It’s always nice to try a line of work outside your comfort zone. It can be incredibly eye-opening, and gives you a new understanding of what someone else’s day-to-day life is like.
Rustic Steel, in Tampa, makes art out of metal scraps. It has made tons of pieces that you can find in the greater Tampa Bay region, like the "Ugly Grouper" outside the restaurant with the same namesake on Anna Maria Island or the big metal gears outside Ulele in Tampa. It also made the big hockey player outside the Tampa Bay Lightning’s newly named Benchmark International Arena.
Even outside Rustic Steel's shop on Highland Avenue, you can see tons of cool creations, like a huge praying mantis, or a monster holding a pickup truck.
One of the neatest parts about Rustic Steel is that it has classes to teach you how to make your own metal art. It’s four hours and held every weekend. The instructor, Tony Blasucci, will teach you how to cut, bend and meld metal together to make a creation you can take home and show off to friends.
"[Seeing] the students and watching that spark in their eyes, literally and figuratively, in the reflection of the helmet, watching them kind of get it, and it clicked for them, and then you just see that smile on their face, and then you see them holding their art at the end, and how proud they are,” Blasucci said. “That's why I keep doing it."
I chose to make a basketball player and hoop with a backboard. The piece is … interesting, to say the least. Maybe I shouldn't quit my day job.
Rustic Steel holds these types of workshops every weekend, and even has special events for date nights, corporate team-building and family days. It’s another small piece of Tampa that helps shape its art scene and makes it a unique place to live and play.
This story first aired on The Bay Blend, WUSF's daily podcast.
