Figure maker
Conrad Hartz
Still hand-carving basswood the way the old makers did, and still building — one of the few for whom that sentence is true in the present tense.
Hartz has been building since 1975 through the Hartz Puppetry Workshop and has a reputation for hand puppets, marionettes and ventriloquist figures alike. Everything is hand carved from basswood, the traditional material, so no two are the same, and he uses brass mechanics for quiet, smooth movement.
Jimmy Vee's first-hand record has him living and carving one here and there. He also runs the World's Vents group on Facebook — a live community hub that no web crawl would ever find, because Facebook groups are invisible to crawlers.
His novelty work includes a head in a box in the Senor Wences manner, done as a Chinese head, on which the mouth lever works backwards: you push up to open rather than pulling down, possibly at the original buyer's request.
The mechanics
His early figures follow Frank Marshall's earliest method — the head made in two halves, front and rear, splitting at the sides with the carved ears part of the back half, and side-to-side non-self-centering eyes on a teeter-totter crossbar. Controls were brass then and plastic later. Later figures use ball-and-socket necks with side-to-side self-centering eyes and a slot jaw.
Status Living, builds occasionally recorded first-hand by Jimmy Vee, which outranks any web source — maker websites in this field routinely outlive the maker
The figures
10 photographs across 2 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.
Hartzfigure02 5 photographs
- Size
- 40"
- Materials
- basswood
- Movements
- slot jaw / moving mouth; self-centering eyes
Tough Guy 5 photographs
- Size
- 40"
- Movements
- slot jaw / moving mouth
Recorded owner Phil Jones as stated on the source page when it was written — not current ownership
