November, 2010
Tempe Post Office Show

The Post Office in downtown Tempe, Arizona has art shows in their windows. My work was selected for one of the windows. The show, called "Momentum," runs from November 2010 until March 2011. Below are photos of each of my pieces in the show.

October, 2010
Top Ten Steel Sculpture Website

I was recently selected as one of Capital Steel and Wire's top ten steel sculptors.

Read more news

March, 2010
Pop Rocket Features Royce Carlson

I am the featured artist in the April, 2010 issue of Pop Rocket. Pop Rocket is a Northern Arizona arts and entertainment magazine published in Prescott, AZ. My sculpture, COSMOS, is on the cover and there are photos of some of my other work inside. The whole issue is available online as a .pdf file.

Click on the image at left to get to the article online.

March, 2010
Hot Love Seat

My wife, Nita, and I created a love seat out of junk we gleaned from the Chandler recycling center. We called it the "hot Love Seat." It was made specifically for a show at the Chandler Center for the Arts called Ten Transformations: Framing Renewal. The show runs March 12th though April 16th, 2010 in Chandler, AZ.. The Phoenix New Times put out an article about the show but this was before the show opened. I haven't seen any press about it after that. With this project we put our talents together, Nita's with concrete and mosaic, and mine with steel. We included lots of different materials in the creation of this bench. And it's actually comfortable to sit on!

January 3, 2010
Sculpture Sale - These sculptures need new homes!

COSMOS - a complex wind sculpture over 20 feet tall and 12 feet in diameter at the base. It has been been used in a recent Bruce Willis movie, The Surrogates, is shown in the 2010 Burning Man wall calendar, and a photo of it appeared in Wired Magazine's online version in 2004. It's gallery price would be $26,000. I am offering it for $16,000. This is my most "famous" sculpture to date. Video of Cosmos in motion.

THE DANCINATOR - a skeletal figure of a woman dancing. It is a little over 5 feet tall and is made out of scrap steel and found steel objects. It's gallery listed price was $3000.  It is available for $1600 direct from my studio.

Please feel free to make an offer on these. I need to clear out space at my studio for more fun stuff.

December, 2009
Article by Royce Carlson in The Blue Rock Review - PLAY issue

The Blue Rock Review is an annual collected journal of visual art, essays, poetry, and interviews about the creative process. I wrote an article about how play and work blend in the creation of my art and they published it in this year's journal.. Each year has a theme and in this issue the theme was "Play." The article features several photos of my work.  It's an honor to be represented in such a fine publication. I highly recommend it to creative people everywhere. It is published by The Blue Rock Artist Ranch near Wimberley, Texas (not far from Austin).

December, 2009
Large Residential Project Completed.

Since the beginning of the summer of 2009 I have been working on an impressive residential project. It was a 9,000 sq. ft. house. The owners were super nice and invited several artisans and fine craftsmen to add their touches. I was lucky enough to be one of them. The result was spectacular.

The challenging part was a helical stairway. I had to cover a curved stair stringer with steel plates so that it would look like something you would find in an old factory. Then I had to make a curved railing for the stair. The railing contains several organic branch-like elements.

That was only part of this wonderful job. I made branchy infill panels for over 100 feet of log deck railing, a balcony railing, four gates, 25 flower-like ground lighting pieces, two sets of decorative chimney covers, and several organic-looking hand rails with forged leaves at the ends. All of it was done in a natural rust finish with a boiled linseed oil sealer.

Oct. 4, 2009
2010 Burning Man Calendar has a picture of COSMOS in it.

Every year the Burning Man Festival organizers put out a wall calendar. This year's contains lots of photos of art, performances, etc. On the page for June, 2010, there is an unusual night shot of Cosmos taken by John Ross. Cosmos was set up at Burning Man in 2004. Since then it has been displayed in the yard of my shop, Cosmic Steel. When it was at Burning Man, it had Spandex covered wind catchers. The Spandex rotted away very quickly. Now the wind catchers are sheathed in steel for durability reasons.

Sept. 27, 2009
COSMOS appears in "Surrogates" movie.

The latest Bruce Willis film, released Sept. 25, 2009, is about a future where everyone interacts via surrogate robots. My sculpture, Cosmos, appears in the background about a third of the way through the movie. The setting is the "human reservation" where a character called The Prophet (played by Ving Rhames) lives. It's a green park-like setting with greenhouses and wind sculptures and such. Cosmos can be seen spinning away at the left side of the screen for about 2 seconds. There is a another, direct-on, shot except Bruce Willis' head practically fills the screen. I suppose, since he is the star of the movie, that I shouldn't complain too much about him blocking the view of the sculpture!

I thought the movie was pretty good. Both my wife and I are action/adventure and Sci-Fi fans so it's not surprising that we liked it.

Cosmos is available for sale. - $16,000 The sculpture is a little more than 20 feet tall and has a base diameter of 12 feet. There are multiple spinning elements. Check out the video tour of Cosmic steel to see it in action (near the end of the 5-minute video).

I wrote a brief story about how Cosmos ended up in this movie in my blog, Adventures in the Zone.

May 10, 2009

Video Tour of Cosmic Steel.

Here's a five-minute video snapshot of Cosmic Steel taken on May 2, 2009.