Frank Entsminger makes fine bronze sculptures, based on decades of studying animals in the wild as a hunting guide.
Frank Entsminger is known for his fine detail, bringing to life the "critters," as he calls them, that have motivated him all his life.
Frank Entsminger was first a taxidermist and then applied what he knew to becoming a fine art sculptor.
This is the second in a series about people finding or rediscovering creative pursuits later in life. The reporting project is funded by a grant from the Alaska Center for Excellence in Journalism. If you have a suggestion of a person who has explored their artistic or creative impulses upon retirement or when other life demands lessened, email editor@seniorvoicealaska.com.
Frank Entsminger came to sculpting the hard way-through fire.
A taxidermist by trade for decades, Frank had built a life in Alaska around his love of wildlife, hunting and the outdoors. A house fire left him with second and third degree burns on both hands. While he recovered, unable to do any heavy work, a friend and fellow taxidermist who had become a sculptor offered a suggestion: Why not try clay?
"I began sculpting small animal figurines that I would later mount," Frank recalls. An art collector took notice while visiting Entsmingers. That was the beginning of Frank's sculpting career.
Now 82-83 in July-Frank creates detailed wildlife bronzes from his home 34 miles from Tok, working in a combination of modeling clay and hard wax, a blend of paraffin, beeswax and petroleum that holds fine detail and can be handled without distortion. The finished originals Frank hand-carries to a foundry in Springville, Utah. Using the lost-wax process, they go through 29 steps before emerging as finished bronzes.
The subjects are exclusively wildlife-moose, caribou, Dall sheep, grizzly bears, eagles-drawn from a lifetime of hunting and guiding in Alaska. Frank has also pursued Marco Polo sheep and ibex in Tajikistan and Argali sheep and ibex in Mongolia, which got Frank into sculpting Asian animals. That deep familiarity with animals in their natural surroundings is central to his work. He isn't interested in just rendering a creature. He wants to capture it in its world-on a mountainside, along a creek, in the wilderness they inhabit.
His toughest critic is also his biggest supporter: his wife, Sue. "She always gives me constructive criticism," he says. "When you're working on it hour after hour, she'll come in and say, 'That leg needs to be longer, or that critter doesn't do that-it's not natural.'" He credits her as an essential part of his most ambitious pieces, including a life-size bald eagle covered in thousands of individually detailed feathers.
That's when Sue started sculpting as well. She had also been a hunter all her life, and they spent a winter making rows and rows of individual feathers for the project. She became an integral part of the life-size eagle.
They were both honored with the 2014 Alaska Governor's Conservationist of the Year Award. She and their son, Matt, are licensed guides. Frank is an assistant guide under their licenses.
Frank's road to sculpting ran straight through taxidermy, which itself began on his grandmother's small farm in Montana, where as a boy he was already skinning and mounting whatever he could find. By high school he was skilled enough that a local taxidermist wanted to hire him full time. Instead, he and two classmates piled into a 1957 Studebaker and headed for Alaska in 1962-three years after statehood, when the state was, in his words, still the Last Frontier.
In those early taxidermy days, commercial forms for Alaskan animals barely existed. Frank learned to cut and splice forms, scaling them up or down, eventually making his own molds. It was painstaking work-fiberglass and paper mâché that had to dry for a week before shellacking. That patience and technical problem-solving have carried directly into his bronze work.
The market for fine art bronze is a hard one. Galleries have come and gone. The economics are unforgiving-most galleries want 50%; Frank holds the line at 40%. The foundry costs alone eat deeply into any profit.
"I do it because I love to do it," he says simply.
At art shows, Frank notices that children are the first ones drawn to his work, gravitating toward the animals before their parents wander over. He encourages every one of them, pointing them toward modeling clay suppliers, urging them to keep at it if they show any talent.
Frank is still at the bench, still chasing the exact angle of a leg, the particular set of a shoulder, the look of an animal as it actually stands in the wild. His wife keeps him honest. The animals keep him going.
Frank Entsminger sells his work through several galleries including Georgia Blue in Anchorage and at Chena Hot Springs. He also takes commissions. https://
