Meet the Sculptor Behind Empire’s T-Rex

Leelanau County’s newest resident is a total blast from the past! Made of solid steel and standing more than 13 feet tall, the T-rex fossil sculpture can be seen lumbering over Curtis Warnes’ new gallery off Plowman Road in Empire. The artist says the larger-than-life dino is affectionately named “Gilbert” after his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather who were all Gilberts.

The inspiration for Gilbert came a few years ago, after Warnes worked with fellow metal sculptor Enoch Flaugher to design and construct a different towering dinosaur as a custom build for a client. Under Warnes’ direction, Flaugher says, “I very much learned as I went. It was completely new to me.”

After admiring their finished work, Warnes admired Flaugher’s sculpting skills and also realized the need for a dino of his own to “honor my family who have been in the Glen Arbor [and] Empire area for over 100 years.”

The prehistoric heavyweight is also a “way to drive attention to my business and art,” says Warnes, who typically creates up north-inspired furniture, decor, and one-of-a-kind artwork under his business name Curtis Warnes - Functional Art.

Idea in hand, Warnes collaborated with Flaugher – who has been working alongside Warnes for over six years – to spearhead Gilbert’s creation. Flaugher says Warnes approached him about the project “as a public sculpture that everyone can enjoy.” While Warnes has facilitated the financial aspect of the build and given input on the details, it’s Flaugher who sculpted Gilbert from the ground up, drawing on his experience from that first dinosaur to guide him as he started digitally engineering the sculpture’s design.

While the first dino took around one year to complete, Flaugher says Gilbert took over twice that with “some breaks” because he wanted to create a more nuanced sculpture. “It's a more refined piece of art,” says Flaugher, who studied up on tyrannosauruses to get every detail just right and guesses that his finished work weighs “somewhere around 5,000 pounds.”

Still a solid 10,000 pounds lighter than its real-life counterpart, Flaugher says his greatest challenge in building the sculpture has come from its enormous, to-scale dimensions. “I didn’t have all of the main components of this sculpture in one place when I was working on it because I had limited shop space for building it,” he explains. “[Gilbert’s] 37 feet long but I had maybe 20 feet in the room I was building in. So I had to build in sections and constantly move the sections around,” starting with the legs and building out from there.

Now that Gilbert is fully assembled (with the help of a forklift) on his own turf, Flaugher can appreciate the magnitude – both of Gilbert and of his own two-plus years of hard work. “So much of art, whether it's drawing or working on small sculptures, is just stepping back and taking a look,” he says. “I didn't really have that privilege in the workspace because there was no angle.”

As for how he and Warnes managed to get the steel behemoth from the workspace to its current home, they designed it to “come apart at the hip.” From there, the finished steel components were removed and separated for transport before being reassembled and then painted to protect the sculpture from rusting. “I would have loved to have kept it as it was,” says Flaugher. “It looked the best that way. But, being that it's made of carbon steel it would rust and we would have lost a lot of the detail that I put into it.”

From its dozens of razor-sharp teeth to its tiny T-Rex arms, every detail is highlighted by a bright, shimmery copper that can’t be missed from the road on a sunny day. “I was like, if we're going to paint it, I would rather we kind of embrace the paint and make it its own thing and move away from the steel, instead of trying to make the paint look like steel,” says Flaugher. “I thought, let's make it its own feature.”

While a lifesize dinosaur skeleton might seem out of place within the serenity of Leelanau County’s wildflowers and conifers, word of Gilbert’s existence is already drawing visitors up M-72 just two weeks after its official debut.

Flaugher admits the experience has piqued his interest beyond metal sculpting, “I wasn't really a dinosaur kid growing up.” But, he says, through this project, he’s become “pretty obsessed” with tyrannosauruses. He also says he plans to continue metal sculpting art, though maybe on a smaller scale. “I’ll be opening an outdoor sculpture gallery right next to Gilbert,” which he says will be open to the public to “wander through” and that all pieces will be available for purchase.

Meanwhile, Gilbert is ready and waiting for selfies, and can be found at 12100 S. Plowman Road.