A Big Leap From Doodles

Sometimes success looks like a 10-foot-tall teal bunny.

That was the case for Jeffie Brewer: “You struggle as an artist for a long time to get a footing and get a break, and then you get the break.”

His break was that bunny design.

The whimsical, minimalist metalwork changed the course of his career—and ultimately his life—nearly 20 years ago. And so today, a version of the bunny stands guard outside Brewer’s studio on the outskirts of Nacogdoches, where the artist’s creations are dreamed up, brought to life and shipped all over the world with the help of a small team.

Decades before any of that, Brewer’s path to finding his artistic voice took a long and winding path that began in his father’s junkyard in Palestine. “I had always been the kid who drew and made stuff,” he says.

But after a failed attempt at “making it big”—maybe as a comedian—in Los Angeles at 18, he moved back home and studied at a few different colleges before earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Sam Houston State University, where a final-semester class sparked his interest in sculpture.

He completed two master’s degrees in art at Stephen F. Austin State University while searching for his artistic voice. After graduation, Brewer stayed in Nacogdoches to teach at his alma mater in the late 1990s. He taught a variety of courses, including art appreciation, painting and 3D design.

His artistic style bounced “all over the place,” he says, including painting, drawing and using a plasma cutter to cut shapes out of steel.

“At my core, I’m a redneck kid who got dipped into the art world and wrung out,” he says. “The real shift happened when I stopped making art for other people and just made what interested me.”

In 2004, he raised his nephew for a year while the child’s parents were stationed overseas in the military.

“His parents were both in Afghanistan and Iraq. Having this kid around changed my philosophy of how I made and worked in art,” Brewer says. “I made a little bit more of a jump toward figurative, representational sorts of things.”

Birds were a common theme during this period, but he later started doodling bunnies while working at his wife’s advertising agency.

When Brewer returned to working in steel after a two-year hiatus, the first thing he made was a bird, inspired by his drawings, to put in the arboretum beside his office in the SFA art department. It was stolen a week later, inspiring Brewer to make a new sculpture that was “too big to steal.” His next design—that giant 3D bunny—was inspired by his mindless doodling.

“The bird had been just a cut-plate steel piece, but with the bunny, I saw a chance to try something different, something with more dimension and presence,” Brewer says.

The bunny was an instant hit—a “eureka moment” for him. “I got to see how people interacted with it, and it revolutionized the way that I thought about art,” says Brewer, who wants people of all ages to walk away from his work feeling something.

On a whim, Brewer entered the bunny in a South Carolina public art show. He won, and that got him mentioned in The New York Times. The bunny made an appearance in New Orleans, putting him on the radar of the world-renowned Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas, which included his work in a later show.

“After that, it’s been chaos,” Brewer says. He kept his foot on the gas, leading to increased exposure, commissions and new animal designs, including armadillos, giraffes, cats and crocodiles.

He made the leap to full-time artist in 2019 and has a team of four full-time assistants, including two SFA grads. At any given time, his team is working on four to eight projects—among them an 8-foot-tall purple kitty or an 8-foot hot pink wiener dog. His three real dogs, Olive, Odie and Vinnie, are always on hand to provide emotional support.

Brewer’s work is evenly split between commercial and university clients, galleries (his work is in a dozen across the country), and personal commissions from individuals. His large pieces sell for tens of thousands of dollars, and smaller pieces available on his website go for about $200.

In 2024, Brewer and his wife, Angie, self-published a colorful soft-cover photo book, Joy Machine, that showcases his sculptures.

Every piece is made at his rural workshop across from a cow pasture. A rusted steel gate with the silhouette of five of his famous bunny designs leads to a tree-lined driveway, a sculpture trail really, with an 8-foot purple robot and other artwork scattered in the nearby woods.

One of his most notable permanent public works in Texas is the 12-foot-tall purple bull that stands in front of a water tower on State Highway 46 in Boerne. Others include 58 sculptures at the Bark Yard dog park in Allen—where his 30-foot dog collar is used as a shade structure—and the yellow armadillo outside Covenant Children’s Hospital in Lubbock.

“Lubbock loves Jeffie,” says Elizabeth Grigsby, the executive director of the Lubbock Arts Alliance.

She first discovered Brewer’s work more than a decade ago while serving on a committee to select art to display along highways. Since then, his work has appeared in the Lubbock Arts Festival and twice along intersections. One piece was a 13-foot-tall pink flamingo designed to celebrate an art donor’s 100th birthday (Brewer also made a smaller version for her assisted living facility that she decorates for each season).

“What I find most interesting about Jeffie’s artwork is that when you look at it, you immediately know what it’s meant to represent—there’s no confusion about the subject,” Grigsby says. “Yet it’s presented in such a unique, colorful and stylistic manner that it captures your imagination. He blends clarity with imagination so that the work feels both playful and sophisticated.”

Constructing a 500-pound metal bunny is no easy feat. While Brewer, a member of Deep East Texas Electric Cooperative, initially drew his animal designs by hand, he now creates them digitally. The files are sent to a local laser cutter, which trims the figures out of metal. The larger pieces are usually made from steel for durability, while the smaller ones are aluminum.

“We have to build an inside structure and then wrap it and then we have to meticulously weld it all out,” Brewer explains about the multiweek process. “And then go back and grind all the welds off so it looks seamless.”

The final step is powder coating the pieces to add his signature bright colors. Brewer initially hand-painted all his sculptures with a waterborne enamel before switching to powder coating for its longevity. He still hand-paints pieces upon request. “I’m a big fan of the teal,” says Brewer, noting that blue shades are the most requested, followed by red.

As he continually ships pieces to clients across the country with the help of his staff, he says he still can’t wrap his head around his success. He’s just glad to be able to do this work.

“I don’t have a master plan or some big vision board. I just want to keep working, keep building and see where it takes me,” he says. “As long as I’m able to make things that connect with people and keep the lights on, I’m happy.”