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>>With its boundless variety of scenic beauty
the North American west has long served as a
reliable source of inspiration for those with
a creative soul like this talented artist from north
Idaho an avid outdoorsman,
Mike Schneider's creative soul is cleverly etched,
scorched and welded so eventually it shines
through his extraordinary art work made from metal.
(Mike Schneider) About four or five years ago, I
had retired from the telephone company, here
locally out of the Coeur d'Alene area. And I was go
to build houses. Well of course the housing
industry ah, kind of went on a slump here and out of
boredom one day I went out to my shop and made a picture,
in fact it's that grizzly bear. And my oldest daughter,
who lives in Portland, she came home
and took a look at that and she's artsy herself
and she said Dad, you really need to go downtown
and look in the galleries and see what metal art looks like.
And my daughters, ah which I've got three,
and my wife, have been my inspiration ever since.
>>As an art medium, working with raw
metal is near the top of the list in terms of
difficulty. Yet, for Mike Schneider it's a skill
he's always been comfortable with.
In fact one could argue it's in his DNA.
(Mike) Well, actually my grandfather was a blacksmith,
and it, metal was always in our family, and ah the one thing
that always intrigued me was any time
that you cut or weld metal, there is a heat
signature left along side of that. And that heat signature
is the colors that I try to produce in my artwork.
I try to use those colors like a canvas painter uses paint.
You know, you can't duplicate the colors
of the real things all the time, but I like to try
to use the natural colors that come out of
different types of metal from different kinds
of heat, ah, grinding methods that will reflect
the light given directly. And I think I'm still
learning a great deal every time I do a piece.
>>The ability to take a cold, flat chunk of metal
and transform it, using a variety of tools, into an
inviting, colorful, three dimensional piece of art
is a process that requires the melding of imagination
with strong hands and an eye for detail.
(Mike) Well, everything I do is self-taught, basically,
other than what I learned you know, in school as a kid.
But, to begin with almost all of the metal
anymore is recycled metal. So I start by cleaning
everything totally off with a grinder.
And then once I've made the whole thing shiny, I'll lay it
down flat and shine the light on because you can't
always tell where all the scratches and blemishes
and things in the metal are. And believe you me,
they show up sooner or later. But once you get it
down to where it's clean, what I generally do is do
the etching on the metal. I like to put depth and
dimension into a flat piece of metal, with the
grinder and grinding techniques.
>>Once Mike has etched out a suitable background for a piece
his next step is to draw color out from the metal,
which means turning up the heat...
(Mike) When I build a piece of work that's large, there is no
heat treating part of it, you have to heat treat
the whole thing. And, the metal jumps and crawls all
over the place when I'm doing it and you got to
chase the cold spots out of the metal while you're
doing it so it doesn't warp the metal.
The torch takes a lot of practice because a lot of the
colors you have to stop before they appear.
So you have to know how hot and what colors are coming out
of that metal and when to stop, because a piece of steel,
turns about four different colors and there's
varying shades of those colors.
Sometimes you learn to live with the color that comes out, and
sometimes you don't and it's got to start over.
But the colors are cool.
>>Something else that's
cool is the 3d look Mike try's to incorporate into
many of his art pieces. To achieve this effect
objects, such as trees and animals, are cut out with
a plasma torch, polished with a grinder and then
attached in layers with a spot welder. (Mike) I like
the fact that the 3-dimensional aspect of a
lot of the work really pleases people. It makes
them feel like they can kind of almost step into
this piece, and smell the trees or something.
>>Given the demanding nature of metal Mike knows
that once he begins a piece he must stay on task
until it's complete or at least, ready to leave the shop.
(Mike) When I build a piece of work, I bring
it in the house after I think it's to a completion
stage and I'll set it up on my hearth,
so I have to look at this thing constantly and that's
where I scrutinize them. And there's been a few of
them that were taken back to the shop and got
totally torn apart. And of course my biggest critic
is probably my wife. Ah, also my biggest fan.
But when we can both sit and look at a piece, for a
week or two, and enjoy it for that long, that says a lot.
>>These days, out in front of the Schneider
home is a tin man. It's a novelty piece to be sure
but in many ways it also stands tall as a tribute
to Mike Schneider's journey from being just a
"metal worker" to becoming an accomplished "metal artist."
(Mike) I try to achieve creating the most
beautiful piece of metal work that people see.
I don't care if it's an abstract or if it's a
conventional piece of artwork, or whatever it is,
I like to try and use that metal look, the reflectivity
of metal and the colors that I can get out of metal
to achieve something that people have never seen before.
And I guess that's what the inspiration
to keep going is.
Ah, I think it's important
for anybody who's ah, going to call themselves
an artist to do what you think is right.
Ah, I mean it's quite obvious when you look at
all the different forms of art, there really is no
right and wrong. It's an expression of what you do.
And if you can do something to the point
where it touches people than you're an artist.