It is true that  some of these old cars have been restored and most likely added to a car collection But what about the ones we sometimes see off in those distant fields as we travel? The ones that no longer work? The old loners that have been sitting in the dirt through all those years of heat and cold? Now, sitting there with their windshields  broken out and  bodies full of bullet holes; What is their fate? As time goes by the majority of them will be gathered up, smashed in a mobile compactor, chopped to pieces, then melted down in a foreign land. The essence of what they once were or what they once represented is lost and it’s body returns as a cheap wrench from your local hardware store. The first time the tool is used it  usually breaks and is thrown away... A pretty sad epitaph for such an awesome machine the way I see it.

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As an artist, when I’m alone out there among my latest finds, cutting off the bumpers of these old iron beasts, I think about the tales they might tell from their hey-days. I can imagine the first day they rolled off the car lot just purchased by someone who scrimped and saved to finally buy that brand new, shining, big powerful machine. As my torch rips through the metal sometimes I’ll  hear a dog  barking , a train passing  or the howl of the wind, but the cars always sit like silent sentinels, some rest alone, others clustered together. I envision them as old buffalo that never completely decayed and crumbled into the earth again; different herds of steel buffalo—Pontiacs, Chryslers, Chevys, and Buicks—that all ran together on their prairies of concrete and asphalt.

Am I like the scavengers that came along and gathered their remaining bones to be hauled off to the glue factory? Or by giving them back their dignity through a reinterpreted form of physical artistic expression—a welded sculpture containing bits and pieces of their still recognizable original element—do I become a preservationist? I believe the second theory to be true. Whether it’s a 14 foot rearing stallion or an imposing Knight on a Horse, I feel that through the reinterpretations I’ve created over the years I’ve preserved their strength and style like a monument to their dignity.