Public art sculptor, found object artist, and welder Rick DeTroyer has spent the last five years planting seeds for a second career as a Chelsea-area fine artist, since retiring from teaching vocational industrial arts in the Ann Arbor Public School system for around three decades. In the years leading up to retirement, “I started getting more into aesthetic projects” and came to the decision to start building upon “my shop class skills” to create art and decorative functional objects, DeTroyer says.

Rick DeTroyer smooths part of a clay model to be used as a reference for a metal piece in his studio in Gregory, Michigan.

Angela J. Cesere | AnnArbor.com

At first, “the challenge was to find my niche in the art world and find my own creative mode as an artist,” DeTroyer recalls. During the first five years of retirement, “I have been playing around with different materials and sales strategies.”

He is now enjoying growing renown for his outdoor sculptures, public artworks and his creative reuse and reshaping of found objects, recycled materials and industrial waste. He also builds things like door handles, furniture and business signs, among other aesthetically pleasing functional objects. Right now, the artist is doing about half of his work on commission.

I visited DeTroyer at his studio, located north of Chelsea near Unadilla, on the 30-acre property where he lived with his family until they moved downtown. “Having this space out here was the perfect setup. I had already established my tools and I can make noise on projects out here in the country. When we moved into town, it was always a fantasy to do something out here when I retire,” he says.

A 12-foot-diameter replica of a birthday cake dominates one of DeTroyer’s workshops, upon the occasion of my visit to his studio. It is to be hung from the ceiling of a “birthday party room” at TreeHouse, an indoor playground in Lake Zurich, Illinois, which is owned by Chelsea’s TreeHouse owner Michele Balaka who recently expanded to the Chicago suburb. The cake sculpture has two kinds of icing; old license plates on the top and strips of a discarded decorative tin ceiling wrapped around the cake’s tiers. Working lightbulbs are wired through large candles. While on one of his frequent expeditions for salvaged materials, the tin ceiling “called out to me as the perfect icing on the cake.”

DeTroyer originally started working with salvaged materials because “it was free,” he says. “I could take home an old locker that somebody threw out and have a big piece of sheet metal to hammer on for practice,” without worrying about “messing up expensive art supplies,” he explains. His exploration of artistic uses for discarded materials and objects also ended up being an adventure in finding his “creative mode” as a fine artist: “I like the idea of recycling and restoring. I hate to see things wasted. I really like thinking that I’m saving something from going into the junk pile.”

“One of my first projects has old heater grates that are really ornate cast metal pieces. I was into old houses. You might recognize it from your grandma’s house, but people switch to new heating systems that are set up so that those grates don’t hook on. People throw these ornate pieces out. I thought, gosh, somebody did a lot of work to make the template up. I recognized that it was an artistic piece,” DeTroyer remembers. He has also fallen in love with the aesthetic qualities of patina on metal, or “rusted, pitted metal, like you see on old farming implements that are made of heavy duty metal that can rust a lot but still be used year after year,” he says. Collecting and finding materials to use has also been an adventure he has fallen in love with. “It’s like a scavenger hunt or digging for gold,” he laughs.

DeTroyer thinks “I’m a bit of a Johnny Appleseed of art.” As a sales strategy, the artist sometimes plants his artworks on people’s lawns for free. “It’s a freebie kind of thing, in a sense, but I’m looking at it as, what better advertisement than a piece in a true setting — in someone’s yard, where people can walk by?” he explains. He found this “freebie” marketing strategy to be a valuable tool, when he was first getting started. A waitress at the Common Grill tipped him off that the restaurant's bathroom door handles needed to be replaced, DeTroyer recalls. He decided to make the restaurant two new handles as a gift. Soon after, Kathleen Treado-Daniels, a Common Grill patron and wife of actor and Purple Rose Theater founder Jeff Daniels, found out about his metalwork and commissioned him to make them a table.

DeTroyer’s “Johnny Appleseed” approach is not all about increasing his own sales. He also champions featuring more public artworks and outdoor sculptures in town. “I’m Johnny Appleseed because I’m planting art in people’s yards and letting them know that there are different types of apples. You get the trees growing to show people what public art is like and then they can decide if they want more of it,” he says.

One of his sculptures that is on display near the Purple Rose Theater is being featured in this year’s annual SculptureWalk Chelsea, a public sculpture exhibition that he helped bring to town. He brought the idea to River Gallery co-owners Patti Schwarz and Deborah Greer a few years ago, after he had enjoyed his experience exhibiting his own public artwork for the first time in Saugatuck, Michigan’s 2006 "Art 'Round Town" public art exhibition.

The artist decided Chelsea should host a similar event “because it would give artists a chance to show people what they do for free. Having art downtown in places where people are already hanging out starts discussions about art,” and “educates people about sculpture,” he thinks. The event, which is in its second year, is funded by the DDA with support from Sounds & Sights on Thursday Nights, The City of Chelsea, and The Chelsea Center for the Arts (for which DeTroyer serves as a Board Member), a truly downtown-wide event.

If funding is secured, DeTroyer will soon be creating aesthetically pleasing seating and public art for downtown Saline, in collaboration with mosaic artist Tricia Huffman of teaching studio Mended Pieces Mosaics. They are working on constructing a small model of their ideas. “It will be something functional — a place for people to sit — which will also have a planter and other floral or natural elements,” he says. He has also pitched an idea to Chelsea for an archway that could go in one of the alleyways within the DDA footprint, he reports.

Jennifer Eberbach is a free-lance writer who covers art for AnnArbor.com.