For the past few months I’ve been knee deep in large-scale projects, which is quite an amazing thing.  I’ve always enjoyed working on wall-sized commissions, but those sorts of opportunities don’t present themselves every day.  (And if they did, I’m not sure where I’d put them.)  Up until recently I’ve averaged about 2-3 very large pieces per year, which, considering a piece might take six months to create, provided a comfortable balance between long and short-term work.

 

This year was different!  When one commission after another measured in feet and not inches, including two Very Large Pieces with Very Short Deadlines, I realized there was only thing to do.  I shut down my online shop and went deep into focus.  As of today I’ve shipped four, and have three sections of the largest one ready to be crated and delivered.  I thought I’d take a moment to share some in-progress pics with you.

 

The photo above is one of two pieces for the new Cuyahoga County Administration building.  It is constructed a little differently from previous versions of this design in that it only has one layer.  You can see the individual pieces as they are being fitted together.

   

 

The piece above is a larger variation of Split Sun, below.  This along with a companion recently traveled to its new home in Michigan.  I was not able to get a better photo of the finished piece, but liked this in-progress image showing the layering of the hills.  The 15×25″ copper & red version below is available in my shop:

The largest and most challenging piece has been a layered map of Cuyahoga County, to be installed at the entrance of the Map Room in the new County Administration Building.  It is very different than any of the maps I’ve previously made in that the city outlines are created by overlapping and layering sheets of metal.

 

The image above left is a detail of the northwest corner (tilted), and the right shows my working sketch delineating the layers.  Yellow marks the pieces on top, and blue forms the background layers.  When two pieces near each other have the same color, they often are cut from the same piece of metal, connected under an adjoining city — even if they are miles apart in real life.  I hope to take a photo of the full piece once it is installed ~ until then here is about 2/3rds of the finished work, with the Cuyahoga River running right up the center:

 

And with that last puzzle I shall leave you, squinting, until next time :)

Take care, and have a great week!

Chris