Leaving The Nest (Maquettes #1 and #2)

Leaving The Nest (Maquette #2) Mild steel and acrylic lacquer

My apologies to my patrons for not blogging for so long! My personal life circumstances the last few years haven't been conducive to this kind of thing, and I hope to start making up for it now.

In that time, much of my work has been in feigned glass, a technique in which I mixed custom glazes and applied them to paper to create hyper-realistic images that appear to be stained glass. I’ve spent more time creating than blogging recently, but you can see more of my art in that style through my Instagram and Facebook accounts, and I'll be adding some of it here soon as well.

I'm still doing pen-and-ink and feigned glass, but now that things have settled a bit and gone in a new direction that's given me access to more studio space, I'm moving towards sculpting in steel, which gives me the freedom to explore my artistic sense in three dimensions, create large pieces, and also “scratches my itch” for working with my hands while bending iron to my will.

The two maquettes above were created in service of my first large endeavor in this medium, and were inspired by some small pieces of angle iron that were cutoffs from a different project. When I looked at those leavings, they suggested birds to me, particularly those cut at an angle that seemed to represent an avian cavorting in flight. By welding them together in inobvious fashion, I was able to create something I found interesting, and I hope you will too! The full-scale version should be done by the end of this summer, and will be on display in front of my studio in Michigan. If you'd like to see it in person, please contact me for the address, or to schedule a private showing.