Roger Martin
I am a lifetime North Carolina resident and I have been creating wildlife sculpture in one form or another for over 30 years. I have been intensely interested in animals since an early age. I drove my family crazy with pets ranging from raccoons to rattlesnakes and the occasional unmentionable lump in the freezer in the basement. As an artist, my subject matter has almost always been animals. There is an enormous amount of wildlife out there, the challenge to me as an artist is to take the same old subject matter and create something unique. I use size, posture and motion to achieve my goal.
I started my professional career at the Schiele Museum of Natural History as an assistant curator. I quickly grew tired of making leaves for dioramas and retired at the age of 20. I was intent on becoming a sculptor so I started sculpting mannequins for the taxidermy industry. Over the course of twenty years, I sculpted approximately 300 animal mannequins ranging from deer mice to Cape buffalo. As a sculptor, it was a wonderful experience. I had the opportunity to study animals around the world in the wild, then, come home and sculpt life-size anatomical portraits.
After twenty years I had to try my hands at bronze. I really wanted to sculpt hair and feathers. The majority of my work is sculpted in clay and cast in bronze. I like the freedom clay gives me to create texture. For me texture is about the reflection of light, not an attempt to simply recreate fur or feathers.