One of the most notable discoveries of METAL's past year was that the majority of our design (or design + fabrication) work was in collaboration with architects and artists who had contacted us to encourage their projects into being.

Though METAL has a gallery, we are not located in a highly trafficked area and have never been able to depend on the proverbial "walk-in" traffic for assuring our cash flow. We circulate our goods via the World Wide Web, but we have come to find that our design and our fabrication skills are what keep us burning the midnight oil. Why am I bothering telling you this? I am bothering because it astounds me to look back, analyze the data, and note that we did more work for artists and architects than say builders, home owners or hospitality venues in 2012.

Don't get me wrong, we get commercial and residential jobs galore but artists and architects proved last year's mainstay and I am fabulously grateful. I am grateful and striving for ways to invite more artists, nationally and internationally, and more architects and, of course, more clients generally. That's a principal objective of mine as an owner of METAL, to keep the work arriving (otherwise our "distinguished design and fabrication" is but reverie) and to assure our liquidity along with our notable designs.

Did you know, for instance, that an artist in Senegal, if s/he wished to have their metal work appear in the United States of America could contact METAL and we could fabricate it for sale here? Likewise, an artist in Paris, who wished to take advantage of our design prowess, could engage us for computer generation and problem solving of his/her latest vision but have it fabricated in his/her own 200-year-old Paris atelier (bear with my fantasy life, please). The possibilities are, as I always like to believe (and a partial reason for naming my small press with Barbara Brown, Infinite Possibilities) infinite.

We all make choices, goodness knows how many in a day, but it takes time for those choices to surface in the form of palpable results. Sometimes it is years before we know that a path we took was the right one. Sometimes, it is providence, in concert with intention, that ultimately "provides".

Welcome- artists, architects, hospitality networks and homeowners, machinists and metal enthusiasts, commercial and business concerns, and thank you for your confidence in us and for your patronage. You keep us humming along.