LeRoy Transfield

LeRoy Transfield was born in New Zealand, of Maori and European descent. He grew up across New Zealand, Australia, and Singapore — and from very early on, by his own account, he was drawn to war and the stories of the men who fought. "Ever since I was very little I was fascinated by war and war stories," he has said.

That fascination was not abstract. His great-uncle, Huriwhenua Taiaroa, served in the First World War with the Maori contingent of the New Zealand Expeditionary Force. So when the United States Mint opened a competition to design a coin marking the centennial of America's entry into that same war, Transfield was not designing for strangers. He was designing for his own blood.

He took a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Brigham Young University–Hawaii in 1993, studying sculpture under the artist Jan Fisher. He went on to teach, then opened his own studio. Today he lives and works in Orem, Utah, where most of his work is figurative — people sculpted in the round, in bronze and stone, including war memorials for Utah towns.

In 2018 the U.S. Mint issued a silver dollar to mark one hundred years since the First World War. The design came from an open competition — international, drawing entries from anyone who cared to try, narrowed to twenty finalists. Transfield's two designs won both sides.

The obverse — the heads side — is called "Soldier's Charge." A soldier presses forward in profile, collar up, rifle in hand, two strands of barbed wire cutting across the field. It is deliberately heavy, almost carved from stone rather than drawn — the figure reads less like a portrait and more like a monument. The reverse — the tails side — is "Poppies in the Wire": abstract poppy blossoms tangled in barbed wire, the flower of remembrance growing straight out of the thing that killed.

Getting there took nerve. Transfield first sketched a reverse built around a homing pigeon — a real fixture of trench communication — but couldn't bring himself to submit it. "I just couldn't send it!" he said. He went back to the poppies instead. The instinct paid off.

Like all U.S. commemoratives, the coin was finished by a Mint artist. Don Everhart, the Mint's longtime sculptor, translated Transfield's designs into the final relief — the sculpted, three-dimensional model the dies are made from. It was Everhart's last project before he retired. So the coin carries two hands: the artist who imagined it and the engraver who gave it depth.