James C. Sharpe

James C. Sharpe — "Jim" Sharpe to everyone who hired him — flew Navy fighters before he ever picked up a paintbrush professionally. In the late 1950s he was a naval aviator flying the F3H Demon, deployed to the western Pacific aboard the carrier USS Bonhomme Richard. One tour, and he was done with the cockpit.

He traded it for the art bench. Sharpe enrolled at the Art Center School (now Art Center College of Design) in Pasadena, and by the 1960s he was building one of the most visible illustration careers in America. Through the 1970s and 1980s his paintings ran on the covers of Time, TV Guide, and Golf Digest — portraits of the powerful, rendered in a warm, photographic realism that made a printed face feel like it was looking back at you. He painted book jackets for the Franklin Library and movie posters, and in the 1990s he worked as a staff artist for ABC News and the program 20/20.

Coins were a late, small chapter in a big career — but a fitting one. A man who had spent thirty years compressing a whole person into a single magazine cover turned out to be very good at compressing an athlete into a coin.

Sharpe was not a Mint sculptor-engraver. He was an outside artist — an illustrator brought in to design the picture, which a staff sculptor at the U.S. Mint then carved into the steel die (the hardened metal stamp that strikes the coin). The Mint did this often for the sprawling 1996 Atlanta Olympics program, pulling in well-known illustrators alongside its own engravers to give sixteen different coins sixteen different voices.

What Sharpe brought was the illustrator's instinct for the single, telling pose. His Olympic obverses — the "heads" side, the side that carries the main design — don't pile on detail. A tennis player caught at the top of her swing. A gymnast on the rings beside a gymnast with her arms thrown open. Each one is a body in motion, frozen at the instant that reads fastest to the eye. That economy is exactly the skill that sells a magazine cover at a newsstand from ten feet away.

His two Paralympic designs are the ones that stay with people. For the 1995 dollar he drew a blind runner tethered to a sighted guide, mid-stride — two athletes bound by a single cord of trust. For the 1996 dollar he drew a wheelchair racer leaning into a track-and-field event. Both coins carry the word spirit rendered in raised Braille — a detail you can read with your fingertips, on a coin, about athletes who compete without sight. It is one of the quietly remarkable things any U.S. coin has ever done.