There’s an old Johnny Cash song, “One Piece at a Time,” where the man in black details the many disparate pieces used to make his Cadillac. Local artist Chris Ivanoff can relate.

Ivanoff has been hard at work on his latest piece, “Betsy on the Prowl,” a carefully proportioned metal sculpture made using farm equipment, oil field gear, shop tools and trampoline springs.

“It’s a T. rex … and when I initially created her, and I didn’t have this [part] and I had this part, a lot of times I’ll look at a part and I figure out what it becomes, and it can’t become just anything. It has to become kind of like what it evolves into,” Ivanoff said.

He added that the creature hanging from between Betsy’s teeth (harvested from a tiller) is either being carried or eaten. It’s up to the viewer to decide the fate of the small mouselike creature made using nuts, bolts and a mechanical chain.

An important part of making something like this is ensuring proportion and symmetry. For Betsy, Ivanoff spent time researching dimensions which he found depends on the age of the prehistoric beast, he said. 

From there, careful consideration had to go into finding the right piece to fit Betsy’s frames and matching the set proportions.

“But what makes it especially fun for the viewer is that you can’t just look at it like a painting for, you know, five or 10 seconds — it requires more time.”

Since it’s a three dimensional piece, a viewer would want to walk around it and there are “virtually” hundreds of different parts welded together to make Betsy, who weighs somewhere in the ballpark of 300 pounds.

The inspiration for the work came from T. rex’s history in Wyoming, he said. While they are found more in the eastern part of Wyoming Ivanhoff believes some fossils have been found near Greybull.

“Wyoming has the second most species of dinosaurs, right behind Montana in the United States … and this [sculpture] here, it intrigues adults as well as children. And I want children to become more aware of art, and this is one way to do it, because most children love dinosaurs … now, adults love dinosaurs too, they just don’t admit it.”

Ivanoff’s experience with metal work goes back about 30 years, when he received an education in welding from Northwest College and was a structural pipe welder before working as a sheriff’s deputy for 25 years. 

Ivanoff’s two main hobbies are metal working and teaching Taekwondo. In the past his sculptures have been juried into year-long exhibitions in places like Gillette and Sheridan as well as the Yellowstone Art Museum. But for the last eight years he’s been working on his house (which also includes some artistic touches he fabricated).

Now, he’s looking to get back into the hobby, enter some shows and hopefully make some money.

“It’s a rather expensive hobby. Welding is very expensive, any kind of machinery or the consumables such as welding rod or plasma cutter tools or oxygen, acetylene, it’s all very expensive, and it’s very labor intensive,” Ivanoff said. “Plus this type of old recycled parts, a lot of people don’t realize, but they’re actually much, much harder to weld together.”

Rusted up metal will crumble away and has to be cleaned. On top of that, some of the old pieces are actually cast metal and cast iron which don’t weld well to mild steel.

“They can develop cracks if they weld up too fast with a lot of heat,” Ivanoff explained, and when using recycled parts they have to be removed from the machinery and cleaned.

Betsy is getting close to completion and the rusty pile of metal at her feet will likely turn into terrain. Projects like these are a lot of work and Ivanoff often has multiple projects running at the same time to avoid burnout — right now he’s working on both a bear and trout piece cut and fabricated out of flat, mild steel.

“If you’re doing metal artwork, sometimes you get frustrated, and it brings out emotions within yourself because things don’t always go right,” Ivanoff said. “So you jump onto another project … a week or month later, you’ll figure it out in your mind, you may be sleeping, you may be awake, but when that happens, then you’ll come out and go, ‘OK, I’m ready to go again.’”

It’s been a fun project to do.

“I don’t really enjoy watching TV that much … what gives me satisfaction is just accomplishing something,” Ivanoff said, adding, “Everybody’s got the ability to accomplish something.”