Business of the Arts: Lasting Impression

In a nondescript brown pole building in Fair Grove, someone has placed a row of disembodied heads just below the rafters.

That someone is sculptor James Hall, and his skill with chisels has given the mostly smiling heads a Halloweenish vibe. Most of the noggins are components of sculptures that he carved and later had cast – typically in bronze. Some are familiar visages to Springfieldians, since Hall’s work can be found throughout the Queen City.

One example of Hall’s work, completed through his company, JH Creative LLC, is the life-sized sculpture of Stephen H. Good, former Drury University provost, that sits on a bench outside of the F.W. Olin Library on campus. Similarly, a sculpture of urban beautification proponent Anne Drummond, also seated on a concrete bench, can be found just off a path at Nathanael Greene/Close Memorial Park.

Also familiar to Springfieldians is Hall’s “The Defeat of Bigfoot,” a concrete foot with a cocked toe that is a permanent fixture in Sculpture Walk Springfield. The piece is located at the northeast corner of Trafficway Street and Jefferson Avenue at the Jordan Creek Greenway trailhead.

Why a foot? Hall can’t say. But he is someone who pays close attention to the shapes of things – their angles and curves.

“I was looking at my own foot and I thought, ‘What a wonderful piece of architecture that is,’” he says.

He also gets a charge out of the reactions it gets, with people either loving it or hating it.

“It was never intended to be a serious thing. It’s whimsical,” he says.

He remembers the first reaction it got when he and another person were still in the process of installing it.

“He started screaming at us from his truck and saying, ‘That blanking piece of blank is obscuring my view,’ and he just let loose with this litany of insults,” he says. “I looked at the other guy and I said … ‘My first critic!’”

In addition to his bronze installations, Hall has done work for companies and organizations near and far – corporations like Tyson Foods, for which he made small presentation pieces, and Rubbermaid, which he provided with life-sized crash-test dummies for use in an advertisement. He has also provided hanging sculptures for use in Bass Pro Shops and a kid-sized model of a cave for a National Park Service display in Eminence.

Visitors to the Titanic Museum Attraction in Branson have seen his work in the form of a giant ice cream cone that hangs over the gift shop.

Commercial work
Hall earned his art degree at Missouri State University under the tutelage of Professor Dwaine Crigger. He spent 10 years working at Chase Studio in Cedarcreek, southeast of Branson, where he refined his craft under the late scientist and artist Terry Chase, whose natural history exhibition work is in many of the world’s top museums.

“That was the best thing that probably happened to me because I got to be a real sculptor,” Hall says.

After a decade, Hall left Chase Studio to work for himself, and that’s when he began to experience artistic variety only commissions can provide. He flips through a book featuring photos of his sculptures – a private commission of beer tap handles bearing the faces of the Three Stooges, life-sized bobbleheads depicting upper management of Carthage-based Leggett & Platt Inc. (NYSE: LEG) bedding company, and a tiger sculpture positioned atop an ATM for Landmark Bank in Columbia. The latter piece has a companion, he says: a big, green tree frog that sits atop a Landmark Bank in Denison, Texas.

He has collected some testimonials from customers for his website, JHCreative.org. Randy Metcalf, marketing manager at Leggett & Platt, says he has worked with Hall on numerous projects, both commercial and noncommercial.

“James Hall always exceeds my expectation on every project we’ve been involved with,” Metcalf writes.

Mightier
Hall’s commercial work pops up on social media almost any time Hogan Land Title Co. closes a deal.

Hogan clients are frequently pictured with a 7-foot-tall pen called Penny. She was crafted by Hall to exactly match the pens that the company uses to ink its deals.

Michele Boswell, head of marketing for Hogan, says there are actually five pens, all exact replicas of the working models. “Our pens are kind of what we’re known for.”

The original Penny resides in the Sunshine Street office of Hogan, and slightly smaller, but still outsized, versions are kept at other locations.

Boswell says Hogan has a special contract with the pen manufacturer.

“They make that pen exclusively for us,” she says. “We have to order it in ridiculously large quantities to get it.”

Inking the contract to seal the deal on a property purchase is a big moment for clients, Boswell says.

“This is a very serious business, and we play a very serious role in what for most people is a major occurrence in their lives,” she says. “It’s also joyous. It’s monumental for somebody who is selling real estate, and monumental for somebody who is purchasing.”

Big moments require big gestures – and a photo with a big pen feels exactly right to Boswell.

“We made the choice to invest in Penny, and she’s been a game-changer for us on social media. Our posts stand out,” she says.

Hall says he charged $1,000 to $1,500 for each pen, since he fabricated them – and further compensation comes in the form of the kick he gets out of seeing them on Instagram.

An investment
It’s hard to talk about money for a commission-based business that can be feast or famine, depending on the economy, Hall says.

“I have an accountant who tries to do that,” he says. “I’ll make $12,000 this year and $80,000 the next year. I don’t know what to tell him. It’s feast or famine.”

Projects are all different sizes and cast from myriad materials, he says, so it’s hard to cite a price point.

“If you had a human-sized bronze statue – just, one of me, say – that’s probably $60,000 or $70,000, where a third or more going to the foundry, so much going to mold, so much going to me and transportation and all that – and that’s kind of the baseline I always start off with,” he says.

He adds that those are Midwestern prices.

“The further you fan out east or west, it seems to get exponentially higher,” he says.

Hall also does somewhat smaller items, like tombstones, and even desk-size work, like trophies.

Prices of a trophy-sized item vary, he notes.

“Something like a 9-inch-tall figure would be about $1,500 for a one-time sculpture, $400 for a one-time mold-made, and about $150 per cast in urethane, since it’s custom,” he says, adding that if he were casting multiples in bronze, it would run about $500 each.

“All of this stuff usually depends on size, shape, amount of detail and what material they are able to be made in,” he says. “It can get pretty complex figuring this stuff out, especially for us right-brainers that just want to do the work.”

Doing the work sometimes means sending out proposals to potential customers, and sometimes it means wielding the chisel to see what emerges in his shop.

Right now, that’s a bust of actor John Goodman, one of Hall’s fellow MSU alums and chair of the university’s Onward, Upward fundraising campaign. That deserves a bust, Hall figures – so he’s sculpted one with the idea that he might try to sell MSU on the idea of having it cast.

It’s a close likeness of the celebrity – but Hall notes no one wants a likeness that is too close.

“If they recreated our face exactly as it is, I don’t think we’d like it. There’s chickenpox scars and pores – there’s stuff,” he says.

He says he likes to sculpt people when they’re a little bit older, since that’s when they get interesting.

“When you’re doing a portrait, when are they at the height of their powers, the sum of their accomplishments?” he says. “It’s rarely when you’re really, really young. You need those lines of experience on their face.”