Paul C. Balan

Paul C. Balan was born in Paete, Laguna — a small town on a Philippine lake with an outsized reputation. Paete is a woodcarving town, the kind of place where the skill runs down family lines, and Balan grew up inside that tradition. He is descended from Pablo Bague, remembered locally as one of Paete's master sculptors.

He studied fine arts at the University of Santo Tomas in Manila and worked as a painter and sculptor in the Philippines before leaving for the United States in the early 2000s. He settled in the Chicago area, became a U.S. citizen, and — by his own telling — started with almost nothing: a few dollars and the training in his hands.

That training was unusually wide. Balan works in paint, in pen and ink, in murals, in stained glass, and in bronze. It's a sculptor's eye fed by a painter's sense of composition — and that combination is exactly what coin design rewards, because a coin has to read both as a tiny picture and as a thing carved in metal.

The turn toward coins came through the U.S. Mint's Artistic Infusion Program (AIP) — a pool of outside artists the Mint invites to submit designs alongside its own staff sculptor-engravers. Reporting on when Balan joined isn't perfectly consistent: his alma mater dates it to 2008, while other coverage tied to his national-medal work says 2010. Either way, by the early 2010s he was inside the room — and he became the first Filipino, and the first Asian, artist to design a United States coin.

Here is the part most people never learn: on a modern U.S. coin, the designer and the sculptor are often two different people. An AIP artist like Balan submits a design — a drawing, a composition, an idea of what the coin should say. A Mint staff sculptor-engraver then translates that flat drawing into three-dimensional relief — the raised and recessed surface that gets cut into the steel dies that strike the coin. (A die is the hardened metal stamp; relief is how high the design stands off the surface.)

Balan's gift is composition. Describing his own work, he has said he doesn't chase a tidy mirror-image symmetry — he chases balance you feel:

"For me, what is appealing is that it's not really a symmetrical balance, but it's balanced in terms of visual impact."

You can see that thinking on the coin that made his name. His 2015 American Liberty High Relief reverse — the reverse is the back, or "tails," side — shows an American eagle rising in flight, an olive branch gripped in its talons. The bird isn't centered and static; it lifts diagonally across the field, wings caught mid-beat. The Mint's sculptor Don Everhart translated it in such fine relief that you can pick out individual feathers and the leaves on the branch.

That two-name credit shows up right on the metal. On the reverse you'll find the West Point mint mark W alongside two sets of initials — PCB for Paul C. Balan, the designer, and DE for Don Everhart, the sculptor. Two artists, one coin.