This is the skull of Arsinotherium, an impressive ancestor of the modern rhinoceros.

This is Megatherium. As the largest of the ground sloths it stood 20 feet tall.

These are some skulls of elephant ancestors, with the mammoth skeleton behind.

Megaloceros was a massive animal related to elk that lived during the ice age.

The predator display, included dire wolf, dire bears and saber cats.

This was the Gallery of Comparative Anatomy. All of these are skeletons of modern animals placed in groups that allow comparisons between species. I loved this display. Each wall was covered in comparisons of antlers and horns, or whale and hippo skulls. The cases were full of smaller animals and comparisons between feet, skulls, spines, ect. There was also an entire case comparing human skeletons with different primates.

I also visited the Gallery of Evolution. This exhibition of hundreds of species as taxidermy specimens was really amazing to see.

While in Paris I also visited the Sevres Porcelain Factory and National Porcelain Museum. This allowed me to research the history of ceramics, as well as the technical processes used by the factory.

After Paris, I spent time in Dresden visiting the Porcelain Museum there, seeing the Hall of Meissen animals, and taking a trip out to the Meissen Porcelain Factory and their Museum.

Dresden was a beautiful city. All of the museums were in one location near the opera house in what used to be Augustus the Strong’s Palace. Augustus the Strong had a passion for porcelain and his collection is one of the largest in the world. It includes the hall of Meissen animals, which is what I went to see. I couldn’t take pictures in the porcelain museums, but I got pictures of these animals at the factory. These animals were commissioned by Augustus the Strong in the 1700′s and were based on the royal menagerie. Most of them were large sculptures making them a technical marvel for porcelain at the time. I loved learning more about the history of animals in clay and Dresden and Meissen were the perfect cities for this.

This is the famous Meissen rhinoceros at the Meissen Porcelain Factory Museum. It was first cast in 1731 and modeled by Joachim Kaendler who created naturalistic but exaggerated sculptures.

This pair of Meissen lions was first cast in 1732. They were modeled by Gottlieb Kirchner, who sculpted animals with humanistic expressions.

These animal sculptures were so difficult to cast in porcelain at the time, that they were left without the enamel color, or china paint, used on everything else in the factory. This was because the additional firing for china paint would often crack these large pieces. The factory still casts some of these animals today. Here are some images of the other beautiful animals made at Meissen, including the Monkey Orchestra, commissioned by Louis the XIV.

This trip really combined my two passions; animals and ceramics. I was also able to visit the Dresden Zoo, the Paris Museum of Hunting and Nature, and a special exhibit at the Paris Decorative Arts Museum called Animal. The sculptures I am making now are heavily influenced by the things I was able to see on this trip.

One of the most powerful of these prehistoric animals was the Brontotherium. This ancestor of the modern day rhinoceros was one of the largest mammals to exist in the Ogilicene. They stood 8 feet at the shoulder and weighed up to 2 tons. The strange “Y” shaped horn shows the versatility of their evolution.

Another animal that interested me during my thesis was a scavenger called Andrewsarchus. This animal looked a lot like a wolf, but its closest living relative is a sheep. The three foot long jaw bone of Andrewsarchus was all that was discovered of the animal. This gave me an opportunity to invent some anatomy and add elements like porcupine quills to the body. I was interested in restraining the animals at their most powerful point, here I used a muzzle that attempts to hold these massive jaws closed. The muzzle is ceramic as well in this piece, but the rope and porcupine quills were added after firing.

In this piece I played a little bit more with inventing a body for this wolf-like scavenger. I based this pose on images of calf-roping. The gesture allowed for a very dramatic exaggeration of movement. Here I focused on giving the Andrewsarchus legs that were elongated and thin like those of a sheep, with the paws and body of a wolf. The leather strap around the mouth and the twine around the legs are real and were added after firing.

The last animal I focused on for this series was Deinotherium. This is one of the many evolutions of the elephant that preceded the wooly mammoth. The strange tusks on this animal curved backwards and may have been used to strip bark off of large trees. Deinotherium had a much shorter trunk and smaller ears than modern elephants and was the third largest mammal ever to exist. This piece mounted on the wall. The weathered brass ring in the ear is real and was added after firing.

Each of these pieces started with a sketch and a small maquette. These maquettes were enlarged by small degrees until I reached a mid-sized sculpture for the final piece. This process of working allowed me to repeat gestures and anatomy multiple times for each animal and really focus on realism and detail as the pieces got bigger.

This piece was made using the solid building technique again. I also made the sculpting cart using plywood and large caster wheels to help me move the piece around in my studio and get it to the kilns. A lot of paddling and carving was used to rough out this initial form. The piece was then cut into multiple sections, hollowed out and reattached.

This piece took about a week to construct solid, and then 3 weeks to hollow out. The detail work over the surface included a lot of embellishments and texture from press molds and slip cast animal bones. In the surface of this piece there is an element of the cult of remembrance. This is a strong idea in romanticism that sees death as a part of nature that balances life.

Skittish and small, the Propaleotherium reflects the fragility of early mammal life on earth after the extinction of the dinosaurs. For me, these animals embody their ancient environment and act as the spirits within the trees of the prehistoric forests that are lost today.

Some of these pieces were also photographed in the woods near my home in Texas. Placing them in this environment allowed me to see them in their true place among untouched and wild nature.

I would remove the wax original from a silicone and fiberglass mold like this one. The thinness or thickness of the cast was very controlled in order to use the least amount of liquid bronze to cast it. This kept the pieces lighter and less expensive to cast.

Then I would melt down any seams on the piece using hot irons, and sculpt any areas of lost texture to match the rest of the surface. I often had to be able to sculpt horns or teeth and other small parts in wax if any details were lost in the mold.

I was also able to work on some much larger pieces. This half life size red elk was sculpted by Mick Doellinger, a local artist. I was able to meet him and learn about his studio practice. Many artists like Doellinger work their originals in clay or plasticine, usually with a foam core underneath. Seeing larger pieces like this one also helped me see ways that the animal form can be segmented for casting or hollowing in my own work.

I also had the great pleasure of working with Bobby Hunt, another local animal sculptor. Hunt had recently installed some new sculptures at the Museum of Living Art that opened last spring at the Fort Worth Zoo. From his many trips on safari and big game hunting, Bobby has been able to study the animals he sculpts in the wild. He uses taxadermy often as a model and I learned a lot of really great techniques from his method of sculpting. This Elephant sculpture is one of my favorites of his.

This spring I began working with large scale solid building. This piece, Atlas, measures about 2.5 feet at the shoulder and is roughly 3.5 feet in length.  Here I will explain the methods I used in creating and firing this large figure.

Solid Building Process

I began by making a maquette, and doing some sketches. Source imagery is very important to me for sculpting. However, this particular animal, known as Chalicatherium, was a prehistoric mammal from the Neogene period. Although I had images of skeletons, and fossilized remains, I could not view this animal living. To help me sculpt a believable anatomy for this creature,  I looked to its closest relatives, and present day animals with similar anatomical structure.

Chalicatherium’s closest relative today is the horse. I used elements of the horse in the facial structure, as well as the neck and chest. This animal also walked very similarly to a gorilla, which allowed me to get an idea of the way their spine and front legs might have looked. Chalicatherium also had very long, claws on its front feet for pulling down tree branches. These claws were turned under, much like a three toed tree sloth. The animals I referenced were more familiar to me, and could be studied more easily.

Solid building proved to be a little tricky at first. After struggling with designing an armature that would work on the large scale, I came up with this slightly altered method. I built the large piece much the same way I built the maquettes, by first building up a solid block of clay (about 300lbs. is shown here), and carving the legs out later. I also hammered dowel rods down into this large mass of clay to give me an idea of the gesture and angle of the legs. Once this clay was stiffened, I was able to add more clay on top, and sculpt the form of the animal.

The next step in the process added about 300 more pounds of clay to the base. This solid building technique allowed me to work very fast. This form was roughed out in about two days. The best way I found to work the clay was with a paddle and small boards that beat the clay into shape, and then using loop tools to carve the shape of the legs away from the solid base. The piece must also be sprayed down constantly to keep the clay workable.

By the third day of solid wetwork, I had achieved the form and gesture that I wanted, and carved out some of the muscles and rough details of the feet, and face. This stage was allowed to stiffen until leather hard for around four days. Once the entire piece was evenly dried to leather hard, I began to cut the piece into sections to be hollowed.

On the left is a section of the head after hollowing. Each section was cut from the solid piece and then hollowed to a 1/4” thickness. The interior of the walls were smoothed and compressed to give the walls of the piece the most strength. On the right is a leg reassembled after hollowing. Each leg was cut into about five 4” sections, and then reattached as each section was hollowed.

On the top you can see the solid body, still on the support, but without legs. At this point the body was cut into two top sections of the back, and two bottom sections of the belly. These were then hollowed and compressed, shown in the image on the bottom.

The hollowed shells of the body could now be reassembled. I used a clay firing support underneath the belly which came from the original solid support structure. The shell of the body was supported by large pieces of foam until it could hold itself up. No internal structure was used in this piece. The structure relies solely on how compressed and thin the walls are.

Reattaching these pieces took about a week, and was very dependent on timing the dryness of the clay. Once the h0llowed pieces are completely reassembled, all of the detail work can be done. For this piece I chose to cover the surface in textures from various prehistoric fossils, as well as textures found in nature.

Many of these textures were made using press molds from bark and rocks. Others were made by pressing natural materials like branches and leaves into the surface of the clay.

This is the finished wetwork after the addition of all the details and textures. Here are a few detail images of some of various textures on the piece.

The piece was then bisque fired for about seven days. This slow firing carefully removed all water from the clay, and then slowly brought it to temperature in the kiln. By firing this slowly, and using firing supports under the belly and head, the piece only sustained small cracks during the first firing. Here is the piece as it came out of the bisque firing.

The piece was then glaze fired to cone 6 in order to achieve brighter colors. After the glaze firing I attached horse hair to the neck to contrast with the imagined surface and create a better sense of the piece as both living animal and spirit of the earth.

These pieces were slip cast using various molds. Like the rabbits I made in Hungary, these bears had a mold for the body, and a mold for each leg. The legs were then altered to change their position, and allow each bear to have a different pose.

The first of these bears was the piece called Troubled Water. This piece is a porcelain polar bear fired to cone 10 with no glaze. The bear was then attached to a rod inside an acrylic aquarium. I also fired large chunks of porcelain and placed them on the bottom of the tank to mimic icebergs. The tank was then filled with water, and the bear was illuminated using small, remote controlled lights attached to the interior of the piece. Here are some images of the finished piece.

This piece is called Tread Softly, and focused on a polar bear with a china painted landscape on its body. The landscape was referenced from the Fredrick Edwin Church painting, Icebergs. The bear was then positioned to walk on two arctic fox skins, emphasizing the dependence of other animals on the polar bear for survival in the arctic.

The final piece in the series is called Nothing Gold Can Stay. This title comes from the Robert Frost poem, expressing the fragility and ultimate mortality of all things in nature. These two polar bears were sandblasted, and then gold lustered to appear as if all the gold had been worn away over time. They were then positioned to interact with an actual bear skull, facing their own mortality.

This is my mom and dad when they were starting out as artists. My dad began by carving the Vinyard Bay Doors in Austin, TX. My mom is seen here unloading a kiln when she was close to my age. It is always inspiring for me to see how my parents have grown into successful artists today. They are always so supportive of my choice to be an artist too.

National Geographic photography has been inspirational to me since childhood. I always find that these photographs capture what I love about nature. Patterns and colors, the beauty of the animal form, and the humanity that can be found in animals.

I have been reading animal encyclopedias since I was very young. It seemed that I could never learn enough about all the animals I could find. I still use these books in my studio today. They often help me learn more about animals I want to make, or discover new animals, and study them more closely.

Paolo d’Atlan’s illustrations for books like the Jungle Book, portray animals with vivid color and pattern in their surroundings. Quick line work gives them a sense of movement and liveliness.

Margaret O’ Rourke uses porcelain and light as her main mediums. This gives her work in porcelain a delicate and ephemeral quality. The light is a way to emphasize the capabilities of the porcelain.

This is another art form that I have recently took an interest in. This is an image of a diorama from the Philadelphia natural science museum. These dioramas were very powerful to look at, and while the viewer is separated by glass, the scene extends on into the distance.

Gert Germeraad is a figure sculptor who focuses mainly on human emotion. His pieces have a rough and sculpted look that gives them more life behind their expressions. The blushes of color in different areas create a very realistic effect.

Shay Church’s animal figures usually appear to be very lifeless. However much can be discerned from the hollow eyes of his sculptures that seem to call for empathy. The modeled textures give the bodies a solid and yet sunken feeling.

Bethany Krull’s pieces reference man’s relationship to nature, and delve into the histories of evolution, and the natural world. These silken porcelain forms relate to an unblemished natural world, free from human interference and destruction.