
For over two decades, I depended on scavenging and collecting steel scraps for my sculptures in an enormous metal waste facility south of Boston. Early on Saturday mornings, they allowed outsiders to dump their demolition loads for a fee. I would be there to cherry pick for a removal fee. I loved this place because the metal was beautifully chewed and crunched by dinosaur size cranes with T-Rex jaws. But a year ago, after two decades, I decided to stop this, cold turkey. This meant that I would eventually run out of material and stop welding sculptures.
I will miss walking through puddles with shimmering oil rainbows and ooze, searching in mountains of shrapnel sharp detritus for treasure. Like finding rare blue sea glass on the beach, these metal shards were the genome of my welded steel sculptures.
I have been loading mud-crusted, oil-soaked metal into a variety of cars for the past 20 years, and then unloading them at home into category piles: limbs, heads, connectors, curving flakes, painted pieces, shiny pieces and other categories.
My dependence on collecting and curating this pre- art material was apparent in 2015 when, after living for 27 years in Winchester, Massachusetts, I moved to Dudley, in South Worcester County, where I currently live. In Winchester, I had a tiny lot with a long driveway. On it were two piles of metal scraps that I had sorted: one useless, one treasure. When the driver of the “Got Junk?” truck arrived at my front door alongside the driver of a rental dump truck to take my precious scraps to Dudley, both, with hats in hand, asked which pile was which.
Works created in that Winchester driveway had ended up in front of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, Grant Park in Chicago and a townhouse development in Dallas, Texas. When I sent my children a photo of the exterior of their now broom-clean former home, one responded with the question: “We had a driveway?”
Works created in that Winchester driveway had ended up in front of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, Grant Park in Chicago and a townhouse development in Dallas, Texas. When I sent my children a photo of the exterior of their now broom-clean former home, one responded with the question: “We had a driveway?”
I moved to Dudley with my mountain of scraps gathered over years. These would eventually end up as sculpture in Elm Park, Worcester; sculpture at The Mount in Lenox, The Fuller Craft Museum in Brockton, a “Vision of Eight” exhibition in Attleboro, the theater courtyard at the Hopkinton Arts Center and Art Complex in Duxbury, all in Massachusetts, as well as an exhibition with the National Sculpture Society in New York City. Others were recently purchased by MIT, leased for a year to a site in Lakeland, Florida and shipped to a buyer in California.
After I retired from my day job as an IT professional in 2018, over the next few years, I was able to create many large-scale works. During Covid, the metal yard was closed, so my scrap pile was my only resource and abstractions replaced the earlier heroic figures as the arms and legs pile ran out.
But now, a year after I stopped collecting steel, I spend more time curating lawn and garden spaces where the metal once lay about. The decision to stop and shift gears was a result of re-balancing my most important assets: time for my art, time for others and the omni-lubricant of personal finance.
I have plenty of existing works that speak my mind to submit for exhibit or to consign at my gallery, DMD Design, in nearby Thompson, Connecticut. My tax records from 2017 through 2023 list costs for U-Haul
transport, welding supplies, freight and labor to help with crate building and deliveries, as one-third of my retirement income. Though sales, rentals and stipends have been solid, my accountant advised me to revise my business plan. Like Charles Dickens’ character Wilkins Micawber in “David Copperfield” advised, the penny a month plus or minus margin really matters.
When people ask me why I stopped painting and started welding in the first place, imagining I had lost my desire to work in a hot, heavy, sparking risky medium, I explain that framing cost too much and I hated painting backgrounds.
But the creation of large-scale works and my managing, moving them and the cost of source materials, freighting or delivering juried submissions soon blew up the budget. Once retired, this was noticeable. Now my existing inventory, no longer expanding, is in the gardens or inside the house. It is also listed alphabetically on an Excel sheet called: The Distribution Plan.
I am now channeling my lifelong creative identity into sculpture repairs, revivals or removals. And I have posted the following on my mental horizon: Commissions and deeply personal small lightweight works ONLY! from now on!
I share my current decade, at age 75.5, with many artist friends recently entering their 70s or starting their 80s. We all toss about the topic of inventory accumulation and planning for the cliff edge of age and the beyond. My friends are prolific, dedicated, highly respected artists, many with massive existing inventory and a work habit that promises jiffy pop expansion.
Their plans vary widely. A retired commercial real estate interior designer, who paints on a large scale, plans to leave unsold works to a national organization he once headed for them to auction to benefit their activities and members, and they have agreed. He has no reason to slow down or reduce sizes of his works and has sufficient storage options in his Boston Seaport arena. Other artist friends are puzzled and in stasis about their need to keep up their work pace as storage options are minimal. The rising cost and dwindling availability of preferred supplies for my painter friends is also a discussion point.
One painter friend is unfazed. She declared that she lives in the moment and art is her fun, her spinal cord, her existential raison d’etre. The destiny of her ever-growing oeuvre after her exit is of no concern.
She paints and weaves and draws and prints her truth, her dedication to the arts is visceral, her results always transformative soul food, deeply felt visual narratives. Her gift to all who see it. She has no concern whether her work outlives her.
So, we all live somewhere between the post-exit Art Auction donation and dumpster last chapter. I have an inner voice that suggests my daughter will remember me kindly if I find homes for my work in advance of vanishing. Luckily, a local gallery with national clients adopted a serious portion of my inside and outside pieces. But I also have taken a very tough look at works that only enchanted the birds that pooped on them. I have returned them whole to the metal yard where their component parts were purchased.