As McAuley puts it, everyone’s brother is a painter. But no one knows a sculptor.

McAuley was then commissioned by IU for an Elinor Ostrom sculpture in 2020, the first statue of a woman on the IU campus. Ostrom was a former IU professor and was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009.

McAuley’s third gift to IU was finished four years later: a bronze John Mellencamp and his guitar.

As McAuley puts it, everyone’s brother is a painter. But no one knows a sculptor. Sculpting requires more tools, a live model to pay out of pocket and the patience to fail and try again. Not many people can do what he does, especially when only given a photograph to work from.

There is pressure when the person you are hoping to bring to life is still living and will personally evaluate it.

In total, John Mellencamp took McAuley five months to complete from his studio in Indianapolis. The sculpture was unveiled on Bloomington’s campus Oct. 18 last year. Mellencamp himself made an appearance for the occasion, smiling for photos and singing a few songs for those who gathered.

Mellencamp’s bronze figure now stands forever outside the IU Auditorium next to Hoagy Carmichael. His left arm holds the neck of his acoustic guitar and his right arm is held up, ready to strum.

When McAuley sculpted Carmichael, he had complete artistic freedom, choosing the age in which he would appear and the pose he deemed most Hoagy-like.

The Mellencamp commission was much stricter. The singer’s agent gave McAuley a recent photograph and said this is how he wanted to be depicted. This was after McAuley had already prepared a presentation where he explained the public might find it more iconic to see a young Mellencamp as he was creating his hit songs.

McAuley saw Mellencamp in concert once or twice, he can’t remember. They are only three years apart in age, with McAuley turning 70 this year and both have been residents of Bloomington. The sculpture tethered them together.

“I respect Mellencamp as an artist, as a songwriter, because you know me, I use clay,” McAuley said. “And he uses words like I use clay.”

His mother an artist and his dad a mathematician, the values of art and perfection were instilled in McAuley when he was born.

“With my father, everything was black and white,” McAuley said. “There are no gray areas. When he would shovel the snow off the driveway, it had to be a perfectly straight line. No snow on the pavement, always on the grass.”

McAuley knows no life without art. His mother and grandmother were always painting and crafting. He drew a lot in high school and worked with clay when he could. During those years, he bought motorcycle parts from his friend for $25 and put it together himself.

“The motorcycle was a machine, 3D,” McAuley said. “And clay, I could make anything I wanted out of that clay.”

For years, he rode on the wooded trails behind his home in Bloomington, occasionally venturing onto the road.

McAuley said the motorcycle gave him the same freedom he found in art, which brought him “great exhilaration.”

He sold his motorcycle to go to college for art and hasn’t ridden one since.

In college at IU, his pottery classes were his favorite because he enjoyed working with his hands and making mistakes, changing and adding things to the clay as he worked.

The beginnings of a bronze sculpture are in clay. McAuley sculpted Mellencamp with it, then sent it to a foundry to be cast in bronze.

McAuley said getting a sculpture cast in bronze is difficult, especially in the Midwest, because it is essentially a desert for foundries. One must find a foundry they trust, where bronze is melted and poured into a cast after the wax is removed from an intermediary plaster form.

Once finished, few adjustments can be made; the bronze statue will remain as it is forever. This is McAuley’s reputation. This is his livelihood.

The pressure to make his sculptures perfect wakes him up at night.

To maintain his reputation as an artist of high integrity and to ensure accuracy, McAuley hung up posters outside his bathroom door showing the anatomy of a human ear and the muscle groups of the face. No two ears are the same, but he said they all share a certain unity.

McAuley said the ears and the face are the hardest to get right. If you get the face wrong, you get the person wrong.

Sculpting the body of a person is easy enough if you have a model to stand still for you. The model must have the same body type as your subject and be willing to wear whatever clothes they are given.

Finding Mellencamp’s body, however, proved to be a great challenge.

McAuley stood across the street from the nearest Starbucks in Indianapolis for hours to scout out someone willing to do the job. He was turned down by every man he found whose body could resemble the famous singer. Eventually, someone responded to his Facebook notice.

He didn’t mind that the model’s body didn’t match — McAuley was able to sculpt his legs and cut them down from there. The sculptor used his knowledge of anatomy to change the body type to fit Mellencamp.

Down the hall from the bathroom in his studio, a room with glass windows and a sliding door sits cluttered with art, some finished and some awaiting his delicate hand. The room smells of paint with no visible source. An empty black platform sits near the back of the room, where the bronze Mellencamp once stood holding his guitar.

McAuley said he is relieved to be done with the project, proud of what he produced. He is now working on a piece for an art show, a circular clay sculpture he calls "Madonna and Child” based on Michelangelo’s “The Virgin and Child with Infant Saint John.”

McAuley takes inspiration from Michelangelo. He is a Christian, like him. He prays for the good of the world and the safety of his mother. He prays for himself and his nation, for the good that he wants to see in everything.

He sculpts with a photograph of Michelangelo’s original “Virgin and Child” sitting on the table beneath him.

Michelangelo’s piece depicts a young Jesus laid in the arms of Mary with a young John the Baptist holding out a baptismal bowl to her. McAuley’s takes the same circular shape but instead is set on a beach with Mary wearing a swimsuit and baby Jesus snug inside an inner tube with goggles on his head. John the Baptist is awaiting to take full shape, but when he is finished, he will bear a mischievous grin and tease Mary with a locust.

McAuley’s hair is gray. His tools are tiny, silver and sharp. The table they rest on is covered in a blue tarp, stained in clay. He works slowly, sometimes listening to the radio to avoid the starkness of silence. His choice of rhythm is light, classical or jazz or 1970s music.

He was listening to the radio on the day he feared most for his reputation.

It was the morning broadcast of his favorite Indianapolis station, WICR 88.7, and the two hosts were talking about the new John Mellencamp statue down in Bloomington.

They said the statue didn’t look like him. For McAuley, that is the worst thing he could hear as a figurative sculptor.

McAuley emailed them immediately.

“I said, ‘I listen to you every morning, I love your commentary on life and politics, but I really think you missed the boat on this one,’” McAuley said. ‘“I was given a photograph to work from, and here is a picture of him right beside the head. People are influenced by you and what you say. I wish you had done more research before you made a comment on something you are aesthetically ill-prepared to comment on.’”

He kept listening to the station in the following mornings in hopes they would retract their statement, but if they did, he didn’t hear it. He has seen similar remarks in the comment sections of news articles.

McAuley said he wishes people had studied the aged version of Mellencamp’s face as he had. He knows he followed the photograph exactly. He knows the statue is one he should be proud of because Mellencamp himself thanked him.

The letter from Mellencamp was short, but it was all he wanted. It read: “Michael, thank you for your work, and your eye, to the sculptor.”

As he worked on Mellencamp, he viewed his anatomy references time and time again, walking back and forth between the door and the studio where John stood atop his platform. In the hallway between them, sculptures of his past line the walls.

During his bathroom breaks, he could reach for the aged book above the toilet bowl, which detailed the lives and artworks of famous sculptors like Michelangelo and Raphael.

When he washed his hands, he could read the Bible verse he taped to the mirror: “He who humbles himself will be exalted — and he who exalts himself will be humbled.”