Found
I get raw material for my sculptures from a number of places. One of them is along the roadsides and train tracks where I walk and sometimes pick up litter.
I find tools, wheel covers, chrome hub caps, sheets of rusty steel, railroad spikes, fence posts bent from car accidents, and leftover hardware from telephone pole replacements. I also sometimes see free furniture left out on the curb for collection. Steel-framed desks and chairs are perfect salvage material.
Another source is donations from people who know me and my work and are happy to contribute materials, sometimes from the workshop of a widow. Neighbors with rusty steel that seems useless to them often become part of my next creation. I recently had a local ranch lady, who had seen my work at the wine bar she was sitting in, give me a pile of miscellaneous hardware and ranch-related objects.
In the past, I have come across a surplus coil of rusty barbed wire while hiking in Arizona. Having no tools with me to cut it free, I returned the next day with cable cutters, cut it free, and hauled it back to my car. This particular coil of barbed wire became two of the pieces in my portfolio, namely “Barbed Cross” and “Barbed Pi”. During the process of constructing those two sculptures, I learned just how wicked that material is to work with. After getting poked several times through heavy welding gloves, I deemed it prudent to get a tetanus shot, just in case.
Forged
Joining steel pieces usually uses welding processes, which involve either an oxygen- and gas-fueled torch (in this case, acetylene) or an electric arc welder.
The fact that much of the material is rusty steel requires considerable labor to remove the iron oxide patina. Grinders, buffing wheels, die grinders, stainless-steel rotary wire brushes, and polycarbide brushes are used to reveal shiny, bare steel that can be welded.
Carbon Steel (the most common form) has a melting point of between 2500 and 2800 degrees F. Bronze has a melting point of about 1675 degrees F. An Oxy/Acetylene torch produces a flame of about 5600°F.
Many of the pieces shown in the gallery were brazed together using bronze brazing rod, which produces a strong joint and adds a decorative element. The Oxy/Acetylene torch is used exclusively for this particular process.
Some of the pieces, containing large, thick steel, require an arc welder to fuse the metal parts efficiently. Other pieces are fused together using both Oxy/Aceylene and arc welding for aesthetic and practical purposes.
The actual welding process takes a matter of seconds to accomplish. Most of the labor involved in welding is the often tedious setup process. If proper attention is not paid to the setup, the welding can and will fail to accomplish the desired task. To sum it up, welding is 90% setup and 10% actual welding.
Reimagined
Reimagining the scrap, cast-off, and found objects into something abstract or representational usually starts with a theme.
One example of that is the piece titled “Love Reimagined,” whose concept originated in the mind of the artist after a love interest made the following statement. “At our age, as seniors, what is a serious relationship supposed to look like? We probably will not get married, will not have children, own our own homes, and probably would not want to give them up, so what are we supposed to do?”
In response to the statement above, the artist felt motivated to express his sense of ambiguity through an abstract, metaphorical piece. He began by dumping out a bucket of salvaged steel parts on the garage floor and arranging them until his sense of balance, movement, and energy were manifested in the layout. Below are those parts, before they became the cohesive work and the finished piece.
