Practical Welding Today: Artist's Gallery

Sculptor Uses GTAW
to produce artwork
- one drop at a time

Inspiration begets emotional creations

by Dianna Dearen

When the 37-year-old artist Craig Frederick conceptualized his latest piece, he wanted to fabricate a fine line through space to represent the generations of his family who had lived and worked in his hometown of New Britain, Connecticut.

Home, which will be unveiled there soon, is a flowing, 3-D, 75-foot-long fabricated stainless steel line that curls in different directions.

The piece will have a permanent residence at the five-corner intersection of Arch Street in the town. Ever since settling in New Britain from Europe some five generations ago, at least one member of Frederick's family (the Fredericks, Lynchs and Chases) lived or worked on Arch Street, so the piece has a special place in Frederick's heart.

The flowing line of "Home" also easily could represent the artist's involvement in how he uses metal to tell a story, such as a couple's ability to respect each person's differing beliefs or a depressed individual's most trying and painful periods.

In more than a decade of working with metal, Frederick's artistic media have included casting, manual fabrica- tion and welding, and the extremely laborious process of creating multidimensional webbed sculptures one drop of filler metal at a time. He constructs pieces for both indoor and outdoor collections.

Process Choices

Frederick's first experiences with metal came in the late '80's while bronze casting his early wood carvings. Drawn to the structural integrity of metal, he explored the artistic possibilities that metal fabrication and welding offered. Work on his first fabricated sculptures started in 1990. Frederick has a large collection of hand tools that he uses to make his sheet metal fabricated pieces, which often are shiny, reflective, abstract bronze or stainless steel figures.

"Metal, when hammered and stretched, behaves the way all the forms of nature that I study behave - whether it's the wing of a bird, or a wave, or the galaxy," he said. "It has to do with the cooperation and confliction of forces on one another."

Because of his advanced skill in fabrication, welding, and finishing, Frederick can create abstract works with graceful lines and little evidence of the labor - sometimes as many as 800 hours for a single piece - that went into them. His sculpture "Beacon" appeared to be cast in the same manner as his earlier "Glimmer" piece, when it was in fact fabricated and joined from nine different pieces of metal.

Frederick began exploring how his welding machine could become more like a paintbrush in his process - more a tool of expression than just construction.

"The thing that was bothering me, at this point in fabrication, was that I was using my TIG welder a tremendous amount and having to really care about the quality of my welds that ultimately I would grind down, file, sand, and polish to the point where there was absolutely no evidence of fabrication," he said.

Frederick began experimenting with a new artistic process using his gas tungsten arc welding (GTAW) machine, or TIG welder. With no substrate, he creates webbed sculptures by depositing individual drops of filler metal. The edges of these sculptures are stainless steel rod, which he uses to define the parameters of the forms, "but they almost disappear when you look at the whole thing," he said.

The structures of these pieces, in a way, allow the viewer to see inside his other smooth sheet metal fabricated pieces.

Frederick uses both the GTAW webbing process and general sheet fabrication for his artwork. He also continues to work with bronze casting, as well as stone, for his sculpting.

As he does with much of his artwork, Frederick bases the designs of his webbed pieces on things in nature - not surprising considering his strong background in natural sciences. Frederick studied geology and biology as an undergraduate.

"I'm constantly looking at things all around me in nature for inspiration," he said. "The pattern in which strands connect to one another in these (webbed) pieces became very similar to things you see in nature, the way certain insects build their homes, the interior of a bird's bone."

Saving Grace

Though the actual physical structures of many of his pieces suggest elements of nature, Frederick often is inspired, as he was for "Home," to use real-life human experiences and relationships as the themes for his artwork. "The Poets' Fodder" represents the give and take that exists in even the best of human relationships, according to Frederick.

The idea for this sculpture, which Frederick constructed with the webbed filler metal technique, came from the story of poet Donald Hall, who lost his wife, poet Jane Kenyon, to cancer. The artistry of both individuals and the reciprocity of their relationship inspired Frederick to create "The Poets' Fodder," which is 53 by 32 by 9 inches and constructed of stainless steel rod using mild steel weld on a concrete base.

Another piece,"Equal Faith," also inspired by a married couple, Frederick's close friend Robert Austrian and his wife, Jeannie. The 18.5 by 10 by 7 inch hammered and welded bronze sculpture rests on black marble and a bronze base. "Equal Faith" represents a couple's ability to share and respect each other's spiritual beliefs, according to Frederick, who presented it to the couple as a wedding present.

"Sole Despair," another fabricated bronze piece, represents Frederick's own experience with chronic depression. Because the piece was constructed while he was in the middle of one of his worst bouts with the illness, Frederick feels a sentimental attachment to it that is stronger than that to most of his other pieces.

Developing his artistic skills allowed Frederick to understand the beauty and ugliness of human existence, according to the artist. "I consider myself fortunate to have been through this and to have survived," he later wrote of the experience. "This sculpture embodies all I know of this existence, beauty and horror alike."

For "Sole Despair," which grows straight up like a flame from its concrete base, Frederick hammered and welded bronze and set a small black Onyx sphere at the top of the piece. Dedicated to his mentor, Maurice Lowe, it still sits in Frederick's studio in Plainville, Connecticut, as a reminder of that trying period in his life.

Close to Home

Frederick can not create a piece without being inspired by something. Even when commissioned to create a piece for a corporation or private collector, Frederick still has to find some meaning, however abstract it may be, before he will agree to the project.

"If somebody loves my work and they're interested in a piece of mine, they can certainly let me know where they are thinking of putting it. I'll get to know them and that place," he said. "I can design a piece that is along the thread of how I'm working but that I think is site- specific and really geared toward that person and that place."

Winning the commission to create "Home" was not easy, despite Frederick's connections to his hometown, according to the artist. If anything, it worked against him, he said. Frederick eventually was selected from an anonymous pool of more than 200 artists, 12 of whom were encouraged to submit proposals.

Tallix, Inc. is providing the welding services for "Home," for which Frederick designed and created the model. Frederick plans to perform the finishing on the piece, including the manual grinding of approximately 300 feet of stainless steel welds. Because he will use a dual-action sander, there will be no swirl marks or discernible patterns on the shiny, reflective finish," he said.

"Home," which Frederick does not want photographed before its unveiling, will be 12 feet tall, 18 feet long, and 16 feet wide. The form itself is only about 13 inches square at its thickest point.

"Its line gracefully changes in size and orientation around a centerline. So the four sides actually turn and twist as it goes through space," Frederick said.

Though it will appear to be just sitting on the ground, it actually will be a well-grounded piece with a pinning system that connects to subterranean footings in the ground. Frederick anticipates installation of the sculpture in late September.

After living all over the U.S. while studying and teaching art, Frederick has settled back in his hometown with his wife, Laura, and two pet birds and dog. He maintains a studio and gallery in Plainville. While he doesn't work on Arch Street, his contribution to the town will be unveiled there October 5.

And it certainly will not be the last graceful piece that he fabricates. While he says sculpting has not made him a wealthy man, there continue to be many elements of nature that inspire him to create his metal art. Frederick says he is satisfied that he has sold eight major pieces of artwork in his lifetime.

Van Gogh, after all, sold only one.

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Reprinted with permission from the September/October 2000 issue of Practical Welding Today®, copyright 2000 by The Croydon Group, Ltd., Rockford, Illinois, www.thefabricator.com

Hammered &
Fabricated