Overview

This creature was one of my senior projects while attending Maryland Institue College of Art. It was originally a combination of wood and steel. A week after I graduated in 1993, I took the piece to Lenexa, Kansas for a weekend "Art in the Park". The city purchased the piece and it resides on an island in a large pond. The wood had mostly rotted away after about 15 years and it was time to rebuild. In 2009 I went to Kansas and spent about a week rebuilding the piece with all steel parts. Now it should last a long, long time.

Overview

I had found a old landfill compactor and a trenching machine in Key West, Florida and acquired them for sculpting materials. I sold my car to pay for consumables and the tireless help of a few buddies. The construction happened in six weeks. When we arrived, first we had to build a bridge crane to lift the chicken parts. I made a deal with the local scrap metal guy and got some old crane parts that came from a navy building. Then we began the two weeks time of disassembling the old machines. Someone saw what we were doing and donated a road grader. Four more weeks of steady work on the giant rooster and it was as complete as it was going to be, there was a deadline for the opening reception of Sculpture Key West. The Giant Key West Chicken was a big success and won the Grande Esplanade Award!!
This piece was hard work and took nine hundred hours to complete. It is fitted with a dashboard and seat, hydraulic controls and cylinders. The entire body moves left and right and the beak opens and closes! This big bird now resides in Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts.

Overview

This project was made during the emergence of the 17 year Periodical Cicada. It was commissioned by Merryweather Post Pavillion to hang in a tree for concert goers to see as they enjoyed music.
The cicada has five hinge mechanisms within each leg and will bolt onto anything you could bolt to... It has very a similar anatomical range-of-motion that the real bug has. One difference that I made was to construct a mouth that looks more like a sharks mouth.

Overview

The Chocolate Moose was built for the Jemicy School. Originally the school had a mascot that was made from logs and had rebar antlers. They asked me to interpret the old moose and make a new one. My idea was to combine the more rudimentary design with a vision of real moose anatomy. So I thinned up the body and defined muscle sheets, bones, and combined machine parts with supposed moose perspective.

Overview

The Chomping Head is built from parts of agricultural and construction equipment. It includes parts from 1960â??s Allis Chalmers harvesting equipment, John Deere corn head parts, and Caterpillar tractor parts, just to name a few. The creature chomps, oscillates to the left and right, the teeth move and the eyes go back and forth. The Chomping Head is powered by a one-half horsepower motor and a speed reducer.

Overview

This sculpture consists of seven stones held together by steel. The entire piece rotates, precisely balanced. I began designing this piece thinking of a visual layout of the stones. I then designed the steel around the stones and entered information about the stones into a computer. This allowed precision dimensioning and the ability to calculate the weights of all materials used as related to the rotation. The steel was flame cut by a numerically controlled torch machine. The spinning weight of these materials is about 3000 pounds. Its motion is driven by a motor and gear reduction to achieve a range of speeds. Modified Caterpillar tractor parts are used as support columns to hold the axis of the work. The entire piece is 15 feet tall and is bolted to 8 tons of concrete.

Overview

The CATERAPTASAURUS was created for an outdoor sculpture exhibition at The Evergreen House in Baltimore, Maryland, and also made possible by the Alban Tractor Company who proudly displays the creature at their Pulaski Highway facility.

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Overview

"From Bedrock to Bartertown" is built on the chassis of a 1972 V.W. Beetle. I built it in 1995 with the help of Baltimore's Festival of the Arts: Artscape.
The materials that make up the body are chunks of oak, sycamore, maple, cherry and other wood. These materials are combined with disc plow and combine parts, pieces of a chimney flue and various other scrap metal. It has safety glass and improved suspension. The back end opens up to get access to the motor.
The car is natural and organic, a mix of the past and the future. In the car's name, Bedrock refers to the past and is influenced by the Flintstones. Bartertown is inspired by the Mad Max movies.

The pedal car was made as a human powered vehicle also made possible by Baltimore's Artscape. I constructed it in 1997. It weighed in at about 700 pounds and was powered by a person, pedaling a flywheel. In turn it used the inertia from the spinning weight to engage the drive wheels. It worked pretty well as long as you weren't going up hill..

The last vehicle was my old Ford Ranger. Again a project for Baltimore's Artscape, 2009. I removed everything that was not essential for the fuel injected, computer run vehicle to make tracks. This included all the sheet metal, all the structure above the frame. I then used an old Horn/ New Idea loader from a tractor and some pipes that I salvaged from a job at the American Brewery. I moved the seat to the bed of the truck and also put the steering wheel in the middle. It has a summer dogsled cart for a from grill and some caterpillar tractor parts too. It became a super dangerous field runner that of course was loads of fun.