My name is Dug Stanat
and I am a sculptor.

I love to sculpt creatures, characters, monsters, and spirits.
My work is about meeting darkness with humor, celebrating the strange, and searching for the unseen.

Biography

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Armed with little more than a love of things that eat people, I began my art career in the early nineties, selling mixed media monster sculptures in local San Francisco galleries.

After six years of exploring sculpture, I found that I wanted to make my creations move. I dabbled with stop motion, but soon turned to 3D computer graphics and was immediately hooked to the point that I abandoned physical sculpture. After making several independent shorts, I was hired as a character technical director by DreamWorks Animation, where I spent the next twelve years creating digital facial puppets for eight feature films (imdb.com), including How To Train Your Dragon, Rise of the Guardians, Madagascar, and Shrek 2.

After more than a decade of digital work on large productions, I was ready to once again work with my own hands on my own designs. In 2013, I left DreamWorks to return to the life of an independent artist. I resumed my work in mixed media, and also began working in ceramics, finding that the two mediums provide very different joys, benefits, and results.

 

Influences

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My deepest influences are those that have been with me the longest. With that in mind, the following painfully incomplete list is presented in roughly chronological order of exposure:

  • Our wonderful natural world, especially sharks, crocodilians, and dinosaurs;

  • Children’s books with countless characters pictured on each page, such as Libenzi’s Robin and the Pirates;

  • Freaky old masters, such as Albrecht Dürer, Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder;

  • Classic illustrators of adventure, such as Howard Pyle and his students;

  • The Stop motion magic of Ray Harryhausen;

  • The genius that is Gary Larson;

  • Folk art from around the world, notably Oaxaca and Bali;

  • And of course the endless soup of contemporary fantasy art that is doled out daily on the web.

 

Awards

  • Chesley Award for Best Three Dimensional Art, 2023;

  • Infected By Art Volume 12: 1st Place Grand Prize, 2024;

  • Spectrum 27: Gold Dimensional Award, 2020;

  • Spectrum 22, 23, 24, 26: Dimensional nominations;

  • Gencon, Best in Art Show, 2017;

  • Infected By Art, Volume 5, Silver Award, Sculpture, 2017;

  • Infected By Art, Volumes 6 and 8, Honorable Mention, Sculpture;

  • Dreamworks Animation: Distinguished Educator Award, 2010.

 Thanks for reading.

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