By Matt Skoufalos
Andrew Sandstedt has always been an artist, but it took some time for him to take his talents into the professional sphere. As a teenager, he’d considered pursuing an arts degree after high school; his parents convinced him to get a business degree instead. When Sandstedt would see his classmates clutching their art portfolios on campus, he’d think, “Well, maybe someday,” and redirect his focus to his schoolwork.
“In art, like anything you do with life, there’s all kinds of paths that build on each other and move you forward,” Sandstedt said. And so his passions continued to reveal themselves in the novel interludes of his day. Murals that Sandstedt had painted in his children’s bedrooms circulated at a baby shower, where an interior decorator took notice of his work.
She hired him on for a few commissions, and as job cuts came through the ad department at his newspaper job, Sandstedt took on more painting work to pick up the slack. Eventually, he spun off his own painting business, which ran from 2005 until 2018, delivering services like finishing, plastering, and mural arts, typically in high-end residential and some commercial settings.
“I had a lot of repeat business from people who I had worked for, and then worked with a woodworker, and stayed busy,” Sandstedt said.
After a divorce, however, Sandstedt needed full-time work. He had picked up a bit of welding instruction some years earlier, learning from the shop foreman at his father’s machining company on his lunch break. When he landed at the Holt, Michigan headquarters of Block Imaging, his skills were put to use as mechanical team lead, installing and de-installing medical imaging equipment at various sites across the country.
Neither did Sandstedt back-burner his artistic interests. When some friends at Friendland Industries, a metal processing plant in the Old Town district of Lansing, Michigan had an idea to showcase metal artists in town, Sandstedt put his welding acumen to use supporting an event they called ScrapFest.
“You have an hour to come in and pick up to 500 pounds of scrap, and then build something in a week,” Sandstedt said. “It was a fun thing, and then every year, I just kept doing it; coming back, and growing, and learning more about metalworking, and loving that art form.”
In 2023, ScrapFest will celebrate its 13th iteration; in that time, Sandstedt’s artworks have taken home two first-place wins, two second-place wins, and a people’s choice win. His pieces have also set the post-competition auction record three years in a row. After a time, he was recruited to craft the trophies for the ScrapFest winners, which led to a new line of business making custom metalwork trophies for events throughout the Old Town community – beard-growing competitions, business awards, and sports tournaments, to name a few. Sandstedt has even created trophies for in-house chili and basketball contests at Block Imaging.
“I’m going to make art until the day I die; I’m not just going to retire and do nothing,” Sandstedt said. “That’s why I love working at a place like Block that gives me the opportunity. My job lets me do a lot of things in life that the art might not let me do. Having a job that lets me take vacations and pay all my bills allows me to go make what I want to make.”
Sandstedt’s artist philosophy is “creativity within confines.” He enjoys the logical exercises of making art within the limitations of found objects, or a commissioned assignment, and expressing himself there.
“Sometimes people have such an open end to what they’re supposed to do that it limits them,” he said. “They can have so many options it’s hard to pick one.
“I always talk about the movie ‘Apollo 13,’ ” Sandstedt said. “Things go bad, and they have to fix the problem to get to Earth. They dump a box on the table and say, ‘Here’s what we have. How do we use this material to make it work?’ That’s why I love the challenge of using repurposed and reclaimed stuff: it forces you to completely think in a different way.”
Sandstedt doesn’t believe he will ever fully retire from working his weekday job, but he does intend to focus more on custom work, and eventually, a gallery show of his portfolio. He would like to design some furniture with his sons, a mechanic, a machinist, and a woodworker, respectively; he’d love to place one of his pieces in a sculpture park. But whatever form his work takes, it’s most important to Sandstedt that he continues to grow as an artist.
“People ask me, ‘What’s the best piece of art you’ve made?’ ” he said. “Well, I haven’t made it yet, but you can see the growth every year. The stuff I made when I was 25, versus 35, versus 45, it gets better all the time.”
“All these people that I admire, I always look at these big pieces and think, ‘How old was this artist when they made this?’ ” Sandstedt said. “It takes a while to hone in on what you’re good at, and get better and better. To be a master craftsman, you’re always learning, you’re always doing, you’re always teaching. I look at my nephews and sons who are in their early to mid 20s, and the deception of social media makes it look so easy for everybody to hit this stride full-tilt.”
As a working artist, Sandstedt also finds himself becoming an ambassador for the fine arts among friends and guests to his home. His walls and shelves are lined with original artworks from local artists, and when people ask him, “Where’d you get this?” he’s able to reinforce the connections that link the arts with their patrons.
“There’s some things that face-to-face interactions do,” Sandstedt said. “You’re not going to create this feel by something you’ve bought at Hobby Lobby or Target that’s been screen-printed and mass-produced.”
“When you communicate your craft to people, no matter what you do; when it’s original, and someone’s been developing and pouring themselves into it, it has an intangible X-factor that you can’t explain,” he said.
