As an artist, I’m often asked how I started. How in the world did you figure out what you wanted to do and make a living at it?

Good question! As I look back over the years, I see a tangled thread between my birth in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and the difficult path leading to the studio that is becoming a tourist attraction today.

Tourist attraction. It sounds like one of those places where people walk around the grounds and shop (“He used to live in this house; this is where he worked; these are the kennels and stables where the animals lived that inspired his stories”). Sometimes, I feel invisible, hearing people say things like that about me. (Who do they think that skinny grey-haired man is, feeding the dogs over there? The one in the work clothes and boots? The one setting out the figurines in the showcases for them to see?

They don’t know it’s me. They don’t know it’s me until I walk in the front door, dressed up and smiling in my riding boots, carrying a Collie puppy in my arms. Only then do they they know it’s Ron Hevener the writer and artist.

Contrary to popular opinion about some artists being shameless self-promoters, I wasn’t completely comfortable writing this article about myself (The editor can tell you I delayed it as long as I could). Maybe that’s because I feel like my life is far from over and this is something an artist should save for his old age (I’m not as old as some people think). But, I do understand why people want to know about our beautiful figurines made here. As for the paintings and stories – well, those are things I dissolve into whenever I work on them … only to wonder, after they’re finished, where in the world did they come from?

As my biographers will tell you, I started very young as an artist. My aunt, my father and my mother believed in my ability and the rest of the family and neighbors became accustomed to the idea very quickly. Not only did they encourage me to see things as an artist, paying attention to detail, but they also stood up against rigid teachers in school who might affect my individual style and they encouraged me to think for myself.

Thinking for myself wasn’t hard to do, because when you don’t have many friends what else is left? (Only kidding. I had lots of friends. They just weren’t usually my age). But, you want to know when the Hevener figurines started … and how they really came to be.

If you really want to know about the Hevener figurines, then you have to find a small town in a far-away land called the Pennsylvania Dutch Country. It’s half-real and half-imagination because it’s not an official country at all. But, it does have its own language and people there are pretty good at making things with their hands. At one time, fully two thirds of the giftware made in America was from studios in the Pennyslvania Dutch Country. So, fly with me over the narrow streets and trees until we see a brick house across from a chocolate factory with tall chimneys. Downstairs is a store, behind the store is the shop of an electrician with all his rolls of wire in many colors – copper, red, white, yellow, black – and upstairs, twisitng together pieces of that wire, you’ll find a boy about five years old. What’s he doing? He’s making a dog. Why is he making a dog out of wire from his father’s shop? Because he’s not allowed to have a real dog where they live.

Like many kids, he has always liked animals. After all, didn’t he have a stuffed puppy he used to love? A toy that he carried with him everywhere until the time he went to sleep for his nap and woke up to find it gone? (Yes, Mom and Dad: I knew you took it away from me. I just hoped you didn’t hurt him too much when you threw him in the trash!). I was that boy and, after that, I was done with stuffed toys. I wanted somthing more “real.” So I drew pictures and made dogs and animals and people from wire and mud that I dug up in the back yard.

Summers in small towns back then were wonderful times and if you were lucky enough to have a park nearby, well, maybe you were lucky enough to have an ice cream stand. We did. And they sold candy, too. But, they also sold souvenirs …

You guessed it: I saw a glass dog. A little glass dog. I saw a horse, too! They looked as real as the dogs and horses I watched on TV.

Every day, I gave that souvenir man my ice cream money. I gave him pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters until I had bought a shiny glass Boxer dog and a white stallion. That was the summer when a five-year-old artist fell in love.

I was so happy! I hurried home, shaking with excitement and wonder. I played with my new treasures and kept them as my secret, hidden under my bed. And no naps for me! I wasn’t going to risk losing them while I was asleep. (Funny, the things you remember when you’re writing something like this).

Well, it wasn’t too long before I broke a leg on the horse and the dog lost a few of the little glass puppies that came along with her. Once that happened, I had to figure out how to make horses and dogs of my own – but how? I wouldn’t solve that mystery until many years later.

How did it happen? I was starting a family, and living on a farm. I had a few cows, some dogs and a horse. But, what I had even more was the burning desire to find out what I could do in life. Even though I was holding down a full-time job, and had more responsibility that other young men my age, I realized I must find people who looked at life the same way that I did, or else my mind would shrink and die. I had to find people who could think. People who knew about books and art and creativity. People who reached farther, intellectually, than many of the people around me. People who had actually accomplished the things I dreamed about. So, I signed up for college. To my surprise (and the surprise of teachers from my high school) I was accepted by Franklin & Marshall College in just two days.

During one of my classes, we visited a museum of natural history. I remember that visit very well, because it changed the direction of my life. What happened? Well, let me put it this way: On the way back to class, I turned around and went back to the museum. I found the preparator of exhibits for the museum – and I asked him to take me on as his apprentice. He accepted. And for the next two years, I drove 20 miles a day from my farm to the museum, where I studied anatomy, astronomy, sculpture, painting … and where I was the only student of Franklin & Marsdhall’s most fascinating professors. I dropped my credit courses, turned down a trip to India, missed out on a recording contract with RCA Records in New York and lost a wife. But, it was the smartest decision of my life. It was during those years that the Hevener figurines were born.

While the process of making figurines is primarily the same whether they are Royal Doulton or Lladro or something you make in your own home, the ‘look’ of the finished piece is very different from one studio to the next. Some pieces are big, some are small. Some are brightly colored and others are very muted in their painting techniques. Some are whimsical and others are very realistic.

In the case of Hevener figurines, it has been a little of both over the years, but whether they are accurate reditiions of the breed or whether they are charicatures, it is the face that matters most to me. The face must show expression – love, curiosity, sadness or joy … and the eyes must radiate that emotion.

Perfection isn’t what it’s about, either, because expression is the important thing. How do you convey expression? You do it with posture, gestures, the lines of the face, twist of a mouth or the arch of an eye-brow. Interesting faces are doing something.

If we are making figurines, clay is the important thing. I like to work in porcelian clay because I’m always telling myself I can fire the finished sculpture in a kiln and save it for posterity. The truth is, I’ve rarely been able to do that because most of the time my sculptures blow apart in the kiln! (The Work Horse, a recent figurine we released that was inspired by Rosa Boneur’s classic painting The Horse Fair is a perfect example. I loved the original sculpture and Bonnie, our best painter here, was very fond of it, too. When it exploded into hundreds of pieces, Bonnie very patiently glued it together … four years later, I finished the sculpture and we put it into production).

(PICTURE OF THE WORK HORSE HERE)

Why do the originals explode if they are fired in a kiln? It’s not because we use the wrong kind of clay. And not because anything is wrong with the temperature at which the kiln is set. It’s because of how I work.

There are two basic ways to approach sculpture: carving away or adding on to the core that you start with. I’m one of those artists who adds, or, as some would say, builds as he goes along. In so doing, however, air is trapped in the clay and that’s what causes the piece to explode during firing. So, we must make the Hevener figurines in a different way. We must cast them from molds that we make ourselves, and they must be made in a material that catches all the fine details of the original sculpture.

From my cluttered worktable, with its reference books, pictures and scattered tools, the sculpture is evaluated by everyone here. Everyone has an opinion and do they ever say so! Sometimes, I fight back and flat-out refuse to make a change. Other times, I can see how right they are! If the design passes ‘inspection’ it enters the next stage: Mold making.

Mold-making is a science. In order to do it right, the one making the mold has to be able to think ahead to the final casting of the figurine. This will determine exactly where ‘dividers’ should be put in order for the rubber mold to open up and allow the figurine to be ‘born.’ Casting the figurines really is like a birth process.

After the molds are made, which takes us several weeks, we begin casting the design. Hevener figurines are made in a material we found and began using many years ago, from Portland, Oregon. They are ‘solid castings’ meaning they aren’t hollow like porcelain or ceramic figurines. We like the heavy feel of the pieces, and actually that’s about as heavy as the original clay that I work with. We think it makes a piece feel worthwhile.

At first, we make just a few castings per day, paying careful attention to any difficulty which may be unique to that design, such as a head turning to the side, or an ear that is especially thin or a tongue curling at the edge. The unpainted castings (white in color) are timmed by hand, and allowed to dry before painting. No two castings are alike becasue of this hand-trimming.

Painting is one of the most difficlt things to master here in our studio. It takes about two years to learn all of our color combinations and many of the colors you see on the Hevener figurines are ‘overlays’ of two or three different colors delicately airbrushed in layers in order to get the right ‘look.’ Years ago, I leased the designs out to a company that couldn’t duplicate the painting. What a mistake! Customers from all over the world scolded me for selling out. There was no choice except to cancel the contract and go back into production ourselves.

When the pieces are painted, our studio manager, Ken Zook, personally oversees the glazing that protects the colors. This is the magic part for me, because it always magnifies the colors and I can finally see how the design has turned out. Only then do I really believe the figurine is finished.

Just like the real animals who model for them, no two Hevener figurines are exactly alike. You can have a litter of puppies and even though they are from the same breed, each one is different frm the next. Just like people. Just like Nature intended it to be.

Over the years, we’ve discovered that customers can tell if a painter really loves animals. There is no question about that at Hevener Farms. As we work in our studio, we hear the dogs barking in the kennels, we take breaks to feed and water the horses and we deal with visitors to the farm all day long. Hevener figurines are individual creations inspired by the love and fun of animals. At the end of the day, when the orders are packed up for shipping and I’m alone in the studio, I often read where the packages are going and touch them for luck. In a world changing so much, and where many of us wonder what is becoming of the life we once knew, it is my hope and my dream that Hevener figurines will inspire people to always follow their hearts and keep their love and passion alive.