From Warships to Artwork - The Story of a Metal Artist

Metal Artist Mickey Craig, has spent his working life in the building trade but is now using his retirement in the Algarve to indulge in his love of metal working. Having spent much of his professional life in the Middle East, he has found his own personal utopia in the Algarvian countryside where he spends his days creating fantastic pieces as a metal artist. 

Texan born, he trained as an art student but did not want the life of a “starving artist,” so he served in the US navy for 4 years during the Vietnam conflict and on leaving the military he took an apprenticeship in sheet metal building trades.

Mickey worked on industrial buildings creating interiors and exteriors, ventilation and has even worked on the roof of the Astrodome in Houston. When the building trade went into a lull in the late 1980s he went to Qatar to find work and spent 2 years employed there. On returning to the US he joined the marine ship building trade working on nuclear submarines for the US Navy.

A visit to his sister in Dubai took him back to the Middle East, where he has been living until moving to the Algarve. He got a job offer in Abu Dhabi working on building ships for their navy and after 10 years he was managing the 1200 people working on building the Baynunah class missile corvettes.

Mickey enjoyed over 40 years in metal trades, during which time he displayed some artwork in Dubai and Connecticut and was commissioned for individual pieces for people´s homes and businesses. Having retired he is now free to pursue his love for metal craft full-time. He does not use a mould or heat the metal but works from a flat sheet which is hand-hammered with an anvil so each work is totally unique.

I visit Mickey and his wife Mary at their idyllic stone clad cottage they are renting in the beautiful un-spoilt countryside which is providing him with the inspiration he needs for his artwork. A keen angler he enjoys being close to the ocean and much of his work is inspired by the ocean and marine life. He shows me his workshop in the garden and explains that it started out as wooden pallets with a tarpaulin for shade. Not surprisingly for a man who has spent his life working in the building trade, he has constructed a make-shift building out of recycled materials he has found around the property.

His biggest challenge since moving to Portugal has been sourcing the equipment he needs for his craft, all his own tools being still in shipment carrier in Dubai, the most difficult being an anvil which they finally found online and needed to collect from Sintra. Fortunately, his partner Mary has Portuguese ancestry and was born in India but has lived in Brazil, so she has a good grasp of the language. They have found tools in flea markets and even travelled to Lisbon to buy a roller set which Mickey had to carry back on the train.

Currently, his favourite working metal is Aluminum as he says it is so light that you can create large artworks which are not too heavy to hang on a wall without support. He would like to work more with copper but is yet to find a supplier locally. He is now looking to expand his commercial enterprise but Mickey is not looking to make a big financial gain, he is merely wishing to fund his art which he does for the love of working with metal.

He shows me some examples of creations, which range from abstract to incredibly realistic depictions of sardines, which he is currently selling very successfully through a gift-shop Martina in Loulé, to abstract statues.

It was by no means a foregone conclusion that they would stay in Portugal but Mary tells me it has been almost serendipity how everything fell into place since coming here, from finding their quirky cottage on Facebook to finding a scrap yard from where Mickey is now sourcing recycled metal. They have found the Portuguese to be particularly friendly and welcoming to them and find that Europe is a happy medium between the US and Dubai which they thought had lost its identity in the last few years. He is expecting his children and grandchildren with be regular visitors and Mickey´s sister already has a house in Loulé.

“I take what´s available and work with it;” Mickey grins, his work demonstrates his artistic flair with each individual piece reflecting nature in a different way from a table he was commissioned to make with legs expertly crafted to look like coral, to a shoal of fish he created for the walls of a fish restaurant in Muscat.

If you ask him which is his best work the answer is always “The next one;” which seems an apt response from this thoughtful artist, who is truly the epitome of a craftsman.