Last week introduced the first in a series of interviews I will be conducting with noted rolling ball sculptor artists from all over. I had realized that the art world and the world at large was missing out on a great deal of information about this wonderful art form and the amazing individuals who are creating it. I aim to change that with these interviews, to provide a fuller awareness and begin the process of creating an historical reference for future creators and fans of rolling ball sculpture.

I previously brought you part one of a wonderful interview with the talented Stephen Jendro in which he discussed how bad art leads to good art, working with the Titan IV rocket program, how the Watts Towers inspire framing and sculpture research at the dawn of the internet.

This week in part two Stephen will reveal his biggest challenge when building rolling ball sculpture, what stresses him out most about building RBS, tips for beginners, safety and problem solving. And the birds show up again.

TH: Aside from your welder, what is your favorite tool?

SJ: My little Pandora radio. Not much gets done without the tunes, seriously.

TH: What do you listen to?

SJ: Todd Snider, Tom Waits, Amos Lee, John Prine.

 

TH: In terms of building rolling ball sculpture, what do you enjoy most about the building process?

SJ: I think what I enjoy the most is that, in order to build one of these things there’s five or six different, discrete activities, and I enjoy them all, and I feel very lucky about that. It’s like the scenery changes. It’s not just one task. I could spend hours, days, sketching things out, whether it’s a new idea or a new sculpture, and that’s an activity unto itself –where I get to sketch and draw ideas. Then I get to physically go out and buy steel. I love doing that. I love going out and picking up steel and parts and bolts and washers.

TH: Why is that?

SJ: I have no idea. I went this past weekend to pick up 30 lengths of 1/8” rod and a dozen ¼” sticks, and there’s just metal everywhere. As far as you look all you see is metal, and it’s all because it’s all going – although the shop is standing still, it’s a kinetic shop in that stuff is coming in and it’s going out, and stuff is being built as a result of it.

Then I get to come home and cut the steel and clean – just cleaning it is nice. There’s a zen moment where I know that I’m going to spend the next hour with some Windex cleaning all these rods and it’s just a great little moment where you listen to music and you just – it’s a nice repetitive task.

And then the frame. I do enjoy building the frames. The frames probably would be the favorite part. I put a lot of emphasis into my frames, because it’s the embodiment of the sketch. It’s the structure that the composition is going to hang on.

And then you get to hang all the rails on it, and that’s a completely separate thing. It’s its own little world. I do three and four rails because I do splitters, and with that third or fourth section I don’t mind being painted into a corner, because it’s getting out of that corner that creates really interesting stuff.

And then the fifth or sixth part of this is if somebody orders one of these things and they’re out of state and I ship it to them I get to play construction worker for a day where I build this big wood box, and I’m a carpenter. It’s completely different!

And lastly I get to be a photographer, videographer, web site producer and
storyteller in order to market and promote my work.

So my favorite part is that there’s a bunch of different parts. It’s not just one thing.

 

TH: What would you say is the most challenging thing about building rolling ball sculpture?

SJ: Persistence. Persistence. In order to build these things – there was the book by Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture – in that he said, “Brick walls are there to keep people out. They’re good.” And there is no end to the brick walls that you’re going to come across making these rolling ball sculptures. And I think one of the reasons that we have such a kinship with people who do this is that we know what we’ve all gone through to get to this point, and it obviously means something to us, because these are hard! And it’s hard on a lot of different levels. It’s intellectually challenging.

[Here Stephen is interrupted by one of his parrots trying to take one of his pens. “Parrots and pens are bad,” he tells me.]

You’ve got to put in the effort, and you’ve got to persist. You can sketch all day long and nothing will happen. You’ll end up with a sketch. You’ve got to put your butt in the seat and spend the time and spend some money and build stuff. You gotta take a leap of faith. For some people it’s buying a TIG machine. For some people it’s just a little internal mental switch where you go, “Oh, I’m going to do this.” You set your mind to it.

 

TH: Is there any part of building RBS that you don’t like?

SJ: How fast the gas runs out of the argon tank! That stresses me out! There’s not much about this whole thing that stresses me out, but for some reason, the gas – I’m half-serious. You don’t worry about the electricity running out. I’ve got metal everywhere. I’ve got more marbles than I know what to do with. I’ve got more ideas than I know what to do with. So when I look at the things that are running out on me, it’s the argon gas!

 

TH: For me the stress is associated with that is I’m perennially afraid that it will happen on Friday night. That’s really the problem, because you can’t get it seven days a week. I’m sure you can if you have an account with somebody, but I’m not one of those somebodies.

SJ: Yeah!

 

TH: What do you do when you’re stuck on a problem? Is there any kind of a typical problem solving routine? How do you find that you work your way out?

SJ: If I’m trying to solve a problem I find that I can sketch it from the front and the side, and then I can go build a possible solution that it might be. I’ll go build something and see if that’s it. And if that’s not it, the second thing almost always is, because I’ll learn from the physical manifestation of that first thing.

Just…being confident not so much in myself, but in more like fate – it’ll work itself out one way or another. I can, with some of the tracks I have a general idea of where I want them to go, but after a while the sculpture kind of dictates where it’s going anyway. But I’ve always got a problem I’m working on, and you know some problems you have to let go of because they’re tactical. The tactics are fun but they’re often tangential. They take you off the path of what it is you’re trying to do. So, I have some ideas of what I want to do with motors, (like building my own) but that gets me into motor building, and do I really want to get into motors, or do I want to build sculptures? I have to really think about that.

I’ve been getting into painting panels, and I want to do something that adds color to the sculptures, and I’m doing it, but I have to be careful not to just become a painter, because I’m actually a rolling ball sculpture builder. Take care to be in one business at a time. Which is fine if that’s your goal, but I have a stated goal to build rolling ball sculptures, and I try to focus on that so that I don’t get too, too distracted.

TH: So far what would you say has been your biggest challenge building rolling ball sculpture from a technical perspective?

SJ: I think the biggest challenge is all the over-thinking that goes into it, and this goes back to the earlier question with problem solving. I find that one way to get yourself out of a problem is the cheaper solution not the more expensive solution. The simpler solution, the cheaper solution, keep making it basic, basic, basic. And to not over-think things. It’s so easy to over think.

When I first started doing rolling ball sculptures, and I see other guys do this too – the subject of track spacing comes up. And it doesn’t matter! I get the feeling like some people have micrometers out. I used to use my second knuckle, and now I don’t even think about it. There is no track spacing. It’s whatever makes the marble happy, it’s that simple. To not over think it. I don’t think I – I didn’t realize how simple it is to weld simply because the tools are so great. It’s a hot glue gun. We’re not laying beads that are going to be inspected by somebody. It’s just a hot glue gun. We’re just melting shit. The biggest challenge is stopping yourself from over-thinking what it is you’re trying to do. It’s not really that complicated, and once you realize it’s not that complicated the answer is staring at you.

But what else would be tech challenging? It would have to be my – on the one hand I’m most proud of it but on the other hand I shy away from taking any credit from anything because I don’t view it like I figured it out, I view it like it was given to me as a gift, and it’s the washer switch. I call it the non-moving-parts switch. I was building see-saw switches that would tip left and right and I didn’t like them. I just didn’t care for it, and I just happened to trip upon these washers – and so it’s really important to have the sculpture split into two, three, four – to split into multiple tracks. With how fast the marble falls, it greatly affects the composition. So if you can split into multiple tracks you can have a much more even composition, and it’s how to split into those tracks was just a large, fun hurdle for me. And again the answer was even simpler than a teeter-totter in that’s a moving part with 25 or 30 welds and a really tough pivot point, and I got that all the way down to no moving parts and a couple of welds for the price of a one-dollar washer.

And I had to take a leap of faith. It was like, ‘I’ve got this one washer. Well, I’m gonna weld it and weld this thing up.’ And it made sense in my mind that the marble would oscillate and fall through and maybe go left or right and/or come to a rest at the bottom of the hole and wait for the next one, which it does, so now not only is it a non-moving-parts switch, but it causes more marbles to be on the sculpture at one time.

 

TH: I always admire a simple solution to a problem that oftentimes seems really complex. These are the sorts of things you only learn by doing.

SJ: Right. The things you think are important, aren’t. So then it comes down to, ‘Gee, what is important?’ Composition is important to me. What do I think will look great on a customer’s wall. What has Zachmann had success with?

 

TH: So in composition you’re talking about your visual perception of it when it’s completed.

SJ: Yeah, because most of it’s life will be static. It’s gonna sit there and not move.

 

TH: I always think people run them all the time, because that’s what I would do. Maybe not.

SJ: I think people run them for five minutes a week.

 

TH: But, they’re so much fun!

SJ: Oh, no, I could be wrong, but I would think that they’re, well, we get busy in life, so it’s only when somebody comes over and says, “Hey, what’s that,” and then they run it for an hour because that new person wants to see it. But even if it was to spend an equal amount of time on versus off you’re still going to want it to look nice on your wall.

I think David Morrell has found a very fun balance. His are beautifully busy, but if you notice he’s got them contained in that frame. So he’s got these interesting frames and a nice base. I think he’s got a good sense about that.

 

TH: What are some consistent areas of trouble that you see other sculptors having, and what sort of advice would you offer?

SJ: I think we all face the same obstacles. I think we all think that the obstacles are unique to ourselves. It’s that personal. We’re all going through the same obstacles. These sculptures ending up being an external manifestation of, I think…I’ll go ahead and say it – our brains. If you feel like you want to do it, go do it. And don’t stop. We need more – and I’ve written this several times on several groups that we need more people building these things. It’s not a saturated market. There’s room. There’s room for what you’re going to bring to it, and what you’re going to build is going to influence everybody and make the art better.

 

TH: If somebody was just starting out with rolling ball sculpture what kind of specific advice in practical terms, somebody who walked up to you and said, “Hey, I’ve seen all this stuff on the internet. I wanna build one.” What would be Stephen’s five- or ten-point bullet list on what to do or not to do?

SJ: If you’re gonna be thinking anyway, think big. Get a TIG, that runs. Get a TIG and ask experts how to do stuff. Follow the advice. Go for stainless steel. Copper’s pretty, but it’s a niche in a niche market. If you go in on it, and a year later decide that you don’t wanna do it, you can always sell your TIG unit for close to what you paid for it anyway [Ed: This applies to recognized name brand welders such as Miller, Lincoln, etc.], so now you’re just out the cost of steel. The TIG welding we do is not that difficult. There’s a ton of resources out there. And very technically speaking, melting metal is very fun! It just is. It’s a lot of fun! That’s really it. Get the TIG unit, get some stainless steel, get some bolt cutters, get some gloves, but before you start to do ANYTHING think about safety. If you’re hurt you can’t work.

 

TH: What are some common safety areas you think people should pay attention to?

SJ: The gloves stop you from getting burnt and stop you from getting cuts. A long sleeved shirt stops you from getting skin cancer. The welding mask stops you from going blind. And protective glasses for all the other stuff that you’re doing. Just common sense protective stuff. Bolt cutters are great, because the way they cut, it’s low impact on the wrists. You’ve got to watch out for repetitive motion types of injuries. Pay attention to safety. I tend to burn myself when I’m cooking. I don’t burn myself when I’m welding. It’s warm. I’ve got the head of that TIG torch half an inch away from my gloves sometimes when I’m putting a piece together, and how hot is that weld point, eighteen-hundred degrees? My fingers are half an inch away from it, but it’s so focused and so local that it’s really warm –

 

[Stephen is interrupted by talking and squawking in the background. He stops answering the question for a moment and talks to what sounds like a large bird very close to him.]

 

SJ: Okay, got rid of the noisemaker, one of them. I have several birds. I’ve got four large parrots in the house, and I’ve got fifteen chickens. All kinds of animals going on here, but it’s wonderful. So, you’re going to hear noises every now and then.

But, yes, so, you’re very close to an incredible source of heat that could ruin your day and make you go blind, so you gotta be safe. It’s really common safety things, nothing extraordinary.

 

TH: I am always amazed that I can sit in my basement and fuse metal together with the current that’s coming out of the wall of my house. That was not possible just a few decades ago. What kind of welder do you have?

SJ: The Miller 150STH.

TH: That stuff didn’t exist several years ago. They were these great big, hulking – they were made for industry. They were made to weld great big things together and you could turn them down to weld little things and they were made for tradesmen to take care of business. They weren’t hobbyist machines, and certainly not proliferating the internet like they are now. You can get one for, what six hundred dollars or something?

SJ: Oh, that would be the other technical piece of advice is to buy quality machines, buy quality tools. Miller is made by Miller. I called Miller a couple of times to ask them questions and they are a good bunch of people.

TH: Yes, they’ve given me really excellent advice. They’re really, really good about passing on information and being as helpful as they can. It’s one of those companies where you’re like, “Man, I’m glad I own their stuff.”

 

TH: You know artists have their own particular style, we have something that defines our work as our own. What in your work do you feel like is a stamp or a signature or something that kind of makes your work unique to you or when people look at it they can identify it as your work?

SJ: You know, I’ve thought about that, and like most of my answers it has multiple parts. It would be great if our art, our type of art, if it could grow via new people doing it or more people doing it or get a greater awareness to the point where, honestly, that question would have some relevance. Because I look at my work and I go, “Yeah, that’s me,” but nobody’s ever gonna know that. Ever. That doesn’t stop it from being me, but I’m the only one that can really tell. If you were to put Jeff’s art and my art and your art and Matt’s art and David’s art all on a wall and joe public came up to look at them, it would be probably three weeks before they would get around to discerning any difference between all six of those. Because they just look at it and their mind has left them. They’re not comparing and contrasting, they’re just going “Oh, these are all these kinetic sculptures, that’s cool!” And for me, I don’t think anybody’s gonna go, “Well, Jeff has found objects, and Stephen is painting the little balls that are on the ends of his track. I don’t think anyone’s going to look at it with that level of detail. The level of detail I put into it I don’t think people are going to notice. So I’m thinking at this point I’m hoping they’ll look at it and they’ll go – for me it gets back to composition. They might go, “Well that looks like something I might want to hang on my wall.”

But I think for me, having said all that, I think it’s gonna be the metal hubless ring lift, probably. My metal rings. But maybe that switch that I have because that switch – I’d say it’s probably the switch, and I say it’s the switch, but…nobody notices it. You have to point it out because they’re too busy. Like, a new person, they’re gonna look at a rolling ball sculpture, and they’ve never seen one in their life. They’re looking at, they’re just in shock. They can’t focus on the detail. They’re not sitting there with a glass of wine going, “Oh, yes, that’s from the Renaissance period.” They’re, “Holy crap! That’s the coolest thing! Hey, have you guys ever thought about doing…” and they’re engaging that part of their brain where they just wanna give you ideas.

Yeah, I would say the non-moving-parts switch, but honestly I think I’m the only one that knows, and that’s okay.

TH: There are signature ways of building and constructing things that, even if it’s not any kind of revelation, it’s the way that people work. You could argue “Oh, you should do it this way or that way,” and the artist says, “Well, but this is the way I do it.” It doesn’t really make a difference one way or another it just happens to be one person’s mode of operation, and that’s all part of that style of building.

SJ: Yeah, I realized early on that I had all these pieces of metal all over the place, and somehow I got it into my head, “I wonder if I could make words out of that,” and it turns out that I could, and so I put words on some of my early sculptures. Now I do my name in metal, and I really like that. I like that you can take the leftover bits and make words out of it. I don’t know if people want words on them in general, but I do like doing my name out of it. ‘Signed in metal,’ you know? Ooh-la-la!

I don’t know – attention to detail. It’s either the switch or the ring lift. Let’s go with that.

TH: In that direction, what’s your main list of tools?

SJ: The Miller STH150 on pulse mode with the button switch on the torch. I got it from Cyberweld. It’s the Miller switch. That little button switch has done more for me. I had the rotating knob thing, and I didn’t fully appreciate the imprecision. Because I can stop welding within milliseconds of when I need to stop welding as opposed to half a second, my welds got 800 percent better.

So there’s that and bolt cutters. Jeff Zachmann came over to my garage many years ago and told me about small boltcutters. The gloves and the helmet, that’s pretty much basic.

Oh, the Milwaukee portable band saw. It’s made for cutting pipe in a ditch, so it sits at an angle, but you can still cut – a low-speed band saw for cutting quarter-inch, however you want to get that done is a good move.

My little two-dollar plastic funnel for doing the funnel spirals.

My Miller workbench. I love my Miller workbench! It’s cool! I had a metal Frisbee sitting on a concrete block that I used to work on, and I didn’t realize how huge an impediment it was until I got this table. It was like, “Oh, I can do all kinds of stuff now.”

TH: Which bench did you get?

SJ: The one with the thinner top, because it doesn’t matter, and without the – you can get it solid or with cutouts, and you don’t want the one with the cutouts, because that’s where all the marbles are going to go, falling through.

TH: Anything in the way of pliers or bending or cutting tools?

SJ: Oh, yeah, there’s the 39-cent Home Depot clips – the little one-inch clips – and then a couple of alligator clips for my clamps and that’s it. That’s all I do. I don’t do the whole jig thing. All my stuff is just free-form. I have that thing from Home Depot parts where I roll my coils.

Home Depot is one of my favorite tools! The whole store is one of my favorite tools. You know, it’s like, without the internet, without Home Depot, without these welding devices – without those three things – you and I aren’t even having a conversation!

TH: Right!

SJ: We’re not! We’re very lucky that all these things have come together: The availability of parts and materials locally, the sharing of all the knowledge that’s happened because of the internet, and the availability of welding tools. I mean, we could do it with oxyacetylene, but it’d be hard. It’d be messy, and it might not be as sellable.

TH: There’d be a lot of brazing going on, I suppose.

SJ: A red Sharpie! A red Sharpie, and they make one that’s clickable. I saw one. I need to buy one, but a red Sharpie that’s clickable so you can mark various things you want for either the center or cut or trim. And the clickable one I need to get because I hate having to keep taking this cap on and off. It comes down to time and motion.

I’m looking around my workplace to see what else.

Here’s a tough one for me: finishing your welds. For a long time I didn’t know, because I’m not a welder, I didn’t know about finishing welds. So my art was suffering because I would do all this welding, and the welds looked like crap and I didn’t know how to finish them. I came up with this way of taking a laptop battery and this orange juice powder that I got from this company and making one of these weld-finishing things, this device. But it’s acid, and it’s messy. It works, but there had to be something better, and when I went out to go meet Steve Fleury in New Hampshire, he showed me how he does it. He said, “I’ve got this two-dollar brush. See this brush? This is two dollars at Home Depot. Brush it when it’s warm.” So that’s what I do now, and I see other guys struggling with that, not knowing that, and I don’t know whether or not we should tell them? I don’t know where I fall on some of that stuff.

The other tool, like I said before, and I do view it seriously as a tool, is music. Music just removes time. Time goes away.

 

TH: Since you and I started talking about this whole thing, and you’ve mentioned several times about broadening the awareness of this art form, I do have to ask: Where would you like to see this going for you, personally, in the future?

SJ: I have a personal goal to build a thousand of these.

TH: And then you’re done?

SJ: No! No! But then I’ll be older!

TH: Now you’re building on a scale that we’d call an average-sized wall mounted piece. Would you like to build larger or smaller, or is that where you like to be?

SJ: You know for me I think it’s where I like to be. It starts with the size of the marble. I love the fact that these 25mm marbles are the size of a human eyeball. It’s very anthropomorphic. It has that quality to it, where we see ourselves in our work. Yeah, this is the scale I like. The one-inch marble dictates that. I like the relationship between the size of the eighth-inch rail and the one-inch marble and the size of sculpture you end up with as a result of that.

TH: Are you doing a lot of your own work, or are you doing a lot of commission work?

SJ: Fifty-fifty. Half of it’s commission and half of it’s for sale.

TH: Do you have a preference?

SJ: No, they’re both fine. As long as you have parameters around the commissions, then it doesn’t add stress to your life.

 

TH: Well thanks very much for the interview. It’s been great talking. I look forward to seeing more of your work in the future.

Below is one of several videos of Stephen Jendro’s rolling ball sculpture. To check out his work in-depth with lots more photos and video, click over to StephenJendro.com. If you enjoyed the interview, please do take a moment and drop a comment below. Feedback is always greatly appreciated!