This steel face sculpture is the start to a series. The theme and message of the series is still being developed. This metal art face sculpture was designed to either hang on a wall or on a stand. This one is titled "Iron Face".

This could be the third year in a row the local paper featured an image of my work in the paper. this is a large face sculpture titled "Metaface". It is in the 2017 "Sculpture Is" show at the Sierra Azul nursery and sculpture garden in Watsonville, Ca.

This article mentions my work and features this great photo of my sculpture bust "Inner Eye", a head sculpture depicting the Third eye chakra. all done in the usual recycled metal parts.  This piece has allot of space in it. I was going for a minimal approach.

      It's been since 2007 since i've sculpted  a large head sculpture over four ft. tall. The Cloverdale Ca. Sculpture Trail juried outdoor sculpture exhibit is a good opportunity for me to create this new piece for their 2017-2018 sculpture exhibit.
   The sculpture is being made from the usual recycled metal parts and pieces. It's all welded together using mig welding and oxyacetylene cutting and welding. The biggest problem i have making a sculpture this big is finding enough interesting metal parts to use. Just recently A&S metal recycling co. just told me they will not be selling metal to individuals any more. That"s a huge disappointment because now i am forced to find other resources for my recycled metals. I was lucky to find a very generous man who let me take away a van-load of his junk metal that he was tossing out.
    This Indian bust sculpture is titled "Chief Steel Feather" and will be on display this summer of 2017 in the town of Cloverdale Ca. Keep in mind this image is early in progress so its hard to judge how it will look when finished. It will have a large feather head-dress and other embellishments.

        Here it is more progressed.

      This painted metal wall art sculpture is hand painted with colorful enamel paint. Since 1992 I have been sculpting welded metal figure sculpture. Durring this time i would clean the finished metal sculpture the best i could with wire brushes or sandblasting. I would then apply a good quality clear enamel spraypaint. This protected the metal sculpture from the elements, made it clean to touch and gave it a glossy apearance. It also let the nice natural color of the raw metal show through.
      It was'nt  untill 1997 that i decided to paint two large outdoor commissioned sculptures. They turned out realy well but i wasnt committed to the process for some reason. I continued to leave my sculpted artworks colorless to keep the integrity of the bare metal look and to not be distracted away fro form with color.
      An artist painted canvas that hangs on the wall is one artistic discipline. Sculpture is very different in the sense that the artist is dealing with A volumetric three dimentional object as oposed to a flat surface.  Its much more difficult to compose paint on  A sculpture than it is to paint a flat painting. I realy needed to study what i was doing sculpturaly and adding paint just threw me off. It was sort of like breaking a hunger fast with a twinkie. It didnt sit right. 
     This artwork titled "Mystery" was intended right from the start to have a colorful painting on it. I thought about it for a long time and finaly figured out how to make it work.

I use different methods for sculpting my large faces. This one process uses an armature or understructure to build a form over.  This sculpting technique requires the use of an original form to work on. Most of the time I will have to build the underlying armature first. this form will be modeled to reflect the appearance of the mold that’s sculpted over it. In other words the sculpture i build over the top of the original form will look almost exactly like the original.
    Once i have the original all welded together i can then start  making a duplicate. In this case here i constructed a 10 ft tall mild steel fece from rusted scrap metal. I then laid the face down facing up and proceeded to weld a stainless steel duplicate over the top of it. I clamped the metal to the original to follow its form tightly and welded it together piece by piece.
   When it was complete i built a stainless steel frame for the duplicate sculpture to be supported by.  Here you can see the original displayed in a NY. Gallery and the stainless steel sculpture duplicate that was made from it. Sorry for the blurry image of the rusted one.

  For sculpting the large faces I have found that i can sculpt the likeness in clay first. I can then transfer that image to metal. Its a very crude way to transfer an image but it works. you can’t always find the model your looking for so to sculpt it in clay the way you want works well.

  I sculpt the clay face on a scale of one inch equals one foot.  So an 8 inch tall clay face can be built into an 8ft. tall steel face. the face is then sliced vertically. these 1 inch thick slices are placed down on a square grid and the contour is traced.  The same is done horizontally. after i have all my contour lines drawn on a grid I draw another grid with 1 ft squares. Then i transfer by eye the 1 inch contour drawings to the 1 ft. graph. I then start laying out and bending 1/4” metal bar to conform to the contour drawings. After all the contour drawings are made in steel bar i weld them together where the horizontal and vertical bars cross and vualla, instant large grid face. Now that i have a rough idea of where the surface is soppesed to lay i can start applying material and making it a solid structure.

This welded steel recycled bicycle sprocket bust sculpture was exhibited at Oakwilde Ranch and Sculpture in 2015. It is titled "Gears Of Thought" and it won best in show that year.  Here is that years page,    http://oakwilderanchsculpture.com/?page_id=142        Off their website.
      This image shows the indoor gallery. The grounds are 50 acres and display many other permanent and traveling artworks. the sculpture park is in Valley Springs California.

This piece is a favorite of mine. I titled it "Woven Reflections". welded entirely out of stainless steel. Most of the laticework on the face was done by plasma cutting tons of 1/8 inch sheet stainless steel into ribonlike pieces and the weaving hammering and welding them in place.
      The monumental face sculpture was fabricated using a steel armature underneath it. the understructure is a sculpture as well.
      The reason behind the name of this piece is that during it's construction 9/11 took place. It was somewhat ironic that i ran out of the ribbon like pieces of metal i was using and had to improvise by strategicly  placing in the more geometrical rectangular pieces seen peaking through. These pannels were put in the day before the 9/11 tragedy. In retrospect after the piece was finnished i reflected on the piece and the event in NYC and was shocked to see what looked like buildings falling amidst smoke and rubble hidden in the fabric of the face.
    The reflectiveness and woven structure of the metal, the reflection on the incomprehensible event and all the unfathomable emotions of all the people seemd to rest in peace in a simple gesture of a giant metal face. I feel like in some strange way it helped ground all the kaotic and fear based energy at that time and sent out a vibration of peace, calm and stabillity in a time of soul questioning and confusion.