Ronald D. Sanders: the artist who draws, and lets the Mint carve

Most people who design U.S. coins are not employees of the U.S. Mint. Ronald D. Sanders is one of them.

He is an American illustrator, graphic designer, fine artist, and teacher — an honors graduate of the Columbus College of Art and Design in Ohio. His work reaches the public the way most modern commemorative coins do: not from inside the Mint's engraving room, but from an outside artist's sketchbook.

That outside route is a deliberate program. In 2003 the Mint launched the Artistic Infusion Program — AIP for short — to bring working artists from beyond its staff into coin design. The idea was simple and a little radical for a federal institution: let painters and illustrators propose the picture, then hand the chosen design to the Mint's own sculptor-engravers to carve into steel. Sanders is one of those infused artists, and his pencil has shaped a steady run of commemorative coins.

To follow Sanders's work you need one distinction. A coin has two authors, and they do different jobs.

The designer draws the image — the composition, the figure, the story the coin tells. The sculptor-engraver then turns that flat drawing into a three-dimensional model and, ultimately, the die, the hardened steel stamp that strikes the metal. Sanders is a designer. His initials appear on the finished coin beside the initials of the Mint artist who sculpted it — two signatures, two hands.

His style suits the form. An illustrator by training, he builds coins around a single clear subject — a face, a vessel, a gesture — rather than a busy scene. His first design to reach circulation, the reverse (the tails side) of the 2012 Infantry Soldier silver dollar, is two crossed rifles and nothing more: the branch insignia of the U.S. Infantry, stripped to its emblem. It is the work of someone who trusts a simple image to carry weight.

That instinct runs through the coins that followed. A solitary figure of General Douglas MacArthur. A lone steamboat on open water. Two people shaking hands. Each is a designer's bet that one strong idea, cleanly drawn, will outlast a crowded one.