We Make Presidents!

I never dreamed that George Washington, who saved the Continental Army in August of 1776, would come, in the fullness of time, to save our bacon as well- but he did.

By the early 80s StudioEIS was bleeding red ink when we decided to flee a Manhattan walk up where sculpture production and expensive rents made a career as a sculptor as untenable as Washington’s 1776 defense of New York.

 

With a “dust bowl” era moving van Elliot and I, followed by a small army of the willing, took up residence on the Brooklyn waterfront in a neighborhood that looked like the back lot of “Stranger on the Third Floor” – a film noir classic.  Dark and increasingly deserted with manufacturing jobs in full flight from NYC, this former heartland of US Industrial manufacturing embraced the likes of us and gave sculpture production what it could not find in Manhattan- rent at $3.00 per square foot.

Following the success of a large portrait project; the first for us at a Presidential Library, StudioEIS began promoting itself as a figurative sculpture studio that had the capability to make serious portrait sculpture for the American History Museum Market. With our sculpture roots in the 19^th century, we felt well suited to fill a void on the visual storytelling side of exhibition design, in the burgeoning world of history and anthropology museums.

 

 

                                                       Washington Street in Dumbo, Brooklyn, NY

One day the phone rang with a request to make a sculpture of George Washington. The outline of the project seemed a little dull at the time, but with its successful completion came more commissions - and then of course I realized that since we were now working on Washington Street in Brooklyn, a mere 300 yards from the place where Washington made his providential escape from the English - allowing him to fight another day - in effect giving birth to the nation, I felt an obligation to make all the Washington portraits anyone might want.  And there have been many. And  with each subsequent one, they became better and better.

It rained portrait sculptures for StudioEIS in 2003. We won a competition for the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia to create the 42 signers of the US Constitution as life-sized bronze sculptures. After that there were National Park Service Projects, more Presidential Libraries and then in 06 we were commissioned to make three fantastic forensic portraits of George Washington for Washington’s beloved Mount Vernon Estate and Gardens - now the most famous of all Presidential house museums.

George Washington ages 19, 45, and 57 for George Washington’s Mount Vernon Estate and Gardens

2006 was followed by subsequent commissions to sculpt James and Dolley Madison, Thomas Jefferson for Monticello, and Abraham Lincoln twice in his bicentennial year for President Lincoln’s Cottage and the National Military Cemetery and Visitor Center at Gettysburg - the list goes on.

Several views of Madison sculpture: studio shot in clay, in bronze and at Montpelier dedicated 5/28/09

When you do this often, you have to find new paths to representational thinking. In order to do this, you must find new information that leads to these new pathways.  In the case of the Founding generation of Americans, some discoveries are made when we examine their clothing.  Jefferson, it turns out, was extraordinarily tall and very rangy – and this would be in contrast let’s say to the iconic image of Jefferson seen in ‘his’ memorial at the Tidal Basin in DC.  Or in Lincoln’s case, he was not only taller than any President, before or since, but he was skinny – very skinny, and you have to think that if you represent him as accurately as his clothing suggests you should, he’s going to  look more like a hare than America’s greatest President.

 

The more you do, the better you become at what you do, in part because the people you get to work with and the information that informs these projects gets better and better. You even get Goosebumps on occasion measuring Lincoln’s hat or George Washington’s breeches.  Inevitably you find fascination not only with some of the individuals whose lives you are representing (my reading pile is measured in the hundreds of pounds not width on the shelf) but also with your ability to find what Gertrude Stein called the “bottom nature” in these extraordinary individuals. My hope always is that as we freeze frame, building a sculpture over a period of a year or more, we develop an image not only for ourselves, but for others who will one day have an opportunity to view these works and find some curious inspiration in the visual representation. 

 

Measuring George Washington’s breeches and waist coat, and Lincoln’s iconic hat

Correcting the record. In installment #2, I make reference to " my girlfriend and I making the first commision in 1976." I'd like to correct the record by identifying this very fine sculptor and friend as Kate Maloney.  I.S.