Meštrović had worked nearby, but, perhaps in the overwhelming visual banquet of the area, I just didn't think to look up local references. We were just out biking another area north of the city when we came across the museum. Well, we were on Šetalište Ivana Meštrovića, Ivan Mestrovic  Promenade, so there might have been a clue. Not sure. It was hot out there. We were sun-blasted and salt-saturated, thanks to the local cuisine.

We came to this. Not the studio of a starving artist:

The gate was locked. There was a lady selling tickets and memorabilia nearby, who said the gallery would open in an hour or so. I can't remember if she could communicate that there was more down the road, or whether we just drifted there. But we drifted. 

And found another gate, with Mestrovic on it, pretty much unguarded, deserted, in fact. We wandered in, through a portal into a mostly empty walled courtyard, and into an open door. I may have almost fallen down. This was just available to anyone on the street? I'd languished over these pieces for hours in my early 20s, and here they were, all of them:

Perhaps I just have spent so much time in the company of wood, carving, sanding, finishing, breathing the stuff, knowing what I'm working with just by the smell, that I can look at these and get a certain happy fatigue in my hands. I know the sound of the studio when these were made.

It's been years, though. I starved during the time that I was carving. I still have racks of tools, but they have been used for other less noble purposes, and wouldn't sing through wood without a lot of attention from stone.

We did get to the Mestrovic Gallery. Graeme waited patiently while I hung out with the many stone sculptures that I'd known from the Mestrovic book. It was a bit like the few moments that I'd stumbled into the Louvre, just before they closed, finding an Etruscan sculpture, the original of the one featured on our Grade 9 French textbook, only there were perhaps 20 works that I'd ingested and added to my emotional waistline. Perhaps that was enough of a pilgrimage. I'd been back to my early 20s. I had knelt, paid my respects to a master.

Graeme and I wandered to various harbours in the Dalmatian Islands riding the rocky lanes, eating in tiny cafés in narrow streets, and eating all the gelato we could find. It was a sweet time, sweaty, too. 

The hard work of many hands was simply everywhere:

When I was 23, I was pretty much lost, like lots of young men. Being lost, though, was not my forté. A Plan could keep me safe, somehow. I'd quit physics, quit music. I had to make a living. I'm not sure how long it took for the light to come on, weeks, perhaps?

I had a cousin Karen, my age, a potter, working nearby. I'd been a busy student so I had sort of lost touch. A visit to her studio near Beamsville, Ontario was revelatory. A person could make something with his hands and sell it for money! Amazing! I suppose, being the son of a civil servant, I was not well set up for self-employment, but it seemed perfect, a way to control aspects of my life that seemed to need controlling.

I guess I'd been carving something all my life: figures in firewood, faces in clay, people in chalk (French class), a lute player in soapstone. Where is that little thing now?

I spent a lot of time in the library in St. Catharines, Onario. I had found a beautiful book dedicated to the Croation artist Ivan Meštrović, born in the late 1800's, a sculptor who was quite famous in his time, but seems to be rather obscure now. I spent hours poring over his work.

For the first few years, I made my living carving gnomes into old pine roots. I could bash a bunch into that fragrant wood, put them into a cloth bag, and cart them off to a mall and sell them. My first day I made $55, a fortune, given that I was doing casual labour, working a moving van, wielding a jackhammer for less than $2 an hour.

Still, whenever I could, I carved larger reliefs. They all sold, probably for a lot less than they were worth? Certainly, as some of that wood was solid teak and Honduras mahogany, the materials alone would be worth many times the original selling price.

So, in 2007, when my son Graeme had a holiday from his job as foreign correspondent for the Globe and Mail, posted in Kandahar, Afghanistan, we decided to meet in Croatia for a bike holiday. The idea of cycling down the islands of Dalmatia from Split to Dubrovnik seemed terrific.

It was lovely to spend two really active weeks with Graeme, eating gelato, wandering among Roman ruins, riding endlessly up steep hills, and talking, talking in a way we hadn't in a decade.

I made a great discovery for me, a kind of revelation, stumbling over a huge collection of Meštrović work, almost everything I'd been dreaming over 30 years earlier.

I'll rave about that in the next post.

I'm skipping a massive amount of effort here, work done at Artcast. The video, in the first minutes, gives you a bit of an idea of the amazing skill required at the foundry.

By the end of May, 2005, the extensive landscaping and installation was done, placed in Stewart Park, Perth, Ontario. Click here for the street view.

There was a huge event planned around the unveiling. There was a day-long open house at Millar Brooke Farm that included the RCMP Musical Ride. My 88 year old Mom was there, thrilled with the show. Cousins, an elderly aunt, neighbours, in-laws, my brother, nieces and nephews were all in attendance. It was hard to know where to put a little attention.

It was a funny moment, the actual unveiling. Ruth, Jean and I were poised, with some trepidation, on the front edge of the crowd, watching the cover come off. Lots of applause. Breath held, is this our moment?

Thus, the unending lack of understanding about what we were doing. That feeling might have been mostly mine, not being a horse person. I'll have to ask Ruth about unveiling her portrait of Ocar Peterson with the Queen in attendance. She might have had a similar experience:

The cover came off. Applause, long speeches from many dignitaries. No mention of the artists or the foundry. 

Perhaps, for my Mom's sake, I wish there had been a wee nod. Still, I suppose I never made a wrong move, in my Mom's eyes, so it didn't matter. This was Big Ben's day. Ian Millar and Millar Brooke's day.

There are a few Big Ben links that I have not mentioned before:
The Big Ben Memorial Trail, with kudos to all the amazing volunteers

When my colleagues left, Ben perfect, Ian perfect, I installed the tack and called Marcus at Artcast. He was to arrive the next day to take the wax master to the foundry. What to do with the free day?

Here's what I did:

Marcus arrived in an amazingly small van. This wax master was 12 feet long, huge, with great bulk. I wasn't really around for the cutup. Marcus wielded his Japanese saw, its fine blade slicing through wax, styro and plywood with some ease. I don't think he was here more than 40 minutes. All that work was cut into pieces and hauled away. Yikes, I'm glad I didn't see that.

A few weeks after my studio was cleared, I was asked to make a visit to the foundry. Somebody was making a video. 

It turned out to be Spruce Meadows, a Calgary equestrian centre, known to anybody who has ever shovelled out a horse stall. I guess this video has gone out around the world. 

Horse People are not fooled, though. This whole gig was about an amazing horse, not about sculptors.

I never heard from Spruce Meadows again. I wouldn't have missed a moment of this whole adventure, including the unveiling, coming up in the last instalment.

Maybe it's the decade that has passed since this work was done, but I don't remember how my equestrian angels arrived. I've known Ruth Abernethy for quite some time. She lives nearby. Ruth is a world-class sculptor and portraitist. At any rate, she appeared in my studio just when I needed her. The model really needed a perfect wax skin that looked just like Big Ben.

Ruth's sister, Jean Abernethy, was Monty Roberts' illustrator. Monty "The Man Who Listens to Horses" Roberts. Jean is an accomplished artist and rider. We brought her up from her home in Atlanta for the weeks required to understand what was Ben, and what wasn't. 

That this amazing pair of sisters arrived at the perfect moment will remain a mystery to me. Perhaps Ruth could sense me floundering away from her studio 10 km away. She arrived. Jean arrived. Ben happened.

There was still a ton of work to do, many details to finish, and the rider, Ian, to get carved and fitted. And all the tack to install. Still, it was a relief to get approvals from those that needed to approve, especially Ian. I suspect that there were celebrations for a short time, some extra sleep, and a libation.

this is not a whine, honest. I might have been caught playing during the week, maybe gardening, maybe strolling about town on a beautiful afternoon with my honey and an ice cream cone. So, on a lovely afternoon, I'm here with closeup glasses carving a soldier who is about 28mm high.

...and worrying a bit about damaging the ears that lurk here, begging to be knocked about, or scratched or otherwise embarrassed. Very red ears. I'm waiting for the welder to deliver the bases for these. It could be a couple of weeks, this worry. And it looks like I have a 7 1/2 foot clay figure coming in. Probably a clumsy one, too. One worries sometimes.

The work volume in my studio had always fluctuated from zero to overwhelming, and never predicable. For years, though, I had regular industrial customers that seemed to show up almost daily with projects and problems, most of which I would do immediately, often priced at time and materials. It made a great baseline from which to do the crazier projects and live some semblance of a normal life. Still, a project like Big Ben is a 1500 hour elephant dropped into a small life. Things get a bit weird, customers get stalled, holidays put off, friends ignored. Heady times.

After blowing up the photo to life size, I traced the outline onto a couple of sheets of 6mm plywood, joining the pieces with a few strips of other wood. The point of the construction was to make it all capable of being burned out, as this was to be cut into pieces and cast in lost wax.  Where possible, I glued wood together.

I next built a rolling stand that would allow me to move the whole master up and down, and tilting forward and back to allow for work on detail without a ladder.  I joined the plywood silhouette to the stand to allow for some movement. 

My studio was only 2000 sq ft, with room required for machinery and lots of other activities, so the rolling feature is something I add to everything possible in the studio. At the time, I had access to an adjoining empty room, so, in short order, I could swing all my storage and work benches into that room, leaving a blank space of about 600 sq ft with windows two sides. It’s been great, working every day on the bank of a lovely, treed river, high enough up to catch breezes.

My cutout taken directly from the photo was my standard edge. I knew that, regardless of the third dimension, that all details had to match this pretty closely. It took a lot of staring at photos, a lot of measuring, to determine how far to offset the legs, establish hip bone placement, and even the width of the head. I roughed these dimensions in and mounted the legs onto the extensions. Now I could start gluing on Styrofoam. I don’t know how many boxes of hot glue I used. A lot. I had two guns on the go at all times.

Did I mention that this was fun? It really was, building a horse. It probably took no more than a few days to go from the outline to the rough volume of Big Ben. It feels great to create this size of an object as directly as possible.

Next step was to grab saws, an electric chain saw, a recipro saw, and my 4 ½” grinder with 20-grit discs. All kinds of effort with large muscle groups, a few brain cells engaged, styro beads everywhere, especially in the corners of the eyes and in the underwear. Lots of noise, of sturm und drang. Some pauses, staring at photos, wondering what the heck was happening between skin and bone.

I didn’t pause very long to consider how I was going to learn equine anatomy in a week. Not knowing is a kind of special skill. I just blasted away until I couldn’t see any more what was going on. At that point, I melted a pail of cheap wax, hoping that a more reflective surface would reveal the true Big Ben lurking somewhere. It didn’t. It just made the studio smell bad for awhile.

I needed a miracle, I guess. Without knowing what I needed. One arrived.
Or two.

Continued in Part Three.