The Wild Kingdom of Forest Hart
By Audrey Minutolo
October 1993
Forest Hart remembers his high school classmates in Hampden, a small town on the Penobscot River below Bangor, being divided into two groups. There were those who were considered smart and would succeed, and those who weren’t and would never make anything of themselves. “I was in the second group,” Hart laughs.
He can afford the humor. Thirty-two years later, Hart still lives in Hampden, but today he is an internationally acclaimed wildlife sculptor whose bronzes of caribou, bears, and beavers are sold in galleries from Maine to California. And despite regular field trips to study the wildlife of Newfoundland and Africa, Hart still finds most of his inspiration in Maine, just outside his own back door.
“His art has that dimension that goes beyond the five senses,” offers Ernie Schoeck of Maine’s Massachusetts House, in Lincolnville, one of Hart’s galleries. “They talk to you. One of his newest pieces, a moose, is incredible.”
That moose carries considerable freight in Hart’s life. His first moose was a clay model created when he was a twenty-two-year-old apprentice working at the Carriage Museum in Pittsburgh. His supervisor destroyed it “because it wasn’t professional enough,” Hart recalls.
He didn’t attempt another clay model for almost twenty years. The bronze moose that thrills Schoeck is the first that Hart, now forty-nine, had done since that day in the Pittsburgh museum. In a real sense, the moose confirmed Hart’s mastery of the wildlife form. The Carnegie Foundation Acknowledged this in 1983 by sending Hart to England to instruct a five-day seminar in sculpting attended by sculptors from eleven different countries. “It was kind of a big deal, “he recalls modestly.
Even Forest Hart admits that the idea of him being a big deal at anything might have seemed implausible in his younger years. As a child, he suffered from undiagnosed dyslexia, an inability to translate letters into words. “I was told in school I was one of the dumb ones,” he recalls with the faintest traits of bitterness tinging his voice. “It took years to get over that.”
Hart tolerated his hours in the classroom but relished his days outdoors. He immersed himself in the woods, fields, and streams of rural Hampden, studying nature and observing wildlife. At ten, he taught himself taxidermy and at age twelve received his state taxidermy license, becoming the youngest licensed taxidermist in Maine.
Following high school and a stint in the military, Hart was only one of two people nationwide chosen for a three-year apprenticeship at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh. Until the early 1900s, taxidermist had been considered artists and had required and artistic sensibility to make the clay forms over which the preserved skins were stretched. Commercially produced forms had eliminated the need for this talent, but the museum hoped to revitalize it by training young taxidermists of artistic bent.
Hart decided to return to Maine, though. “I learned a lot from that experience, but I didn’t care fir Pennsylvania, the big city, or the politics of a big museum.” He says. HE started his own taxidermy business (Down East, October 1974), keeping copious notes on the anatomy of each species he worked with and filing the information away for future reference.
He also began sculpting his own clay forms, and the work became an outlet for his creativity. Eventually he began marketing the forms to other taxidermists and collectors, establishing his business called Hart Forms in 1983 that eventually grew to include four employees, a branch in Canada, and sales all over the world. Hart finally sold it in 1991 “because it got too big. I was sitting behind a desk all day instead of sculpting. I couldn’t leave for a vacation or take a trip at the drop of a hat like I can now.”
In 1984, he ventured into a field he had always admired but had never pursued: bronze sculpture. He entered a bronze competition associated with a taxidermy show, but at the time he had no experience with the bronzing process. So, he modeled a mother bear and her cub in clay and cast in fiberglass, then painted the figures the reddish-brown hue characteristic of bronze.
After a nervous wait during the judging, Hart found himself accepting the Best of Show award. It was only later, at the reception for the winners, that he confessed to a judge that the piece was not a bronze. Hart was allowed to keep his award, “but I’ll never forget the judge’s words: “It’s a nice piece, but its plastic” The way he said plastic, it sounded like a dirty word. So, from that point on, I got the money together to do my work in bronze.”
He went on to win a long string of awards for his bronze work, including the 1986 Merrit Award from the Art Exhibit of Alaska Wildlife, a first place in 1987 from the Rocky Mountain Wildlife Exposition, and five first place awards at the Maine Wildlife Art Show. He admits that the public reception to his work continues to surprise him.
“I sold three monumental works [life size sculptures] this month alone,” he says with amazement, “and I was commissioned to do two more monumental works: the Hampden Broncos emblem, a bucking bronco, and a mule [the school mascot] for Colby College.”
Hart’s modesty is genuine. He seems to feel a certain boyish delight that people are willing to pay money for doing what he loves to do-so much money that he and his wife, Susan, a Thorndike native, can travel every fall to the tundra of Newfoundland to observe wildlife for six to eight weeks. They love the challenge of “caribou country”, both for its isolation and the nostalgia. Susan was in Newfoundland working as a guide for her father, a sporting outfitter, when she met Hart on a caribou hunt. “She was my guide,” Hart says. “She’s been guiding me ever since.”
Their tundra trips are exercises in isolation, both personal and artistic. The Harts live in a cabin only accessible by helicopter, forty miles from the nearest road. “The last time we went, we were there almost a moth and a half before we saw anyone,” he says enthusiastically.
In Newfoundland, Hart enjoys the hours of undisturbed sculpting outside as more than a hundred caribou a day pass on their annual migration treks. “I can learn so much from watching them-how their heads are angled, the position of their tail or ears,” he explains. “And this past year we had a wonderful time because we got to see Arctic hares. They are pretty rare and very strictly protected up there.”
They also discovered where the local bears were feeding. “we’d watch them sleeping or eating berries for a couple of hours at a stretch,” Hart remembers. “we were far enough away that we didn’t disturb them.”
He has a keen sense of what “far enough away” means. “Once I got toto close to a black bear,” he admits. “She made what is called a false charge-the bear just runs at you and slaps the ground with its foot. I took the hint and backed off.”
Despite his travels, Hart finds much of his inspiration outside the windows of his gallery and studio, the Bronze House, near his home on the Penobscot River in Hampden. “We live right on the river,” he says, “so we can watch otters, eagles, seals, even moose, all the time. A lot of the pieces I’ve done are from animals I’ve seen right around here.”
Hart can usually be found in the studio every day, dressed in his trademark jeans and flannel shirt with a pencil tucked behind his ear. Plaster casts of feet, muzzles, and other body parts of various species decorate the studio walls, and on cool days a fire crackles in the fireplace of the homey gallery, which contains one of almost every limited-edition piece he has ever made.
“That’s one of the benefits of working in bronze, “he confides. Unlike with painting or other artistic endeavors, when Hart finishes an edition of bronzes, “I get to keep one of each piece I do.” He has experimented with working in wood and marble, “but it’s awfully noisy and dusty when you are working with tools.”
Hart much prefers clay. “I can envision the animal I want and the way it will look, and it keeps me going,” he muses. “You can see the figures coming out of the clay.” He deliberately limits the time each day he spends on a particular work to avoid burning out. “After maybe four hours, I quit even if I’m still enthusiastic about the piece,” he says. “It gives me a chance to step away from it and think about it. Doing a marathon sculpting session-and I’ve done that a few times-takes the enjoyment out of it.”
Hart works to imbue each sculpture with its own character, a major reason his sculptures command as much as $43,000. A list of the galleries that carry Hart’s work leans heavily to the West, partly because Hart’s foundry is located in Boulder, Colorado, and mostly because “sculpture is not that big on the East Coast,” according to gallery owner Ernie Schoeck. “it’s much more popular out West, but it’s coming back here.”
Oddly, and enviably in the art world, Hart has never had to “sell” his work to galleries. “The only galleries I’m in are the ones who have come to me and asked,” he says. “I didn’t approach them. The gallery owners saw my work in exhibits or perhaps at someone’s house or just heard about it through the word of mouth.” Hart is so busy with the demand now that he doesn’t bother with shows anymore.
“I guess the best part of all of this is just being able to do what I want,” he decides. “I’m tickled to death that things worked out the way they have. I never went on to college, and that is sort of worried me for a while. I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to get a job. Now that I think about it, I’ve never really considered this a job. It’s way too much fun.”