Maybe it was the way light ricocheted off the gleaming silver curves that first hooked artist Gary Traczyk on kinetic stainless steel sculpture.
Maybe it was the sleight-of-hand-style appeal of transforming hefty steel into seemingly weightless, dancing forms.
Or maybe it was the challenge of molding a notoriously obstinate metal into the shapes his imagination dictated.
But probably, more than anything else, it was the movement.
You might say Gary Traczyk came into the world with an inborn inertia. His father, a military man, moved the family from South Florida to Italy during Traczyk’s early childhood. Five years later, the family returned to its home in the American tropics, but his impressions of fine art museums across Italy had already set young Traczyk in motion – and in motion he stayed.
He studied art. Martial arts. Business. Paramedics. He graduated college with two degrees only to enroll in the fire academy, which doesn’t require any college. Looking back, he says he didn’t really question any of his moves. It felt right, so he just. Kept. Moving.
And then he met kinetic stainless steel sculpture, and something stuck. Traczyk’s artist mentors watched with quiet interest as the nascent artist revealed an apparently innate ability to tame the jagged, willful metal into smooth, harmonious curves. Without so much as a sketch, save the image in his mind, the sculptor was able to saw, grind, contort, sand and polish raw stainless steel bars into graceful, shining forms that wound around each other like visible music. Supported and pivoted upon one another like lithe acrobats. Engineered through intuition alone to twist, curl, wind – to move – at the touch of a hand.
“There’s nothing else like it,” said Traczyk of his medium. “In normal life, my mind is going a mile a minute. But when I’m in the studio, I don’t think of anything else. It totally consumes me.”
Traczyk found another grounding force – the Miami-Dade County Fire Department – around the same time he began his career as a steel sculptor. He gravitated to firefighting for the same reason he was smitten by kinetic art: Movement.
“There was never a call that was the same as another, never a day the same, I’d never meet the same people,” Traczyk said. “The variety and excitement is what got me into it.”
He’s not the type to aggrandize himself – or even take a compliment easily – but certainly it was the inherent benevolence of the job that drew him in, too. Self-risk is, of course, part and parcel of firefighting, but Traczyk’s generosity follows him when he’s off the clock, too. He’s donated dozens of his pieces, each of which takes months to craft, to causes from organ donation, to Autism awareness to city marathons. When a friend in the department is sick (which happens all too often in the high-risk career) Traczyk is swift to support his or her recovery through the donation of his work for auction or inspiration.
Befitting a man in motion, Traczyk’s work continues to evolve. Recent commissioned projects have deviated from his signature free-standing, moving pieces to wall art and functional art.
“I love it when someone comes to me with a new idea, a new challenge,” Traczyk said on the topic of commissions. “I love bringing my own creativity to their ideas and bringing it all to life.”