A client asked one of my galleries for an artist to create a large metal sailboat sculpture for their wall on the landing between sections of stairs. My gallery reached out to me to see if I would be interested.

Originally the client wanted the boat to only be silver. But in my initial sketch I added color to show her some options and she decided to go with a simple color palette. The surprisingly challenging part of this piece was getting a clean color gradient over very large pieces of metal. It can be very hard to heat the metal evenly when coloring and the larger the surface, especially without any detail grinding to distract from the subtle differences in color, the more challenging. Also getting the rigging lines to be taut and straight was an interesting challenge. I ended up creating some tubes behind the hull to be able to pull it extra tight through them and weld them on the other side. This meant that if they loosened while I finished the rest of the piece I had some leeway left to retighten them.

I also made a smaller version of this piece. Check out my Small Sailboat.

This metal sailboat sculpture is wall hanging, made entirely of stainless steel, colored using only heat patinas, and is safe to be kept outdoors!