Figure maker
Brian Hamilton
died 1988, aged 28
He started carving at fourteen, was building in the Marshall style at fifteen, ended up owning Frank Marshall's tools, and was dead at twenty-eight.
Ventriloquist Central's maker directory calls Hamilton a flash in the pan and then spends the rest of the entry explaining why that is the wrong way to think about him. He started at fourteen. At fifteen he was making carved wood figures in the Marshall style. He was accomplished enough that he acquired all of Frank Marshall's tools to work with.
George and Glenn McElroy took him under their wing and taught him a good deal of their technique. He carved heads in wood and then moved to building figures in fiberglass, and he made some very fine McElroy-style figures — fewer than a handful are known. He also did repair work.
The eight figures documented here include a 1977 basswood commission for the Chicago performer Ilene Karnow, who was then twenty-two and had been taking lessons from Paul Stadleman. Hamilton was around seventeen when he delivered it. He died in 1988 at twenty-eight.
The mechanics
The McElroy tribute figure in this collection has a fiberglass body cast identical to the McElroy pattern, McElroy-style hands, and a head mounted to a universal cradle, with slot jaw, upper lip, winkers and blinkers, raising eyebrows and weighted all-around eye movement. Simpler Hamilton figures are basswood with a moving mouth and nothing else.
The figures
41 photographs across 4 cataloged objects. Each object is one entry in the register — where a character name covers two physical figures, they stay two entries, because the character outlives the object more often than the record admits.
Wood Carved 23 photographs
- Size
- 40"
- Materials
- basswood; carved wood
- Movements
- slot jaw / moving mouth; self-centering eyes; winkers; raising eyebrows
- Dates given
- 1977
Brain Ezry Head 3 photographs
- Materials
- fiberglass
Recorded owner Ventriloquist Central Collection; Jeff Dunham. This head as stated on the source page when it was written — not current ownership
Brain Bird 6 photographs
- Size
- 5"
- Materials
- papier-mâché; carved wood; cloth body
- Movements
- head stick
- Dates given
- 1975
Recorded owner Ventriloquist Central Collection as stated on the source page when it was written — not current ownership
Hamilton catalog 3 photographs
From the collection pages 6 photographs
Photographs on Brian Hamilton’s index and reference pages rather than on a single figure’s entry — portraits, shop material and close studies of one detail across several figures. They are not counted as objects in the register.
