Miscellaneous Projects
My Efforts have always been somewhat scattered! Here are some miscellaneous projects.
The octahedral fish tank was the culmination of many years of effort. At the time, I lacked the technical knowledge and the means to see the project through, but I imagined this becoming an aquarium chandelier.
 Here is a tube bending jig (integrated into a welding table that I made). This was made to help with my Dolphin Fountain project. |  Here are a positioning jig and welding table that I made to help with my Dolphin Fountain project. |  I made these hubs to be used with miniature tubing in the creation of octet (octahedron and tetrahedron) masts and spaceframes |
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 Here is an octet mast created with the hubs shown in the previous photo. |  This is an octahedral terrarium/aquarium prototype. I spent a good amount of effort in making fish tanks, but I did not, at the time, have the technical means to see the project through properly.
My intent was to create a fish-tank chandelier in this form. |  If you've ever seen an architectural model, the trees usually begin as flat metal castings like these. The branches get bent into a 3d shape, and then flecks of green foam are glued on to make the foliage.
I made this collection of trees for a company that was making a model of an arboretum (or something similar). Like a lot of beginning artists, I had trouble saying no, so the number of species got a bit out of hand.
The rubber disc in the background is one of the production molds. |
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 Here is a closeup of the architectural model trees in the previous image. I used a soldering iron to melt together little pieces of wax wire. |  Here is a little cardboard garage that I made. |  Here are a few other cardboard buildings I made. |
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 This goldfish, which i modeled in plasticine, was created for a painter to use as a visual reference |  This goldfish, which i modeled in plasticine, was created for a painter to use as a visual reference |  Here is a sign that I made in 1/2" steel rod for a local restaurant.
The sign is about 4' wide, and I did all of the bending cold. Unfortunately I did not design the awesome logo, I merely bent and welded the steel. |
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 Here is the text portion of the sign in the previous photo.
From this project I learned that I want to avoid, at all costs, the task of making small, blind-ended threaded holes in stainless steel! |  Here is the sign in action. I wish I had taken photos of the installation process, but such things were far from my mind at the time. I was very fortunate to have good help at each stage! |  One of first bits of formal art education were continuing-education figure sculpting classes. This piece came out really good for an early effort, but unfortunately I didn't photograph it before I used it as a soldering jig.
At the time , I thought I would be doing much more such work than I ended up doing, and so I treated this sculpture somewhat carelessly! |
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 |  This is a shot of my work on display at my show at the Piano Gallery in Boston back in 2008. |  This is a shot of my work on display at my show at the Piano Gallery in Boston back in 2008. |
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 This is a shot of my work on display at my show at the Piano Gallery in Boston back in 2008. |  Here is a guitar fretboard with custom inlay that I made for a guitar that was being built for one of my sisters. Little pieces of mother of pearl are really difficult to machine! |  I made several attempts to cut out the abalone (mother-of-pearl) pieces for the guitar fretboard inlay in the previous image.
Below is a piece resulting from an attempt with a laser-cutter, which yielded unusable results.
Above is a piece resulting from the method which was successful (learned from an online forum): Glue the abalone to a board with water-soluble glue, and then after cutting the pieces, soak them in water until they float free! |
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 Here is a lightbox that I made after a friend gave me some large pieces of curved acrylic. |  This is one of several tubular hand sculptures that I made with George Poulos. We eventually showed these at the Art Vigor Gallery in East Boston. |  This is the opening of the show which featured the tube sculptures that George and I created. |
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 I sell a lot of items with necklace cords. Here are some examples of metal fittings I created for this purpose.
In my hubris, I thought I could create the perfect necklace... Click the link below to see the full story. |  This is a portrait sculpture that I made to go over the front door of a friend's house. It is about life-sized
I sculpted the original in plasticine, and someone else molded it and made resin castings. The copy that went over the door (not this copy) was given a faux-stone finish and then skillfully integrated into the existing stonework. |  When I began making tube sculptures, I lived in an apartment that was unsuitable for welding and brazing.
The soft-solder that I was limited to required some sort of fitting to be used, and so I created these fittings to expand on the limited, commercially available options.
I started by turning one piece on a borrowed mini-lathe, and then assembling duplicates of this piece into the shapes seen here.
This unspectacular assemblage represents several months of effort! |
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 Here is a closeup shot of the tube-fittings in the previous photo. These are lost-wax castings from which the sprues have not yet been cleaned.
The molds were challenging to make, and looked better than the fittings, but I could not locate them for the photo-shoot. |
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