Playing With Fire: Embrace your evolution as a welder and skilled tradesperson

Actor Keanu Reeves is the proud owner of my 200th motorcycle sculpture.

Embrace your evolution. Welding opens doors–you just need to walk through the right one!

One of the many doors I’ve crashed through is in the world of art. It was a typical story for me: I picked up welding as part of my millwright training and I became obsessed with it. I spent all of my downtime laying beads and practicing joints. Then I started welding nuts and bolts and scrap metal together. The door cracked open some more.

Then a co-worker named Steve, who was joining a local bike gan ... er ... club at the time, told me I should try crafting a motorcycle sculpture. I nudged the door even more. I made the first bike sculpture for my dad. I was now through the looking glass.

Becoming better with each sculpture became my main goal. The work took off when I bought my first welding machine for my home shop, a Miller Dynasty 200 DX. It was 84-hour weeks at Chrysler for a long time, then 40-plus hours in my shop. From 2009 to 2010, I built at least one bike a week for an entire year to raise money for a local women's shelter and the animal rescue where we adopted Woodson (aka the Brown Dog). Of the 201 motorcycle sculptures built (including the 200th sculpture that caught the attention of actor Keanu Reeves) since then, I crafted nearly 80 in that span.

Yet I still fought the “artist” label. I was a weldor, damnit. A millwright. A skilled tradesman. Then at some point, I had to choose: Take art seriously (the designs, the sculptures, all of it) or step away.

So I began taking art seriously. I tried to slow myself down, not look at the time, and allow a piece to sit a night before finishing it. Instead of dive bombing an automotive sculpture in 15 hours, I would spend a few days on it. Spin it around in my head. Cut it in half if I wasn’t happy with it. Turn down commissions that didn’t excite me.

Through 2012 there were some speed bumps, but mostly I stayed busy with my new job at General Dynamics Land Systems and growing my list of clients on the art side. Then the pain in my arms, combined with the hours I worked, finally caught up with me. From the middle of 2013 through the middle of 2015, I was down for all but a few months undergoing a series of four arm/wrist surgeries due to a weird bone defect I had since birth that left my ECU tendon exposed, causing the thing to tear eventually. I had just started thinking about working for myself full time, but that wouldn't be feasible with ongoing medical costs.

Just because you find a path or walk through a door doesn’t mean life is smooth sailing from then on. There will be obstacles to overcome and more decisions to make. The work doesn’t end there–it’s just beginning.

We moved to Detroit within a year of returning from my medical leave, and I no longer had shop space. I set up in a local work incubator, only to have everything stolen that year on Thanksgiving night. After that huge loss, a blown knee, and having two cars stolen within a month of each other, I kind of checked out for 2017, to the point where I even stopped writing.

I needed a reset and traveled to Iraq to weld on battle-damaged Abrams tanks for the summer. From 2018 on, I rebuilt my shop and started creating again. Still, another year of work travel, the chaos of life, not to mention the psychological battle of feeling lazy when I physically can’t work 120 hours a week anymore, makes me feel like I’m trying to run in wet cement. But some of my best work came during and after those hardships.

In January, after finishing a motorcycle sculpture for the first time in four years, I began to ponder. I’m proud to be a welder. And I’m proud to be called an artist. Not a metal artist or welding artist, but an artist.

If you take the trade seriously and do good work, doors will open. The rest is up to you.

Here are a few pictures of my work over the last few years. I hope you’ll feel inspired and motivated.