Last week, we began our exploration of the process Miami sculptor Gary Traczyk used to create a towering stainless steel wall sculpture for a commercial building on South Beach. (If you need a refresher, check out Part I here.)
When we left off, Traczyk had just wrapped up cutting, welding, grinding, sanding and polishing dozens of stainless steel tubes in various sizes.
The next step in creating this striking piece of stainless steel wall art was the tricky task of getting the metal tubes to adhere to each other in a way that was both secure and aesthetically pleasing.
In keeping with the Miami artist’s signature sleek, minimalist style, Traczyk found a simple and elegant approach. Not a particularly expeditious one – but unhurried, methodical work is an essential ingredient in all of Traczyk’s sculptures.
“I just clear my head and enjoy my time in the studio,” the sculptor says of his time-intensive artistic process. “It’s the one place my mind is at peace, like a kind of meditation.”
And so, one by one, he welded hundreds of steel pegs to the back of his polished tubes at carefully mapped intervals.
On other polished stainless steel tubes, he drilled hundreds of impossibly tidy holes clean through.
One after another, he then inserted the welded-on pegs into their corresponding holes and plug welded the protruding studs on the back side of the artwork to anchor them in place.
In this way, he slowly built up the energetic, perfectly imperfect scaffolding of the stainless steel wall sculpture.
The final height of the commissioned wall sculpture was 15 feet.
The completion of this piece marked the Miami artist’s first foray into metal wall art – a departure from his signature freestanding kinetic art works.
Traczyk’s art continues to evolve as the sculptor ardently takes on new creative challenges.
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