From ‘yard art’ to ‘fine art’

From butterflies to barracudas and salmon to crappies and one life-size eagle and a giant lizard, metal artist Steve Nielsen has made them all for customers around the world through his business Steve Nielsen Art in Oroville.

“I grew up hunting and fishing with my dad. There wasn’t a week that went by that we didn’t go hunting or fishing,” said Nielsen. “He also flew hawks. It was huge influence on me to see those birds of prey and the fish. It was so much part of what I knew. I had the inspiration for my art right in front of me all the time.”

Nielsen started drawing hawks when he was in the fifth grade. He enjoyed the creative outlet of drawing but found his perfect element — metal — as a freshman at Las Plumas High School when a friend told him, “Man you gotta take the metal fabrication class with Mr. (Mike) Morris.”

Not one to argue with a senior classman, Nielsen took his advice and, the rest, as they say is history.

“I learned how to weld, forge, just about everything in that class,” said Nielsen. “It was great.”

After high school, Nielsen began using his metal working skills to customize his friends’ trucks and his drawing skills to do custom paint jobs.

“I treated the vehicles like canvas,” he said.

By the mid-1990s, he was designing and fabricating adjustable air suspensions for trucks. By 1997, he had moved into a large shop, employed 17 people and was doing $100,000 annually in sales around the world.

“Then 9/11 happened and large companies that had ordered from us stopped paying,” said Nielsen. “We kept working but had to downsize. And I started on Plan B, working on my art.”

While he kept doing “truck stuff,” he started unleashing his more creative side creating metal yard art, including a 9-foot dinosaur and a 12-foot crocodile. In 2006, Feather Falls Casino commissioned him to create a 36-inch silhouette of salmon for the club house at the facility’s KOA campground — and later that same year, he made a pair of salmon for the Feather River Fish Hatchery.

“That was the same year I started putting my art on MySpace. I transferred to Facebook in 2008,” said Nielsen. “I don’t think there’s been a week since then that I haven’t gotten a commission job. It’s been nonstop.”

Growth

By 2013, Nielsen sold his machine and fabrication shop to an employee and moved from a large Victorian house in the city’s historic district to his childhood home south of the city limits. There, he set up his metal art studio in the garage and small adjacent outbuilding and began doing his art full time.

Within two years Nielsen had both branched out in metal creativity and returned to a former love — painting — with his art. He started making more 3D pieces, painting much of his work to look “realistic” and honing his metal working skills elevating his sculptures from “yard art” to “fine art.”

It was during this time that Nielsen created a mirror-polished stainless steel eagle sculpture — with 4,000 individual feathers and a six-foot wing span — for the city. That sculpture is on permanent display in City Council Chambers at city hall. His realistic salmon sculptures are also on permeant public display at the Oroville Convention Center.

Through the years, Nielsen has sculpted “at least 300 fish from salmon to trout to crappie” and “about 2,500 butterflies” for customers across the states and as far away as Japan.

Nielsen said he never knows who’s going to contact him or what they’re going to ask for; that, he added, is one of the reasons he loves what he does.

“People see my stuff on social media and contact me saying, ‘Hey can you make this thing or that thing?’” said Nielsen. “I always say ‘yes’ and then take on the challenge of figuring out how to make it.”

Among some of the larger and surprising requests he’s received included one from a Miami architect who commissioned Nielsen to create five “super realistic-looking butterflies” that had wing spans of up to 50 inches and a six-foot Anolis lizard all for a four-acre children’s jungle park in the Sunshine State.

The sculptor was also commissioned to create a metal 8-by-6-foot replica of an ancient 19-inch solid gold Incan mask for a Peruvian-Asian fusion restaurant, Ruka, in Boston. And, a couple from Nevada commissioned the artist to create a life-size polished stainless steel barracuda to commemorate a diving trip they took in the Bahamas.

Working in his home studio-shop with traditional metal working tools and equipment as well as specialty tools he’s fabricated to use in making his sculptures — including an English wheeling machine to shape the metal — Nielsen said every piece presents its own creative challenge and learning experience.

“Sure, I’ve developed a process for things, but I am always challenging, pushing myself, my creativity to the next level,” said Nielsen. “There are no two pieces alike, even the fish and butterflies. For me it’s about striving to do better every time, so sometimes I have more work in a piece that I get paid for. It’s never been about the money. For as long as I can remember, it’s always been about outdoing my personal best creatively.

“I always want the project I’m working on to be better than the last one. It’s an obsession or an addiction to just keep doing better.”

Steve Nielsen Art may be found on Instagram and Facebook.

Reach Kyra Gottesman at kgottesman@chicoer.com

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