As long as his latest creation stands in his Enderby driveway, Braden Kiefiuk thinks he’ll open a lemonade stand.
Such is the interest in Kiefiuk’s nine-foot-tall metal sculpture of a deer.
“If I was selling lemonade, I’d be a rich man with the number of people that have randomly stopped, come by the yard and seen it,” laughed Kiefiuk, 46. “If I see them stopped on the sidewalk looking at it, I’ll wave them in and greet them. I love it. Come by anytime.”
A shop foreman at Combined Mechanical Contractors by day, Kiefiuk spent “every evening, weekend and spare minute” over the last seven months creating his first metal sculpture.
The finished product weighs between 800 and 1,000-pounds, stands nine-feet-tall, and is six-feet from nose to tail.
The antlers are four-feet across.
Each piece of the sculpture was cut out with a zip-cut grinding disc and hammered by hand over a stake. Every piece was formed by Kiefiuk’s hands.
After doing smaller stuff such as silhouettes in his Enderby shop, Kiefiuk was challenged by a friend who said anyone could do metal art with a plazma cutter (a hand-held torch for cutting steel.)
“That made my stuff sound generic so I wanted to make something that not everyone can make. I challenged myself,” said Kiefiuk, who used to draw and sketch 20-to-30 years ago, then started “playing with metal and twisting it.”
“I have never done a sculpture in my life. I don’t consider myself an artist. I can’t say I pictured the deer in a wonderful light coming down from the mountain and this is what it represents. I wanted to see if I could make a deer, smashed some metal together and made a deer.”
Not that the project was easy to do in the confines of his 80-inch high shop.
Kiefiuk built the deer itself and the base it now sits upon separately, along with those four-foot-wide antlers.
He had to lay the deer down in the shop and come up with the antler design while the deer was laying down.
“That was very difficult,” said Kiefiuk. “It was hard to get the proportions.”
Once the sculpture was complete, Kiefiuk and his wife rigged up some ratchet straps and lifted the sculpture onto a quad trailer and wheeled it out into their yard.
Central Hardware came along with its crane, stood the deer up for Kiefiuk, and he welded it onto the base.
“It was the first time I saw the project standing,” he said. “I was surprised and relieved it was done, and I’m pretty impressed and proud of myself. I’m hoping somebody will like it.”
Kiefiuk has sent out feelers to different shops and areas like Whistler and Banff to see if there’s interest in purchasing the metal sculpture.
The deer is available to anybody interested.
“My stuff is one-of-a-kind,” said Kiefiuk. “I will not make it again. If someone says, ‘Make me a deer,’ I won’t do it. Because each person that pays for it will have the only one in the world like it, as far as I’m concerned.”
Anybody interested can e-mail Kiefiuk at sexymetalart@telus.net or phone him at 250-540-4990.
Pictures of his deer and other projects can be viewed at Kiefiuk’s Sexy Metal Art Facebook page, https://www.facebook.com/SexyMetalArt
