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. Â It is constructed a little differently from previous versions of this design in that it only has one layer. Â You can see the individual pieces as they are being fitted together.
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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. Â 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. Â Yellow marks the pieces on top, and blue forms the background layers. Â 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. Â 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