On Returning: A Personal Renaissance

Art’s been at my very core for as long as I remember: I get downright grumpy if I don’t make art – or ride my bicycle. Thankfully, ‘art’, and ‘bicycle’ are loose terms for me, so it’s never been much of an issue.

Nearly a year ago, I decided it was time to take a deep breath and step away from making welded robot figures. I was feeling a bit stuck in a rut and a little unmotivated after 400 robots. So I took a break and directed my efforts toward the bicycle side of my life. I finished up some robot commissions, and after that had a good chunk of time off to consider if I wanted to come back to it, and if so, under what circumstances.

As fate would have it I broke a bone in my foot last June. Then a few weeks later, I broke the same bone in the opposite foot. I still did bike things – making bikes, helping people fix bikes, running weekly bike events – everything bike related – just without the riding part. I got grumpy. But as I slowly healed from my injuries, I was able to invest a great deal of time to giving deep thought on how I’d like to move forward as an artist. This produced a number of big picture concepts that I got charged up about.

Art is the byproduct of the effort to create something that no one’s made before.

People have their own definition of art. Some people don’t think it can be defined at all. For me to consider myself an artist, I need to be able to define what that is for me. So I decided that if I returned to sculpture, it was important to try new things.

I slowly started messing around in the studio again, but instead of following my well practiced and highly refined routine, I allowed myself to do whatever made me happy at that moment. In other words, instead of saying ‘I should make another Dionysian class Astrobot’, I asked myself ‘what do you want to make’? The answer was, ‘I want to make a hand’.

It was a simple, yet liberating thought. Thinking back to my biggest joys and personal triumphs as an artist, I realized that the moments where I allowed myself to work on a tiny detail of a piece were the most gratifying ones: executing a great idea through practicing great craft; taking it slow and working the metal with scrutiny, until it was ‘just so’. When I returned to making figures, I found myself looking at each part as an individual unit. An ankle, a forearm, the bottoms of the feet – each element revealed itself as an opportunity for expression.

The new approach yielded rewarding results. So I made another, and another – each time diving deeper into new territory and new approaches. This new passion and new way of thinking lit the way to what I consider to be a personal renaissance.

These new pieces took quadruple the time to make than my previous ones, however the work was immensely gratifying – and therefore motivating – making it easy to put in some very long hours in the workshop. As a result, I have four pieces to debut:

 

 

 

 

 

I can’t say for certain that everyone will see a noticeable difference in my work, but in my eyes I see a huge leap forward towards portraying human emotions in scrap metal assemblages. Each one of these new darlings is extensively documented on each of their webpages, if you care to learn more. I hope some of the photos will put a smile on your face!