Mike Holt: The Picasso of Prosthetics
30 years ago, Mike Holt transformed his garage into a family-run prosthetics lab with the intention to change lives. Image courtesy of Holt.
Mike Holt applies his artistic skills to a unique product: prosthetics. For 30 years, he and his 10-person team of artists have made an average of 500 life-like prosthetics per year. They are typically for people who have lost limbs, sometimes in a gruesome fashion. (One customer lost her foot after it got stuck underneath a lawn mower.)
He founded ARTech with his brother Dale Holt in 1995 out of his garage in the Dallas suburbs. While traditional prostheses have been primarily to restore function with little emphasis on aesthetic appearance, ARTech focuses on restoring the appearance of the injured limb sufficiently to eliminate the stigma associated with disfigurement. ARTech's natural-looking restorations are virtually undetectable from real limbs. Holt and his team sculpt and paint the limbs (and the nails). In fact, the entire process is done by hand.
At age 74, Holt has no intention of stopping. Why? Because there’s no other feeling that compares to helping make someone feel whole again after the loss of a body part. Here, he shares how he works, including how he and his brother started the lab in their garage; the hardest body part to recreate; and why they do it all by hand.
The team at ARTech sits down with the patients to match the prosthesis skin tone to the person. Like watercolor, it’s a very translucent painting.
How did you come to this work? And how have you grown this business to where it is today?
My brother and I were raised in construction. My dad was a contractor, and my grandfather was also a contractor, so it was a pretty easy avenue for us to follow. My brother got tired of that and decided he wanted to do something else, so he answered an ad in the paper looking for someone who was over 30 with some artistic ability. He said, Well, that sounds like me.
The job was for a company that made custom prostheses — they are a competitor of ours now — and he discovered that he had a real talent for biomechanical sculpting. He worked for that company as a sculptor and mold maker for about five years. One day he came by my house and told me this was the greatest thing he’d ever done. He loved it, and he wanted me to help him start a business.
Tell us about those early days.
We started an anaplastology lab in my garage, a little wood shop I had out behind the house. We hired a couple of part-time art major students who then came to work with us full-time once they graduated from college. After a few months, business took off. Eventually, we outgrew the garage and rented a little office space in Midlothian, which is about 25 miles southwest of Dallas, and hired more people. We had 10 people then, about half of them artists and the other half technicians and mold makers. We outgrew that space and bought an old doctor’s office where we work from today.
Now we do business all over the United States. We have patients in eight different countries, and we work primarily with prosthetists, the people who make the prosthetic devices. And for each customer, we make the covering to go over that prosthetic device to match the patient in skin tones, texture, hair, freckles, whatever the patient may have.
The entire process at ARTech is all art — from the sculpting, the painting, the prep, even the technical components.
How did you and your brother work together in those early days?
When my brother and I started the lab, he made and sculpted the prosthetic molds and I did the paving and the acrylic nails. At this point, I can do pretty much any process here.
Walk us through that process.
Stone models of the person’s sound side and the injured side, along with photographs we need to create that prosthesis, are sent to us in our lab. Our sculptors will use a lost wax method, similar to a jeweler, to create that prosthesis out of wax over the actual model of the patient, so that once it's created, it fits perfectly over their residual body part.
Then, we make a mold and every detail in the wax model is captured in that stone mold. Once we have the mold, we inject it with a liquid silicone. We use a silicone material, which is a rubber product. Once that cures, we take it out of the stone hole and pass it on to the next person, and they will do the preparatory work on the silicone residual, or silicone prostate. And so once that prep is done, it’s passed on to another artist who will do the acrylic nail to match the patient.
In the final part of our process, our artists sit down with the patients and they tint the prosthesis to match the exact color of that person’s body. Like watercolor, it’s a very translucent painting. And so it’s layered on the prosthetic, which gives it the depth and texture of an actual finger or foot or hand or whatever. It’s pretty incredible to be able to have someone look and feel natural again. There’s a huge psychological effect that comes with losing part of your anatomy, obviously, and for us to be able to help that person to feel natural again is really special.
By the end of the process, the lab knows they're one of the only businesses still creating everything by hand.
Your team makes 500 prosthetic limbs a year by hand. Why?
The entire process is all art — from the sculpting, the painting, the prep, even the technical portion of it is artistic. Each patient is different. We’ve done thousands of fingers, but each patient has a unique fingerprint. We don’t have anything “on the shelf” that we can put on the patient. No machine can pump these limbs out — even 3D printers don’t print in wax. So everything is custom-made. We live in an automated, mechanical world, and we’re one of the few businesses that creates something with only our minds, eyes, and hands.
What is the hardest body part to recreate?
Partial hands. These accidents often come from someone who has part of their hand taken off by a machine. We take that partial hand where they still have some residual body parts, like fingers, and we will create more fingers by having the patient slip their residual fingers into the holes of a glove. Only, the glove is the prosthetic. We need our prosthetic, essentially, to slip on like a glove. The difficult part is to integrate a prosthetic with a partial finger.
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