Rick Beckjord’s Sullivan studio is a bit crowded, taken up by racks of carpentry tools, two kinds of fish, a shepherdess with her lamb, some plaster molds, and his parents sitting on the mantel.

Well, not actually his parents. But there’s a very nice plaster bust of his dad, and next to it a plaster study of his mom.

And, what can be a bit unusual in this day and age, the work is representational. Beckjord’s figures of people and animals are easily recognizable.

“Abstract sculpture just never turned me on,” he said during an interview at his home on a side road in the Down East town.

Many of his own favorite sculptors are from centuries gone by – “Donatello, Michelangelo, Benedetto, all the Italians, and a lot of French Renaissance sculptors,” he said. It’s the kind of work that faded in the late 19th century, he explained, a time of “a real rebellion against academic art.”

In Beckjord’s hands, classical sculpture comes alive again in figures such as “Sylvia,” a nude woman resting her hands on a tree stump. The piece was part of a recent exhibit at Husson College’s Robert E. White Gallery.

Beckjord has done the nude not only in bronze, but also in the more affordable aquaresin, one of several materials he uses.

“I always admire sculptors who can work in different mediums. He seems just as happy in stone as in wood,” remarked Carl Little, a Maine art critic and former associate editor of Art in America.

“And I love the fact that you can walk around the pieces. Things keep revealing themselves to you,” Little said after viewing Beckjord’s works in the Wine Cellar Gallery at the John Edwards Market in Ellsworth.

Little’s point is evident in two versions of “Street Keeper,” a statuary of a woman holding a cat in her arms, with a playful dog bringing up the rear. The figure is based on people who look after animals on the streets of New York. Another cat peeks out from under the hemline of her skirt.

A larger version of the piece, fashioned in sycamore wood, shows not the cat’s head but its hind feet. One front paw reaches around the edge of the skirt.

The detail on the woman’s kerchief and the drape of her clothing are important features of Beckjord’s work.

He admires the medieval carvers who were “excellent masters of drape. Using drapery to guide the eye is a very important part of sculpture,” he said, bending his jeaned knee to show how the denim folds at a 45-degree angle.

Of course, Beckjord didn’t know all that when he first started carving things in his childhood, part of a family that moved from the West Coast to the East.

“I got my first pocketknife at 7,” Beckjord recalled. He would whittle wood, make things out of cow bone, or craft masks from California clay.

Moving to Pittsburgh didn’t inhibit his craft. “I had a rock saw and did rock polishing. In the sixth or seventh grade, I was selling stuff to classmates – copper enamel,” he said.

During his high school years at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, he studied with Pemaquid sculptor Cabot Lyford.

“I went to college with the idea firmly in mind that this is what I wanted to do,” Beckjord explained. “I was always working at something, whittling at something, carving away, but I didn’t want my roommate to know the foolish little things I was working on.”

The degree he earned was in economics, and his initial job after graduation was reporting for a weekly newspaper. But sculpture was his calling.

Beckjord had a studio in New York for a time, but decided, “I didn’t want to have to earn a lot just to pay the rent.” He was familiar with Down East Maine, where his grandfather had property in Sorrento, so in 1980 the area became Beckjord’s home.

An unfinished sculpture of a prone figure in maple, a piece he hopes to complete, epitomizes the next phase of his development.

He stopped the work in despair 15 years ago because he believed it revealed his lack of training about the human form.

That was a field that Lyford had not emphasized much, and, Beckjord said, “I realized I did not have the skills to perform at the level I wanted to. Anatomy is not just something you learn in a weekend. It is a lifelong process to understand the form and function of muscle.”

For a couple of years, he spent three-month stints at Cambridge Center for Adult Education in Massachusetts, then did terms at the Art Institute of Boston.

Next he enrolled at the University of Maine, earning a bachelor’s degree in fine art. Finally, he attended the Art Students League in New York to study figurative drawing, sculpture and anatomy.

Beckjord received the league’s McDowell grant to tour Europe – visits to museums in London and Paris, then five months in Pietrasanta in Italy’s Tuscany region. It was the ideal place for a sculptor who prizes classical works.

“It’s very important to go. I should go back,” he said. “Italy has the best marble you could ask for, and Pietrasanta is a sculpture town. There were the great museums in Florence and Pisa, and beautiful old religious pieces in churches.”

In Italy, he began work on “Generation Gap,” a sculpture done in Carrara marble, the snow-white stone of the type Michelangelo used. The sculpture was chosen for the biennial juried show now on exhibit at the Portland Museum of Art.

Recalling his trip to Europe, Beckjord said that even the architecture in many Italian towns reflects classical values.

“You can’t build any old house there. The zoning is very restrictive. The houses have to be mortar and brick – no wooden structures – and with ceramic tile roofs,” he said.

The influence of the Italian masters is evident in Beckjord’s work, and not only in obvious pieces such as nudes. The statue of a shepherdess and lamb in one corner of his studio is an example.

“It started out as David and a sheaf of wheat,” Beckjord said. “The basic position is the Risen Christ of Michelangelo.” The shepherdess’s crook stands where the cross would have been.

But the Italians are not alone in their effect on the sculptor’s work.

“An early influence was photographs of the work of Ernst Barlach – the German champion of the less fortunate who was, in effect, a martyr. Hitler did not like his work,” Beckjord said. The Nazis destroyed many of the sculptor’s pieces.

He also cited Kathe Kollwitz, “better known for her prints and drawings, but also a sculptor. And Ivan Mestrovic, the great Yugoslav sculptor who taught at Syracuse University and is an inspiration.”

Among 20th century Americans, two of Beckjord’s favorites are women, “the great Malvina Hoffman and lesser known Anna Hyatt Huntington. Also the sculpture of Elie Nadelman.”

The list continues: Jean Baptiste Carpeaux and other French sculptors; late Gothic Italians such as Pisano, Nicola and Giovanni; and the Greeks who did exceptional small bronzes.

“And I love Chinese bronzes,” Beckjord added, “and Central American terra cotta – of which the Hudson Museum at the University of Maine has a collection. For a sculptor, a visit to an art museum housing great works of the past can only be a humbling, if inspiring, experience.”

One of the things he admired about early sculptors was their willingness to work in clay to do studies for the major pieces.

“Clay modeling is like swimming. I can swim, but I don’t like to do it,” Beckjord said. For him, the point is not to work out the piece “to the nth degree, and copy it in wood. It’s to get a basic idea, how the figures will work. I don’t work everything out in clay ahead of time.” Often, Beckjord will begin designing in clay, and do a carving in another medium more or less at the same time.

In sculpting people, he started out with one person, moving on to one person and an animal. Now he has done two people, and several sculptures of a mother with two children.

He started with a series of four terra cotta models, choosing the best one for the basic design. Then he did the works in plaster and bronze. Three versions were displayed in the Husson exhibit – a small one in bronze, a clay sculpture a couple of feet tall, and a 6-foot statue in sycamore wood.

For the bronzes, Beckjord makes his own rubber molds and casts the wax copies. Then Moreno Giannaccini makes the bronzes at Pietrasanta Fine Arts Foundry in Brooklyn. The finishing and painting are done by Beckjord back in Maine.

People are harder to sculpt than animals, Beckjord pointed out.

“The discipline of the human figure is very important, because we know what humans look like. They’re very difficult to do. With humans, you’re dealing with gesture and emotion and statement,” he said.

Carl Little said one of his favorite Beckjord pieces in the Ellsworth gallery is “Custodian of the Waves,” showing a man trying to sweep up ocean water.

“You can’t realize how difficult it is to do human figures. The man and the waves, I just like that,” he said. “It’s a fine figure, but also a fanciful subject.”

As for Beckjord’s favorite subjects, “I like animals. They’re very appealing,” he said. Squirrels, chimpanzees, jellyfish, dogs, cats, owls, seals, lambs, penguins and other types of creatures have been fashioned by the sculptor.

In that field, he really admires the work of the Egyptians, describing it as “very inventive.”

He cited the dinosaurs in Washington’s American Museum of Natural History as “fantastic sculptures,” pieces that were done in clay first. Given his emphasis on anatomy, it’s no surprise that Beckjord would praise the work of taxidermists and sculptors with that kind of background.

“Toby Hart,” he said, referring to Forrest Hart, the Monroe sculptor who works in bronze and practiced taxidermy for several years. “He’s way ahead of me.”

Beckjord is currently working on a honeybee in stone, and he also has a slab of granite set aside for a fountain that will be decorated with a relief of fish.

It fits in, somehow, with his living surrounded by woods. Depending on the season, he can be found working in his vegetable garden, tapping maple trees, gathering firewood or marking trails that hikers are welcome to use.

Anyone who drives the busy Route 1 nearby has surely seen Beckjord on his bicycle.

“I don’t like the idea of wasting resources. That’s one reason I walk so much and bike so much. I take the bus into Ellsworth and Bangor,” he said, unless he has to transport sculptures.

There are things that larger cities have to offer, but Beckjord likes those trips to be infrequent and brief. Here in Maine, he’s found the place that feeds his art.

Rick Beckjord’s sculptures may be seen in the Wine Cellar Gallery at John Edwards Market on Main Street in Ellsworth; and at the Folio Gallery Web site at www.foliogallery.com. During the summer, he also will have work at Sullivan Harbor Gallery.