John Krieger
Manistee artist John Krieger spent decades designing cars in the competitive Detroit automotive industry.
Now retired from the car game, he’s gone from designing fins on cars to designing fins on fish, his recent specialty. His colorful, unique fish are made of the same clay used in car models and they range in size from about 3 to 10 feet long.
“Most guys who do fish just take their clay or wood or whatever and make the fish, but because of my design background, I always do a drawing first. I draw every fish, then I work from that. I have piles and piles of sketches of fish and, when I do them, I work on several at a time because they are in different stages of completion. I try to make the heads as realistic as possible. The bodies, very often, are of a general shape, but I try hard to get them anatomically correct.”