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.

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:

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.

PART ONE: THE CHALLENGE

It used to be that the culmination of a sculptor's career was his chance to do full-sized horses in bronze. Since Roman times, every Tsar, Archduke and Admiral has placed himself on a horse on a pedestal. It's a meme, I guess. Just something you have to do when you control the lives of millions. Here are a few examples. There is a great slideshow of similar sculptures here.

The town of Perth, Ontario population 5840, was put on the map of international show jumping when Big Ben and Ian Millar started winning every prize available. Some years after Big Ben's death, Tony and Lynne Hendricks, local business people, organized the resources of the area residents to erect a life-sized bronze of Big Ben. They hired Artcast in Georgetown, Ontario, and Artcast hired me to create this piece.

Although I had heard of this pair, I would not have been able to pick them out of a lineup of any 3 horses. I was amazed when my buddy Bart riffled through a stack of horse images I'd downloaded and picked out a couple of Big Ben. It was my first bit of understanding what the equestrian world might look like. Still, not knowing what I didn't know, I forged ahead, hanging out with horses, sketching, studying, oblivious to the idea that some artists spend a career just studying equine physiolology.

The challenge, as I saw it, was the pose. The townspeople of Perth wanted Big Ben in full flight over a jump. This meant making a tonne of bronze fly. And a 'horse on a stick' was not going to fly.

I carved a quick little model of the pose and layered photos of it on top of a digital image of the jump. It took some weeks of conversations between the customer, the foundry and myself. Here's what the process looked like:

I had planned to support the sculpture on 1" diameter stainless steel rods welded to substantial pipe that represents the jump. Marcus at Artcast has long experience with this kind of engineering, and he gave the design the thumbs up.

A photo was available, one that caught Big Ben and Ian mid-flight over a jump, just what I needed to get a really accurate model for scaling all parts of the project. It's a very mechanical process at this point. Any deviation from the photo was going to be 'not Big Ben'. I was indebited to photographer Shawn Hamilton for supplying this photo. I would have been lost without it.

Finally, I blew up Shawn's photo to full size, about 12 feet long (3.6m) so that I could get started. More in part 2! Whew, a bit tired just remembering. In the heat of the moment, though, on a project with this kind of visibility, there is no fatigue. Fear, excitement, focus, bewilderment, but no fatigue.

I have done quite a number of official crests in low relief, all the way from the Canada Crest, to the RCMP, to family coats of arms. I will be given a drawing like this to work from:

I generate one leaf, copy it a number of times, then cut the copies up to fit around the circle. I carve the various elements like the deer and crown and add them to the pattern. The whole thing, perhaps 16" high, is to be cast in bronze. I have to keep metal thicknesses down to around 6mm, or 1/4". Not thicker. Not thinner. The letters are metal elements that I buy and stick on.

I spend lots of time with strong closeup glasses on, getting all the detail I can into the master. The pearls on the crown are cut into my copy mould.

 I have done so many crowns!  For years I saved all the moulds, hoping that one day I could reuse one. I never did. I threw most of them out when I downsized my studio a few years ago. These days, I would just draw one in CAD and get whatever size I needed cut CNC.

 If I had just known where this sort of work was going, perhaps I would have simply fudged some of this detail. When I found the plaque online, it appears to be on a giant sign in the middle of a field.

You see the bronze crest, right? This does seem to be visible only from perhaps 150 metres. Sigh

I love the prairie! Endless skies, the Balm of Gilead poplar, even the razor-edged cold. But my bronze work here, with its great permanence, seems simply lost. Oh well, I guess I know that that delicate deer is playing somewhere in the plains with the antelope.

Yes, I worked in Hollywood, with Douglas Fairbanks Sr and Jr, but not until they had gone to the big sound stage in the sky.

Hollywood Memorial Cemetery housed the remains of many of Hollywood's elite in the 30s and 40s. By 1994, however, the place had fallen into great decline, made much worse by an earthquake that year. A family from St. Louis, MO bought the cemetery and set about to restore it. They renamed it Hollywood Forever Cemetery. 

A year after the death of Douglas Fairbanks Jr.'s death in 2000, I was hired to carve his portrait, one that was to match his father's portrait, carved by this sculptor. 

The idea, or Mr. Fairbanks Jr.'s widow's idea, was to remove Fairbanks Sr's portrait from the central panel, add marble panels on the left and right, and put up a matching wreath and bas relief profiles of father and son. 

I was flown to LA, given a rather sportif red coupe,  and put up in a pleasant hotel about a block from all those bronzes in the sidewalk. I felt a bit grand, perhaps, and a bit far from my small town in frozen Ontario. This was early March. I could have been skiing instead of trying to look famous in Hollywood.

At the memorial site workmen were busy prying off the wreath, using wedges to bust the anchors loose from the marble. They had wedges in place to pop the portrait off, too, but one of us stopped that operation.  You can see the remains of the wedges behind the portrait, and the outline where the wreath was.

I used a bunch of masking tape and a stick to establish thicknesses and measurements, taking photos from many angles. I was supposed to match the original bas relief.

I took the wreath into a little room in a kind of tower on the property to make a copy mould. I'd bought materials online from a California store and had them shipped to the cemetery. The mould was made in pieces and sent via courier to my studio back home.

I was nicely treated by the owner, but I suspect he was surprised to find such a famous sculptor with such a shiny car to be so boring. It wasn't me who oversold me, honest.

The wreath in the tower:

So I had a free day to drive around, hiking the 
Will Rogers State Park (pretty cool. I called my Mom on my mobile) and driving up past Malibu and on up the coast. It was the ocean, the dry hills and the many friendly Mexican workers gathered at the exits to Home Depot that I'll take away from Hollywood.

And... no fanfare, please. I did the portrait and the wreath. It got cast and shipped. We heard, eventually that the widow either did not like it, or that the cost of changing the marble elements of the memorial was going to exceed the California debt. At any rate, after all these years, I have finally found out that they put the wreath back and simply carved Jr's name below his father's. Er, and put Jr. with his dad. At bit awkward, that thought. Bet they were never that close in life.

Another almost-job, except that I got the Hollywood tour, met a few characters and got to feel famous-y for a bit. Oh, and I got paid. Whew, that's great praise in small town Ontario.

In 1980, after a few year of carving wood, wanting to be some extension of Henry Moore, and mostly starving, I realized that I lived in a foundry town. I had a jeweller friend who showed me how easy it was to get work cast.

Being a sculptor in wood meant spending hours with wood enthusiasts explaining my process, my tools, and spending no time at all talking about art. That's just how the medium affects people: it's like those party people that dominate the conversation with their endless chatter about their grain and smell. I had been making figures, little families using interlocking forms of wood, spending a few minutes thinking and drawing, and a zillion hours carving, sanding and polishing.

The idea of getting work cast in bronze was instantly appealing, especially as I could get it cast locally and very cheaply in the industrial sand foundries. My first effort was a seated figure, carved first in wood, cast, then high-polished on external surfaces. The one copy I had made was bought by the director of the Goethe Istitut in Toronto.

My second effort was built directly in fibreglass, as I remember:

This piece "Two Sisters", is 36 cm high. I always liked interlocking forms. I have stacks of photos of stone forms taken from the islands off the mouth of the French River in Georgian Bay, my kayaking home. These two forms reflect that sense of connection I have to both people and stone, if that makes any sense at all.

I think the stone base came from the stream bed in Short HIlls Park near St. Catharines, ON. It took a lot of effort to match these castings and get them mounted on the stone base. Still, I think I sold a few copies of this. We still have this version in our livingroom, where it sits both quietly and passionately by the piano.

It's a good thing I enjoy variety. I just got an order for a few hundred pewter medals, 40mm across, with a couple of medals plated in silver. The same job involves making a 35cm bas relief of the soldier and dog for a bronze plaque.

I will be working with a magnifying glass next week, instead of a hoist and pneumatic tools.

Here's the artwork for the medals. It's easy to get most of the detail by sending black and white art to Sterling Marking in London, ON. They will send back a rubber engraving with black detail precisely raised from the white background. I'll work with my plastics to create the master pattern. The man and dog will have to be carved separately, hence the magnifying glass.  The man's head will be about 4mm high. Not much room for expression there.

Still, I will be casting these into silicone rubber, so I'll pick up all the detail that I can carve. Here's an older medal I made:

I will update this project as I move forward. Meantime, there's big stuff to get out of the studio and off to the painter. And there's cleanup, sigh. That's just not my forté.

I thought, surely, that this job would be finished today. I did a final sanding job, and applied the final layer of primer. Of course, this showed up all kinds of little faults in the surface that had to be filled. So, again, lots of little daubs of red filler. Tomorrow, this will sand to perfection. Or not.  This is pretty much day 4 of this process.

Note the rolling stands that I've built today. These sculptures have to go to E&L Collision just down the street for the final paint job of candy apple red. Any faults in the surface are going to glare like a ketchup stain on your white tie. The carts will make it easy for the painters to position these awkward shapes for finishing.