American Flag: Flag (back)This is a piece from September of '09. It is mild steel, copper and stainless steel.This is a sheet of stainless steel. With mild steel, plasma cut for stars, overlayed. The red stripes are copper. It is mig welded together with mild steel wire.

While making the piece, I wanted to give the illusion that the flag was waving. I hoped to achieve this with the broken reflection of light from the stainless steel and the imperfect lines in the copper. In trying to achieve that effect and get these metals to stick together (at one point I tried to weave or overlap the stripes and plasma cut stripes in the stainless). I cut, hammered, and burned through in several places.

Today, I would take a different approach, starting with a mild steel backing. I now have stinless mig wire to experiment with. Today, I would braise the copper to mild steel, lay stainless strips next to them, with a gap, and mig weld with stainless, to fill the gap, then sand flat. (I haven't tried it yet, but that will probably be a future experiment.)