Carmel’s Steven Whyte: making it big as a sculptor

After making sculptures for high-end hotels, he entered a double-blind open show and was the only sculptor chosen to join the Society of Portrait Sculptors, where he worked in tandem with the sculptor to the royal family.

Whyte created busts of more than a dozen CEOs, politicians and athletes, including the Duke of Westminster, financier Sir Evelyn de Rothschild and the late Australian Prime Minister Sir Joseph Cook.

Six of Whyte’s memorials are in England, and there are 10 in the United States, including the National Salute to Bob Hope and the Military, and the Tribute to Fallen Deputies, both in San Diego; Martin Luther King Jr. monuments in Fontana (San Bernardino County), and Florida; St. Anthony of Padua and Young Christ at the Carmel Mission; the National Monument to John Steinbeck and Cannery Row in Monterey; and a life-size elephant that had to be helicoptered into place for Tufts University in Massachusetts.

On a recent visit to his studio, Whyte was molding clay between his fingers and hopping between several commissioned works in various stages of completion: a model of Churchill leaning on a bookshelf with a snifter of whiskey in one hand and a cigar in the other, a 1½-times life-size Alexander the Great that still needed a head, a curvaceous nude with upstretched arms, and a robed woman in mourning kneeling with a garland of California poppies.

There’s no gallery sales staff, just Whyte and his studio assistants, and his 8-year-old bulldog Lord Wellington, who is so ugly-cute that he pulls in customers — the dog is responsible for $86,000 in sales thus far, Whyte figures.

An average Whyte figure fetches $65,000, but his large monuments typically cross the million mark, and most often wealthy people buy them and donate them to schools and public entities.

Sometimes the scale of Whyte’s work is mammoth, and he must hire a team of artists to help him assemble his pieces inside a warehouse in the American Tin Cannery building in Pacific Grove.

There he built the Aggie War Hymn Monument, a 38-foot-long, 10-foot-tall, 20,000-pound bronze and steel sculpture of 12 college students with linked arms and feet, swaying in the Texas A&M University fight song.

For one World War II sculpture, he bought uniforms on eBay to inspect them, then interviewed former soldiers and support personnel to find out what sorts of clothing alterations they made, so a finished piece is as authentic as possible.

Two of England’s top art schools offered Whyte a spot after high school, but he wanted to go to the Sir Henry Doulton School of Sculpture, an elite postgraduate program for established artists.

Two women from the Seaside Historical Commission approached him about making a monument to Seaside city founder John Roberts, a doctor who raced down Highway 1 in a horse and buggy in 1894 to save passengers from a shipwreck off Big Sur.

First he sculpts the figure out of clay and pours a silicone rubber mold around it.

[...] molten bronze is poured into the ceramic mold and cooled, and then the ceramic is chipped away to reveal the bronze sculpture.