First Art Job (part one- Introduction)

Okay so my first art job came after college and after working at two retail jobs and at a mortgage company. And of course working at a liquor store as my second job, which by the way was one of the best jobs ever. The pay sucked, but having the customer not be right and having power of that was AWESOME. Hell, it was when i lived in Boston. College town where the liquor stores could get into some serious trouble if they did serve to minors, so we were very very very strict with the sales.

But i digress.......... The first real art job i got was working for an art foundry that is unfortunately no longer there. It merged with another foundry, but not the same. I worked at Tallix art foundry. We were the largest art foundry in the country at one point. We had done many extremely famous pieces of art through there. Jeff Koons did his blow up bunny piece there (which there are great stories about, but i do love that piece), did the Leonardo Da Vinci horse there, many Joel Shapiro's, Claes Oldenberg, my favorite Mihail Chemiakin.

The NYT wrote:

The place where these works were hiding is Tallix, a 34-year-old fine-arts foundry whose buildings and yards, sprawling over five acres, have been used over the years by dozens of artists, from the completely unknown to the hugely famous -- Roy Lichtenstein, Willem de Kooning, Jeff Koons, Nancy Graves and Claes Oldenburg -- to produce works ranging from miniature to monumental.

As the sales pitch for Tallix stresses, the foundry, one of the largest in the country, is a business and does not discriminate on the basis of either artistic merit or size. It can make pieces up to 46 feet high indoors, and virtually any size outdoors.

That was actually one of the amazing things about Tallix. Most of the employees were lifers. They had worked there forever. And most weren't artists at all. They were the locals in the area that learned their job. There were a good chunk that had been there over twenty years. TWENTY YEARS! To me that is amazing in itself. I haven't stayed anywhere for that long. Okay, granted i am only 33 and for me to be anywhere for twenty years, i would have not left my home town and have been a loser. But it also made for interesting stories. I guess i will seperate them out by the departments i worked. Make this a series.

Now, for those who may not know the process of making a bronze or metal sculpture by pouring metal, let me share........

Step One- start with the positive model- something that is originally sculpted by the artist.

Step Two- make a negative mold of the original artwork

Step Three- pour wax in the negative and make a positive version of the art in wax

Step Four- Rework the wax and put together all the different parts of the wax to create the entire sculpture as a whole piece. Clean up the wax and make it look identical to the original sculpture

Step Five- Cut the wax up in pieces and gate the sculpture (meaning devise a system for the metal to flow through and pour evenly to create the sculpture)

Step Six- dip the wax in a ceramic shell to cover it completely and take on all the details of the original sculpture

Step Seven- place the ceramic shell into an oven and burn out the wax so a negative cavity is left and the shell is hard

Step Eight- Pour molten metal in the ceramic shell to create a positive of the sculpture

Step Nine- break off the ceramic shell to reveal the metal sculpture and sandblast it to clean off the debris

Step Ten- place the sculpture back together by welding together the seams and fixing mis-pours and patches. grind back welds and recreate texture and detail in the metal. Sometimes even high polish the sculpture.

Step Eleven- Patina finished sculpture to desired color by using chemicals and torches. Wax sculpture and send off to be installed

Pretty fucking cool. I started in the rework department. i had to fix the waxes that came down. This was the only place in the foundry that had air conditioning. It was also what i would soon find out as the only room in the foundry that ONLY women worked. Wow, did that room get bitchy and caddy. they would all talk about each other behind each others backs. it was vicious. The woman in charge of the department was a total coke head. She had a constant drip on the end of her nose that drove me insane. and of course my station was right next to hers, so i had full view of it all the time. it was disgusting. That room was known through out the foundry as the wine cellar, because of all the bitching that went on in there. No man in their right mind would spend any time in there. it was a layer of hell. seriously. it was horrible. There were some women in that room that were friends and weren't as bad as the rest, but most of these women had been with the company for 15 plus years. They had history with each other. They knew each others shit. And if you wanted in their clique, watch out.

I will continue on the series later....... on how i escaped hell.