Metal of honor: step by step, a casting crew captures a famous figure in bronze at North Carolina's only fine-arts foundry.

• Author: Martin, Edward
• Position: PICTURE THIS

It's art, this larger-than-life sculpture of Ronald Reagan standing in the nation's Capitol. But it seems more than that--almost like alchemy, a transformation of flesh and blood into bronze through an ancient, arcane process that, despite technological advances, still requires plenty of patience and a human touch. "In bronze casting, you're always working with or against something that's either hot or cold, hard or soft," says Ed Walker, owner of the Seagrove foundry where the sculpture was forged. "It's always a challenge."

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This one began in 2000, when Congress allowed states to replace their statues--each has two--in the Capitol's National Statuary Hall, essentially the nation's hall of fame. In 2006, California decided to yank one of Thomas Starr King, a minister whose speeches helped keep the state in the union during the Civil War, in favor of the 40th president. Charlotte artist Chas Fagan, a 43-year-old Yale University graduate and self-taught painter and sculptor, won the commission over nine competitors after submitting a painting, then a 2-foot clay model to the private Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation. It paid for the statue, but Fagan won't say how much.

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He contacted Walker, whose Carolina Bronze Sculpture Inc. has been producing castings for artists since 1990. Its works range from tabletop pieces to monument-scale projects. The business is small--nine employees--but it's in a nearly exclusive line of work. "We're the only full-time, fine-arts foundry I know of in North Carolina," says Walker, 54, a Burlington native who followed a bachelor's in art from East Carolina University in 1976 with a master's two years later from the University of North Dakota. He taught college students casting before starting his business.

Together, artist and foundry owner transformed Fagan's small clay model of Reagan in a business suit into a 7-foot bronze statue. The process, which Carolina Bronze repeats hundreds of times a year for artists, was first used about 2,000 years ago in Egypt, but three-dimensional laser scanners and computerized routers have accelerated it. Just the first step--resculpting the miniature to its full size--once took artists three to four months but now is only a matter of weeks. "Our scanning and enlarging can make the full-size model quickly and with extreme accuracy," Walker says. What emerges is...