SHIDONI'S Tommy Hicks

After growing up in Santa Fe and noticing that my father's company seemed to be on the verge of thriving, I thought he could use a welder in the family and so took lessons in High School. I totally fell in love with welding and tried to talk all the other metal guys into letting me do all their welding too. That didn't fly.

Dad had a new idea we were discussing as he showed me his sketches. We brought out some steel sheet and began to make marks on that and started cutting the forms out. By that afternoon we had a steel "Sketch" formed and all that week I refined the piece. When it was finished, we sat after work as many of us were inclined to do over a drink and admired the piece. Dad sort of spontaneously (I thought at the time) said, "That'd look GREAT really large!" It turns out he usually thought along those lines. I asked how large he had in mind so he picked up a tape and measured the newly finished maquette. "This is 20", maybe the large one should be 1" to 1', so 20 feet!"

We got started right away, making materials lists and ordering the sheet and 1/2" square rods used to harden the corners plus all the welding rod we'd need. I was in heaven for weeks as we learned how to step back to get a proper scale while drawing the form out on the floor. Then had to take turns being raised in the air on the chain hoist to look straight down on the drawings so they weren't distorted to our eye. (A ladder would have worked but wouldn't have been as much fun.) We even had to devise a unique method for bending 6 sets of identical large gentle curves in the 1/2" framework. It was really a blast working on this directly with my dad. He gave me the maquette as my reward and allowed me to make it into a bronze edition which is available through Shidoni Gallery.

We were extremely proud of the finished product and designed a custom cement pad for it to install in the sculpture garden. It didn't take long but sold to Ann Maytag and we installed it in Nambe, not far from Shidoni. Later Ann moved to Santa Fe so we had to move it for her again, yet again when Ann passed away and her family wanted it brought back to Shidoni for resale.

The 20' piece is now in the collection of Los Alamos County and graces the entrance to Overlook Park a block away from overlooking the gorgeous Rio Grande Valley below.