Acme Animal

If quirky and fun is your style of decorating, you’ll love Don Gidley and Sue Parke’s metal sculptures. In their Toronto-based Acme Animal studio, filled with sheets of aluminum, scroll saws and rivets, Don and Sue create their whimsical clocks featuring dogs, cats, fish and birds, as well as fun candleholders and metal ornaments.

The pair met while creating theater sets. Don cuts the aluminum in his geometric style and Sue paints using bold combinations of colour to give the pieces life, not to mention animals’ expressions that will make you chuckle.

Don and Sue see their work as urban folk art, or folk art with an urban sensibility.

Anvil Island Design

Jack Willoughby of Anvil Island Design spent part of his youth in California and now lives on Vancouver Island where the ocean beaches give him much of his inspiration. Jack’s career as an artist began in steel working, then teaching metal work at a Vancouver college, where, since 1992, the freedom to create his own designs soon turned into his full-time job.

Jack’s unique ironwork sells out at international garden shows and can be found in art galleries, gift shops, and private homes throughout North America, Europe and Japan. The strength and simplicity of his work make it equally at home in the house or outside in the garden.

Some of Jack’s more popular brass work includes musical moose playing various instruments, dragon boat girls, dancing ladies and a variety of brass signs to add humour to your home and garden: ‘Weed It and Reap’; ‘No Whining’; ‘A Happy Wife is a Happy Life’.

Art in Iron

Creating a serene mood for a quiet room or looking for something different for a special person, Art in Iron’s selection of Chinese characters is ideal.

This Toronto company specializes in a wide selection of characters – happiness, strength, harmony, dream, friend – being just a few.

One of the artists working at Art in Iron is Dody Dumyn. Dody’s bio for the One of a Kind Show reads, “…17 lifetimes ago, traveling incognito in the Carpathian Alps, I was waylaid by gypsies and sold to an Abyssinian blacksmith. Everything else is a blur.” If you’re having a similar lifetime…or just a month, week or day like Dody had, maybe what you need is some solace and inspiration from a Chinese symbol to lighten your load.

Dog Bite Steel

If you’re looking for a fun and funky piece of art, Dog Bite Steel will have something for you. An environmentalist, and an artist with a sense of humour, Jean-Pierre Schoss of Uxbridge designs two and three dimensional critters – frogs, mice, rabbits, cats and dogs, mangy & cute, and our Canadian mascot, the beaver.

A graduate of Ontario College of Art in 1990, Jean-Pierre has been part of many juried shows in Ontario; one of his larger works, commissioned by Toronto Parks and Recreation, was a collection of giant birds nests for Humber Valley Park. He was also profiled in the 2005 documentary, Artist’s Lives Across Canada.

Primitive, balanced and often very humorous, JP creates works made with recycled steel from oil tanks, farm implements and other thick steel. “I use recycled materials for a number of reasons. First, it is our responsibility to contribute to this world in as many ways as possible. Garbage is a great place to start. Oil tanks are costly to cut up and recycle so the scrap yards don’t want them. I began using oil tanks, water tanks and propane tanks to save money because the steel was so expensive. I soon realized what I was doing. The recycling had become part of my life.”

The rugged, dented and painted old steel provides a character and freedom that is refreshing. JP never sees just a steel object – he sees a new life waiting to come out of it.