- As we continue our artistic adventure today, our next stop is gonna bring us just outside the city of Clare, where we're gonna step inside the walls of Devil's Rope Studio.

It's here that sculptor Jeff Best works his magic, recreating stunning and lifelike forms found in nature, using a most unlikely and prickly medium.

(upbeat music) - As a kid, I guess, I loved the outdoors.

You know, nature has just always been part of me, and then through high school, I won a couple competitions with painting, and that kind of stuff.

But other than maybe every once in a while getting out a pencil and sketching, it was just not something that really, that I did.

- [Matthew] Jeff Best of Devil's Rope Studio in Clare never really thought of himself as an artist.

Despite growing up in a very artistic home, he had always assumed that building his life around a creative passion just wasn't in the cards.

But the spark was lit in Jeff when one day one of his kids asked for his help with a school project.

- When you have kids, they have show and tell, and so one day, and I don't know why, I picked up a pair of needle nose pliers and took some hangers out of my wife's closet, and just started twisting them up, and of course the first thing I made was a whitetail deer.

The kids took it to school for show and tell for several years, and that was the first thing I ever made.

And in my mind, I always thought it'd be kind of cool to do a large life size deer head, but I just knew that I wasn't gonna do it with coat hangers, because it was so, you know, coat hangers are pretty stout, or they used to be, anyways.

Pretty stout.

And I thought well, I'll find something someday.

And that was always in the back of my mind.

- [Matthew] And the key to what would turn that initial idea into what we see today was found in a rather unexpected way.

- We bought some property, and it was 40 acres, and mostly wooded, and I was walking the property one day, and I walked up on it, and here's this barbed wire, all rusted barbed wire laying there.

And I mean, instantly I thought, now that would be cool, the use of the barbed wire for a deer head.

Threw it in the barn and it laid in the barn for, I would say, three or four years.

And I came across that barbed wire again I said, you know, this winter I'm gonna do that.

And so that's what happened.

I used that, and I still have that deer head today.

It's actually hanging over my mailbox here.

- [Matthew] With his first barbed wire creation finished, Jeff would continue working on piece after piece, along the way, honing his skills along with his creative style.

- Every new sculpture that I do scares me.

I've always said that I've never been stumped, but doesn't mean that I don't agonize over it before I do it.

This ram has been a challenge, from the standpoint of its horns.

You know, they curve around, and they have a certain pattern how they curve around.

This is my third iteration here (laughing) of horns, and I'm still not completely satisfied with them, but that's pretty much the same, that I deal with it.

I never have a piece go out of here that I'm totally satisfied.

People say, well I strive for perfection.

Well, if you really could achieve perfection, it wouldn't look like the animal, because I say you have to have some imperfection to make it look real.

I try to perfect imperfections in my work so it looks real.

If you look at whitetail deer, that one antler is typically smaller than the other antler.

And just because this one's got four points doesn't meant that this side's got four points.

But I still struggle on putting those imperfections in because my nature is I want it to look perfect.

I want four on this side, and four on that side, and I want them the same length.

But then I keep on telling myself, no, it can't, you don't want them to be that way.

They won't look exactly real.

- [Matthew] Jeff's drive to perfect the imperfect did help drive his creative passions forward.

But the real turning point for him came when he was able to see how his creations could touch people in a personal and profound way.

- When you get done, and they see it, and they go wow, that is awesome.

You're going, phew.

I know the first time that really hit me was when I did a Friesian horse.

And that was a large, large horse.

I don't know if you're familiar with Friesian but they have long, flowing manes, and they're like the Fabio of the horse world, you know?

Very athletic, very strong, muscular, and very graceful.

And this gentleman asked me to make one, and he says I need it to look like Oliver.

- [Matthew] Meet Oliver, a champion Friesian horse owned by Mary and Paul Alexander of Mount Pleasant.

This time, Jeff would be able to meet his muse face to face.

- To that point, a horse was a horse to me.

You do a horse head, you put legs and hooves on it, you're making a horse.

You're not making a specific horse.

And so that was a challenge.

And we delivered it, actually, on Christmas morning.

It was freezing cold.

Put it on a trailer, wrapped it up with a white tarp, and then he had to coax his wife out of the house.

It was like, I don't know, it was 20 degrees or less, and freezing cold, so she wasn't even really excited about going outside.

And then she went outside, and we pulled that off, and she said Oliver.

I hate to see things go out my door, because I'm typically doing commission stuff.

I make them, and they're gone.

And then I'm onto the next thing.

On the other side, if I know where they're going, and where they're gonna be, so I can maybe drive by them, that always helps a lot for me, when they end up in some really cool places.

For me, that's been the legacy of what I'd done, and when I'm gone, that that stuff will still be there is really important to me.