Twenty years ago, Jerry McKellar concentrated on root canals, crowns, and fillings in this thriving private dental practice in Colville, Washington. He had graduated from the University of Washington in 1969, spent two years with the Army Dental Corps, and then set up a practice with his wife Gayle, a dental hygienist he’d met in school. Life, however, took an interesting turn in 1987 when McKellar cast his first limited-edition sculpture entitled Startled. No one, however, was more startled than McKellar who found his love of art so strong that, by 1994, he began to devote himself to it on a full-time basis. Although the transition sounds a bit absurd, he finds that the intricate three-dimensional work of dentistry furnished good basic foundations for his sculpting. In fact, he has no formal art training other than a few patina classes. “Part of dentistry has to be quite artistic for the work to be good,” says the 63-year-old McKellar. “It does transfer over.”