When I started making metal art my wife, Maureen, was learning how to make jewelry. She would sit in the spare room bending wire, putting together jewelry, and not really enjoying it. I would come in from the shop and show off some crazy bird welded up from a rake and a shovel, painted purple and she knew that it looked like more fun. So, she surprised everyone and put down the jewelry and said she wanted to make metal art. I was all for it. I envisioned us working as a team, designing large sculptures, burning wire, making art, and spending every waking hour together. OK maybe that was a fleeting thought as I realized it might not work out that way, but I was more than willing to offer up my many years of experience and knowledge as a mentor for my wife as a padawan learner. That wasn’t her take but we’ll get back to that. I gave her the shop name of “Flame” and bought her a welding helmet to match. What could go wrong? What I found was that there were some rapids coming for us and we had to paddle our canoe carefully to get through them. We would have to paddle together, sometimes the person in the front yelling directions and the person at the rudder going hard left to miss a boulder, there’s some trust involved. Working with a spouse can sometimes deteriorate into a battle of wills. Especially if one is learning from the other. We jumped in the canoe anyway and charged into the rapids to test our resilience, our patience, and our ability to just shut up when necessary. I’ll save the suspense and let you know we did get through the rapids and we’re enjoying a much smoother ride down the river now. The rapids welded us together and we are a much more formidable team than we would have been. There’s a life lesson in there if you dig deep enough.
The first thing we learned was that we build very different things. We have distinct styles and while our art is made from the same pile of scrap metal our pieces are different. One time she asked me to plasma cut some wings for a bee she was making. I agreed, pulled out a piece of metal and sketched them out. She said “No, that’s wrong”. She took the marker from me and sketched out her version. I explained that she was wrong and that’s not what they look like. We looked at each other for a second, I shrugged and cut out her wings. Now if she wants my help on something I tell her to draw it out, I don’t ask questions and I just cut it. When it comes to bees, we have a long-standing disagreement. She says I make “Angry Bees” and she makes “Friendly Bees”. The reason is her appreciation of honeybees and their role in the world while I dislike hornets after battling some big nests around the house. So, the solution is we each make our own kind of bees.
The next boulder in the rapids was my shop. I set it up, I organized it, I keep it clean, I have a standard of work I like to see and there’s not a lot of room. (Notice the descriptions all start with “I”?) The first thing was that she decided to re-arrange things, then take over a fab table, then not clean up the welding table when she was done………and finally while using the plasma cutter, cut into my new table! I gently suggested we need to discuss this shared space. OK I might not have been gentle; I might have threatened to take my toys and go home. She told me to get over it. We were hurtling down the river now! I took a breath and tried to be a grown up and calmly explained some of my shop rules and why they make sense. We weld in one area for safety, fire protection, ventilation, and cleanliness. We grind in a safe direction, so the table has to face a certain way. The welding gas tank has to be chained to the wall, so it doesn’t fall over and become a missile. The tools we use the most are placed precisely to save time. I had never explained it to her, I just said it was a shop rule. I plunged the paddle in, and we went hard left around the danger and back on course. She trusts me when I offer a safety or shop rule and I explain why it makes sense.
The bottom line is that we have been blessed to find a hobby/side hustle/future full-time hustle, that has us both invested one hundred percent. We have settled into our roles and are now paddling in tandem and obviously we can maintain a much faster and enjoyable pace that way. We might not agree on the demeanor of bees or the length of pig ears but that’s a good thing for us and makes our art more interesting.
Comments