Some time, deep in the mid-80s, I got a call from a city politician from Cambridge Ontario. A huge old oak was in the way of some progress. The tree was to be made into a sculpture to honour the community. I must have submitted a drawing. I do remember visiting the maintenance yard where the tree was stored, standing in some awe of the huge trunk.

There have been moments in past decades, recurring moments, much like Lucy's repeated football trick on Charley Brown, where I think " ha, this is IT, I've Made It." When I got the go ahead, this was my thought.

Here is the tree, lying on its side in the yard. Notice my elderly Pioneer chainsaw near the top.

I think I might have been a few weeks running that chainsaw fairly constantly. Every few days I'd get the city employees to come with a loader to roll the tree over. 

I designed a base that would allow maximum airflow around the base of the scuplture. Wood will stand a long time as long as there is no lasting damp area.

When I figured I was done, they brought a big flatbed truck and crane. This is the morning when they dropped the scuplture in place.

I spent some hours tweaking detail with a large carving tool.

A mobile sandblasting service came in to make the surface look as if it had been there for a long time.

I've always loved Henry Moore, having spent many hours in the gallery devoted to his large plaster maquettes. It was cool to see one of his reclining figures in elm in the gallery in Chicago. So, perhaps this was my Henry Moore. I did understand that my work was 30 years behind the times, but, still, this piece seemed important.

This  was installed in a field near a mall. It was visible for some distance. As I remember, it got a small mention in the local weekly paper. That was it. That big moment. Lucy pulled the football again.

Most of 30 years later, this piece still stands:

Behrends Bronze in Edmonton is a great company that produces mostly custom signage, much of it in metal, some of it cast in bronze and aluminum. I did sculptural work for them for a couple of decades. I never met the owners or management in person, but they were always great to deal with. 

Still, here's a job that landed in my 'hall of shame' folder.

It was to look like this, about 2M, 6 feet high, in relief. The name 'Evanston' came along as the name of the job. Until today, I had no idea what this was for.

I was feeling pretty confident. I cut out the letters, a 3D trick involving layering thin plywood over thicker ply, joining the pieces with little brads. I would cut out and sand the shape of the letter outline to some accuracy. Then I'd separate the two parts, cutting the thicker ply to make a thin wall that made a hollow letter, just right for casting. Most metal casting is done as thin as possible to save metal, reduce weight, and made the process easier.

I drew the outline of the wheat onto a big board on the floor, opened a big bag of potter's clay, and got to work. I modelled this in record time, patting myself on the back for being so darned clever: I'd made a press mould for the wheat heads, so that doing the entire array was a matter of pushing the soft clay into the mould, banging it out, and pushing it into place. Man, I felt like some kind of professional.

So I covered the whole thing in plaster. Then I added more. There's nothing more frustrating than having a mould break, as the master is usually done at that point.

I added more plaster to be sure, then tied in long steel pipes for more strength. I was being professional, careful.

Next day I tried to lift this. I had to roll it over, right? Huh. It must have weighed 350 pounds. I had to buy a 'come-along'' a winch thing for stretching fencing, fasten it to the ceiling, and slowly winch this mould over. This took me all day. 

I don't remember how long the smoothing part took. Awhile. There is this local saying: "I'll be home soon, honey" that is a bit of a joke.

And, of course, this mould had to be filled with a reasonably even 3/8" of epoxy-fibreglass. Sigh, that's a lot of goo to mix and smooth in. A lot of fairing afterwards. I'm not going to look at my old records to see what I got paid for this. I try to avoid pain and embarrassment. 

And then, just tonight, I stumble on this photo:

Huh. This turned out pretty well! Maybe money isn't everything. In hindsight. When it turns out we didn't starve after all. When it turns out we had good food, good friends, a sweet place to live and interesting work.

I'd been in business 33 years when I did this job. Just how long does it take to find wisdom? Or, yikes, mastery?

I heard about a public art competition in the local press, Grand River Hospital was building a new wing,The Balsillie Family Building, an oncology centre. There was budget for a sculpture for the entry.

I had a great assistant, Scott Watterworth, a young man, just 20, who was born with tools in his hands. He had extensive experience in working with ceramics. He even had his own studio and kiln. It seemed to make sense to propose a ceramic sculpture. Perhaps I associate hospitals with echoing tiled surfaces? At any rate, without any experience in the medium, I made my pitch. Here's the digital maquette that I submitted:

I created this drawing in Rhino v3, adding a decal to simulate the colour. I may have added a drawing, as I know that the surfaces and colours were to depict a figure rising up through the world, through nature, and perhaps on to some higher place. It was to be a symbol of hope. I wanted the opening, the rising figure, to rise out of an earthy place that featured a bit of a waterfall.

 We got the job. Scott and I were quite excited. Both of us had dreamed of some recognition as artists, as guys that did big work visible against the skyline. It was easy to see this as a first step. I'll talk more about my efforts in this direction another day. This day was a day of action. There was a deadline.

After drawing up a full size outline, Scott and I headed for his parents' home, into the basement. Starting with a big sheet of rolled clay, we transferred the design onto the wet clay and cut out the tiles.

I could not believe how much that clay shrank! Was it more than 10%?  I guess we proceeded in the correct way: We did the ceramics first, all the way to firing. With all that shrink, there was no point to thinking about the base and structure until this was done.

We built a really solid plywood base, leaving room to add weights to keep the piece vertical, no matter what. I was plagued by images of wild kids swinging from the work, being crushed by a lovely metaphor, but literally.

The vertical support was double 3/4" ply. We glued the tiles down, covering all the plywood. The last thing was the covering of the edges and the base. For some inconceivable reason, I chose to warp Honduras Mahogany strips over the curvy edges and cover the base in more mahogany, including heavily radiused corners. Sigh. This took endless hours. I didn't want any fasteners showing.

The work did get shipped. It looked great.

I wound up calling it "Ad Lux Borealis" (Toward a Northern Light), a sort of meditation on that rising sense, the leaving of earth. The hospital did a great sign in sand-blasted glass featuring the title and both our names.

Scott Watterworth died at the age of 29. He had spent some years as a freelance artist, but this piece, according to his mother, was his favourite. The maquette was on display at the funeral. When I think of this work, I do think of Scott, his boundless, youthful energy, his unfettered creative drive.

I have played with ceramics in recent years, and would love to do more. Working in colour is a lovely change. And, somehow, I'd like to think that Scott lives on in that perfect relationship between clay and fire.

I have been making master tooling for historic cast iron structures for many decades.  Trystan Products of Ayr, Ontario has been a faithful customer since the early '80s. We have created benches, bollards, giant sculptures and lobsters in cast metals. Generally, we start with a photo of an historic structure, or a small drawing and proceed to develop a product.

A typical project was the restoration of an historic cast iron fence on Sherbourne St. in Toronto. We started with this photo from the front of Selby House, originally built by the Gooderham Distillery family:

This poor photo was all that was left of the original fence. The old mansion had been designated an historic property, so money was available to redo the fence from scratch. I made up a sample pattern full size in wood and met with a rather mixed group of concerned men. There was the provincial historical consultant, a federal guy, the fencing contractor, my customer, and perhaps one other mystery man. Everyone was gathered around the little photo and my sample, trying to make sure that his area of expertise was brought forward. The fencing contractor was rather impatient, wanting to get on with the job. The consultant's job seemed to be to hesitate for some length of time to indicate that he was thinking seriously. 

I'm not sure if there ever were wheels turning in that head. In the end, everyone said "ok" and I could relax. It was going to be hard to charge extra for random changes.

I used the sample to produce tooling for use in the foundry. This is where my involvement normally ends. I ship out a grey shape attached in various ways to a plywood sheet, and I'm done. If I've messed up, I'll run to the foundry and tweak the job to make it work. 

For this reason, I seldom see the final product, unless I travel some distance with a camera.  Here's what's visible on Google Street view:

It's been tough, cobbling together my self-taught skills to call myself any kind of an expert. Still, in the presence of 'suits', the only way to do business  is to act as if I'm an equal, speaking with authority on topics often well beyond my expertise. It's a great way to learn all kinds of things in a real hurry. 

Hmm, this might have to be rebranded as a name-dropper's blog. Sorry.

The town of Richmond Hill, Ontario built a new park, themed to Margaret Atwood's book Alias Grace. 

They wanted to include a series of 6" bronze tiles, to be set into stone features. I submitted 12 sketches to represent various items mentioned in the book. 

So, my father used to work for Margaret Atwood's father. I grew up like Ms Atwood. My dad was an entomologist too, though not an academic. He as a farm boy with a PhD. For my first 5 summers we travelled to join my dad in south-central British Columbia where he monitored his test plots, part of his job researching biological control. We lived in old log cabins, and played in junkyards, perfect for little kids.

My dad didn't especially care for Dr. Atwood's taste in cars. My dad was a big Detroit guy, and Atwood was a Volvo man. I suspect this coloured my dad's whole view of his short career at University of Toronto in the middle '60s. Biology was his work, cars his thoracic exoskeleton. 

Still, my Mom was proud of this tenuous connection to Margaret, inspiring me to read everything Atwood for some years. I was a great fan of her early, more biographical work, losing interest when she ventured into the speculative fiction genre, not my thing. 

When this bronze tile project came along, I was happy to get involved, happy well beyond just getting another project. Margaret was practically family, according to my Mom.

Some of the subjects were a bit dodgy, it seemed.  Peony? Potatoes? Beets? Well, I thought the beets came off pretty well. Not the potatoes. Modelled  the potatoes, cast, finished, shipped, while singing a happy tune for distraction.

Not going to show the potatoes. Sorry.

I did model these in clay, with some 'looseness', a rare event, as most of my customers are looking for some precision in their work. These got cast and polished and shipped. Like most projects, I'm done at that point. it's rare to see the final work installed, even if it's as close as Richmond Hill. I guess I'm just on to the next thing.

There are lots of great bronze tiles out there. For a blurry moment I considered designing a 'product'. But I have a long and semi-lustrous career of producing products that beg to be ignored. There seems to be lots of custom work out there, and it's fun to do.

I sort of dreamed for some years of approaching Margaret Atwood at a writers festival and introducing myself, you know, as distantly related. As I get older, more mature, even, that distance fades far into the haze.

 I can just see Ms. Atwood giving me that freezing fish eye, raising an eyebrow and turning away, leaving my smile to melt like a smear of chocolate on a sunny wall. No thanks. I can get people who really love me to do that for free.

Yes, I worked in Hollywood, with Douglas Fairbanks Sr and Jr, but not until they had gone to the big sound stage in the sky.

Hollywood Memorial Cemetery housed the remains of many of Hollywood's elite in the 30s and 40s. By 1994, however, the place had fallen into great decline, made much worse by an earthquake that year. A family from St. Louis, MO bought the cemetery and set about to restore it. They renamed it Hollywood Forever Cemetery. 

A year after the death of Douglas Fairbanks Jr.'s death in 2000, I was hired to carve his portrait, one that was to match his father's portrait, carved by this sculptor. 

The idea, or Mr. Fairbanks Jr.'s widow's idea, was to remove Fairbanks Sr's portrait from the central panel, add marble panels on the left and right, and put up a matching wreath and bas relief profiles of father and son. 

I was flown to LA, given a rather sportif red coupe,  and put up in a pleasant hotel about a block from all those bronzes in the sidewalk. I felt a bit grand, perhaps, and a bit far from my small town in frozen Ontario. This was early March. I could have been skiing instead of trying to look famous in Hollywood.

At the memorial site workmen were busy prying off the wreath, using wedges to bust the anchors loose from the marble. They had wedges in place to pop the portrait off, too, but one of us stopped that operation.  You can see the remains of the wedges behind the portrait, and the outline where the wreath was.

I used a bunch of masking tape and a stick to establish thicknesses and measurements, taking photos from many angles. I was supposed to match the original bas relief.

I took the wreath into a little room in a kind of tower on the property to make a copy mould. I'd bought materials online from a California store and had them shipped to the cemetery. The mould was made in pieces and sent via courier to my studio back home.

I was nicely treated by the owner, but I suspect he was surprised to find such a famous sculptor with such a shiny car to be so boring. It wasn't me who oversold me, honest.

The wreath in the tower:

So I had a free day to drive around, hiking the 
Will Rogers State Park (pretty cool. I called my Mom on my mobile) and driving up past Malibu and on up the coast. It was the ocean, the dry hills and the many friendly Mexican workers gathered at the exits to Home Depot that I'll take away from Hollywood.

And... no fanfare, please. I did the portrait and the wreath. It got cast and shipped. We heard, eventually that the widow either did not like it, or that the cost of changing the marble elements of the memorial was going to exceed the California debt. At any rate, after all these years, I have finally found out that they put the wreath back and simply carved Jr's name below his father's. Er, and put Jr. with his dad. At bit awkward, that thought. Bet they were never that close in life.

Another almost-job, except that I got the Hollywood tour, met a few characters and got to feel famous-y for a bit. Oh, and I got paid. Whew, that's great praise in small town Ontario.

By 2002, I had done a number of jobs for the Parks Department of New York City. I had worked with the Landscape Architect there on a number of jobs. I had an in. Still, I was stunned when he approached me for ideas for a 911 memorial.

This is huge, yes? I had no details at all, just that he wanted a large, 10 to 12 foot diameter stainless steel ball. Of course, my imagination drew me to the main site, with all the attendant sorrow and glamour. I dropped everything. Working feverishly with Photoshop and Rhino 3D, I came up with this:

I started calling fabricators all over the place, looking for someone that could work this big in stainless. Sourcing a contractor to take this on was a challenge, especially then in the earlier days of the internet. I probably stayed in that feverish place until I got more information, some weeks later.

It turned out that this memorial idea was for Staten Island. The customer wanted all 250+ citizens killed that day engraved on the surface of a stainless ball. Yikes. More hours on the phone. The job sounded more specific, more possible.

I found a company in Tomahawk, Wisconsin that could do the job. As I was driving with my son, Graeme Smith to Winnipeg for his first posting with the Globe and Mail, I arranged to drop in. The plant at Northland Stainless was unbelievable. They could make this huge sphere easily in their plant. They even had an automatic polishing mandrel in a room the size of a hangar, that could add a high polish. And their price was amazing. Around $60,000, as I remember.

Of course, somebody in New  York had a better idea, so nothing happened, except that I grew older and could fake 'wise' more easily. But what else could ever have gotten me to Tomahawk, WI?

So, over some decades, there have to be as many jobs that got away as jobs that I did. Perhaps 2 lost to one done? I don't know.

This project, a bronze sculpture commemorating Luna the Whale in Nootka Sound for the Mowachat/Muchalaht First Nation, was proposed by a west coast artist, Christopher Walker. Chris had been working with Chief Mike Maquinna on another project. 


I was quite excited by this idea, but wanted to include the work of local artists, preferring to be more of a facilitator than anything. Chris suggested that we meet Chief Maquinna in Gold River on Vancouver Island. I knew that there were traditional carvers nearby and worked to create a proposal to present that might include their work.

It's always hard to present ideas. Public art exists in its own environment, with luck, belonging to the space, rather than competing with it. I had only a notion of what the space might look like, but I did know that it was a small island in Nootka Sound. Taking all kinds of liberties, I came up with this video, created with Photoshop and Rhino 3D to present the idea. I wanted to show some bronze surfaces deeply incised with the work of local carvers, surfaces that resolve into a brief glimpse of a breaching Orca.

My wife and I flew to Comox, BC and drove to Gold River. We met with Chris and Chief Maquinna, who chartered a boat to take us out to his traditional summer hunting grounds at Yuquot on Nootka Island. It was a luminous day. It's hard to conjure walking on a pebble beach, the sea calm, the air still and warm, on the last day of January. Here's a clip for atmosphere. Chief Maquinna is showing us where he grew up, some fallen totem poles, and the abandoned church that has become a museum for native artifacts.

The project did not proceed, but it was hard to conjure a single reason why we shouldn't have made that trip. We spent a few wonderful days in the Nootka area, then drove to Mt. Washington for a few sunny days of skiing. Work is not always about money, right?

In 1980, after a few year of carving wood, wanting to be some extension of Henry Moore, and mostly starving, I realized that I lived in a foundry town. I had a jeweller friend who showed me how easy it was to get work cast.

Being a sculptor in wood meant spending hours with wood enthusiasts explaining my process, my tools, and spending no time at all talking about art. That's just how the medium affects people: it's like those party people that dominate the conversation with their endless chatter about their grain and smell. I had been making figures, little families using interlocking forms of wood, spending a few minutes thinking and drawing, and a zillion hours carving, sanding and polishing.

The idea of getting work cast in bronze was instantly appealing, especially as I could get it cast locally and very cheaply in the industrial sand foundries. My first effort was a seated figure, carved first in wood, cast, then high-polished on external surfaces. The one copy I had made was bought by the director of the Goethe Istitut in Toronto.

My second effort was built directly in fibreglass, as I remember:

This piece "Two Sisters", is 36 cm high. I always liked interlocking forms. I have stacks of photos of stone forms taken from the islands off the mouth of the French River in Georgian Bay, my kayaking home. These two forms reflect that sense of connection I have to both people and stone, if that makes any sense at all.

I think the stone base came from the stream bed in Short HIlls Park near St. Catharines, ON. It took a lot of effort to match these castings and get them mounted on the stone base. Still, I think I sold a few copies of this. We still have this version in our livingroom, where it sits both quietly and passionately by the piano.

It's a good thing I enjoy variety. I just got an order for a few hundred pewter medals, 40mm across, with a couple of medals plated in silver. The same job involves making a 35cm bas relief of the soldier and dog for a bronze plaque.

I will be working with a magnifying glass next week, instead of a hoist and pneumatic tools.

Here's the artwork for the medals. It's easy to get most of the detail by sending black and white art to Sterling Marking in London, ON. They will send back a rubber engraving with black detail precisely raised from the white background. I'll work with my plastics to create the master pattern. The man and dog will have to be carved separately, hence the magnifying glass.  The man's head will be about 4mm high. Not much room for expression there.

Still, I will be casting these into silicone rubber, so I'll pick up all the detail that I can carve. Here's an older medal I made:

I will update this project as I move forward. Meantime, there's big stuff to get out of the studio and off to the painter. And there's cleanup, sigh. That's just not my forté.