Marshall Harris ’79 may be 6 feet 7 inches tall and weigh 255 pounds, but he’s not above doing a little delicate ironing.

No, the former football MVP and NFL defensive lineman-turned-artist is not getting the wrinkles out of a button-down shirt. Harris is ironing the surface that will sit underneath a sheet of mylar, the plastic-sleeve-like material on which he is working on his latest creation: A 25-foot by 5-foot pencil drawing of a cloud scape.

The work, titled “Slipping the Flesh and Bone of this Mortal Coil,” will be the centerpiece of Harris’ October solo show at Dallas’ Red Arrow Contemporary Gallery. Titled Death Do Us Part, the exhibition follows neatly on Harris’ May winning of the 2013 Hunting Art Prize, one of Texas’ most prestigious art competitions, which also rewarded Harris a healthy check for $50,000.

For Harris, being awarded the prestigious Hunting Prize, an annual contest only open to Texas artists, really “came out of nowhere.” Harris was one of about 1,600 artists to submit a single work, either a painting or drawing, completed in the last three years, to the Houston affiliate of the British-based Hunting Corporation. Eventually, Harris would be one of 109 artists to be shown at the competition’s main charity event and judged for its grand prize.

Not only was Harris’ drawing of a saddle the winner of the first prize, but it sold, as well.

“I thought this is a bonus to have sold the work,” says Harris. “Because when I got there, I looked around at all the amazing art work on display and honestly I got overwhelmed and intimidated. At that point, I was just happy to stand by the vast dessert table for the rest of the evening.”

But even when Harris was told by one of the evening’s lead officials to stand near the stage as the announcement of the winner was about to be made, he remained clueless as to what would happen next.

“So as they start reading the bio of the winner of the contest,” recalls Harris, “I’m thinking how similar his story sounds to mine. Then my sister next to me says, ‘It is you, stupid.’ I couldn’t believe that I had also gotten the golden ring my first time out. When I accepted the check, I ended up stammering out something before walking off the stage. I later realized that in that surreal evening, I sold my work and got a $50,000 check.”

Harris’ Hunting prize winner was a 2011 drawing titled “Round-Up (B.F. Smith & Son Saddlery, circa 1942).” The piece showcases Harris’ trademark artistic style by using varying grades of soft and hard pencil on a mylar surface (a matted-finish plastic sheet formerly used in architectural drawings), to create an almost photo-real depiction of a saddle’s minutest detail: a dented buckle, shiny silver etchings and leather tooling.

“Saddles have almost as many intricacies as the human form,” Harris says. “Each one is unique, with their own nuances, and marked by the scuffs and scratches of time. I wanted to challenge myself by drawing a saddle series through making the most intricate drawings I have ever attempted. I was rather OCD about the process, down to counting the number of the saddle’s stitches.”

Harris is currently working on a coffee-table book built around his saddle depictions, each one telling a part of the history of the Chisholm Trail. His goal is to photograph as many saddles from all parts of the Trail, and then to reproduce them in pencil on a stark-white background.

“Mine is a very stripped-down depiction of a life-size saddle, with no addition of a cowboy or a bucking bronco,” says Harris, who adds it takes him about three months to complete a single saddle drawing. “It is a very austere study of something that is, itself, very detailed and crafted by a real artisan. The aim is to show that saddles are one of a kind, as unique as fingerprints.”

Harris describes his favorite drawing technique of pencil-on-mylar as, “creating the illusion of photography, a technique that is part of the work’s allure,” he says. It’s the kind of illusion that will normally fetch a very real $1,500-$15,000, depending on the size of the work.

“I’ve always liked hyper-realism in art,” admits Harris. “In college, I worked more in painting but I just found it much less controllable than pencil. It’s really difficult for me to capture in gooey paint the kind of detail I can in pencil. At the end of the day, I’m a control freak with my art, and I’m convinced I couldn’t have captured all the detail of my saddle drawings in any medium other than pencil.”

Winning the Hunting Prize, Harris admits, couldn’t have come at a better time for him.

“With this prize, I can actually afford insurance to cover hospitalization, get my teeth cleaned, and I will no longer have to smuggle popcorn into the movie theater,” he says with a laugh. “Of course, not long ago, I was at my darkest time, wondering whether I could really do my art. And then this miracle happened. It’s probably God or the universe saying, ‘Okay, we’ve beaten him up enough, let’s throw the boy a bone.’ ”

All in all, Harris seems totally at peace with his decision to leave behind his previous career in the commercial art world, for the infinitely more precarious existence of a fine artist.

“I could never go back to working in the commercial art field, spending so much time making stuff for other people,” says Harris. “I realized one day that what I was doing in the commercial art world was nothing more than producing aesthetic landfill.”

Over the past three years, since Harris moved back to Fort Worth from Boston, Mass., he has lived with his parents, Marshall E. Harris ’54 (MLA ’77) and Marlene Schnellenbach Harris ’56, in their Wedgwood home. He has created his art in a make-shift studio that had been his parents’ formal living room.

“Yeah, moving home sounds strange for a 57-year-old guy to do,” Harris says. “But you do what you have to do in the end,” says Harris. “I now only want to work on things that will creatively blow my hair back.”

Indeed, Harris is so comfortable in his new artist lifestyle that he has immortalized his transition on his business card, which reads “Born Again Bohemian.”

“Somewhere I read that if you can conceive and believe in what you want, you will achieve it,” says Harris, who admits extracting motivation each day when he looks in the mirror and sees the word “persevere” in tiny letters tattooed across his burly chest.

“Here I am, all these years later, working in my own studio, setting my own hours, doing the work I want to do,” says Harris. “Right now, I’m living the life that God has decided to give me. Of course, next week may be a completely different story.”

Spoken like a true artist.