Ron Sanders: the painter who designs U.S. coins

Most of the artists who shape U.S. coins have never worked a day at the Mint. Ron Sanders is one of them — a gallery painter and commercial illustrator who sketches the ideas that staff engravers then carve into steel.

Ronald D. Sanders grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in the kind of suburban, Norman-Rockwell setting he would later be drawn to paint. He started oil painting at nine and was studying anatomy by eleven. He went on to earn a BFA in Illustration, Magna Cum Laude, from the Columbus College of Art and Design in Ohio.

He built a real career before any coin carried his work — a New York illustration agent within three years of starting out, fine art in galleries across the country, and commercial clients ranging from Chase Manhattan Bank and AT&T to the Shadowrun and Traveller game lines. His paintings have appeared in The Artist's Magazine, Southwest Art, and on the cover of American Artist, and hang in collections including the Indiana State Museum, the Oneida Nation Museum, and the Alvin C. York State Historic Area.

Then life redirected him. After a 2005 cancer scare, Sanders and his family moved to Sarasota County, Florida, where a gallery picked up his work and — when it lost its director — handed him the keys. A decade of fine-art focus and national awards followed. In late 2010, that painter's eye is exactly what the U.S. Mint came looking for: it brought him onto the Artistic Infusion Program (AIP), the roster of outside artists invited to design America's coins, commemoratives, and congressional gold medals. His first coin reached the public in 2012. Now based in Morristown, Tennessee, he's still at it more than fifteen years later.

Here's the part most people get wrong. On a modern U.S. coin, the designer and the sculptor are usually two different people.

Sanders is a designer. He produces the drawing — the composition, the figures, the single moment the coin is meant to tell. A Mint staff sculptor-engraver then translates that flat artwork into a three-dimensional model, and finally into the steel die — the hardened stamp that strikes the coin. Every coin you hold is a squeezed impression of that die. So a Sanders coin usually carries two sets of initials: his, and the sculptor's who gave his drawing depth.

That split is why the same artist's name turns up beside several different engravers. His breakthrough was the reverse — the "tails" side — of the 2012 National Infantry Museum and Soldier Center Silver Dollar: two crossed rifles, the infantry's branch insignia, sculpted by Norman E. Nemeth. From there his range opened up fast.

His instinct is a painter's instinct: one legible image, not a crowded montage. A crew of Mohawk ironworkers striding a high steel beam, the city falling away beneath them in a fisheye view, for the 2015 Native American dollar (sculpted by Phebe Hemphill). Food, shelter, and water — the homesteader's three essentials — on a 2015 America the Beautiful quarter for Homestead National Monument (sculpted by Jim Licaretz). And, a decade on, two of NASA's proudest machines: a Space Shuttle clearing the pad at Kennedy Space Center, and an astronaut spacewalking outside the International Space Station.