RUBINOFF’S STUDIO
Jeffrey Rubinoff kept the technical side of his work private. The photographs, video, and documents gathered here provide a closer look at how ideas moved from physical experiments and dimensioned drawings into welded steel.
Inside the Studio
Rubinoff rarely let people into this technical space, as Dr. James Fox, the first JRSP Educational Programme Director, found out:
Dr. Fox: “Is this your workshop in here, the secret workshop, nobody is allowed in?”
Rubinoff: “I just absolutely don’t want to talk technical matters with anybody. It is the last thing in the world to talk about. I know I have very good technique. The answer to that particular thing is: if you go to hear a quartet play, you expect them to be able to play the music. So I can play the music, that’s all I need to say.”
Rubinoff felt that focusing on his mastery of sculptural craft allowed viewers to avoid a more challenging spiritual encounter with his art.
Nonetheless, a look inside the studio conveys the immense force of will required for Rubinoff to realize more than 100 sculptures while working entirely unassisted.
Video (11:21): The Man and the Material: Rubinoff’s Tools and Machines. Published by the Jeffrey Rubinoff Sculpture Park on August 13, 2026. Longtime friend and landscape collaborator John Kirk explains the history and uses of the machines and tools Rubinoff used in producing more than 100 stainless- and Cor-ten-steel sculptures. Watch on YouTube.
Rubinoff resisted discussions of technique, but the video and photographs make the studio’s technical demands visible.
Designing the Work
To design these pieces, I would use little kids blocks and let it fall. I would build the piece and let it fall. I would then remember how it felt in my hands, and that would become the piece. These pieces also changed the way I worked. Each piece was absolutely completed before the next piece was done. Unlike in the earlier work, where I would have three pieces going in the studio at once, this time I wanted each piece complete.
Rubinoff Tour Transcripts, 2008-11
View the supplied technical drawings (PDF, 3 pages, 1.4 MB)
Working in Steel
When steel comes into my studio, it brings to me grey nothing. If it’s stainless steel, it’s gray nothing; if it’s sandblasted steel, it’s gray nothing. That was the way I wanted to start all of these works. The first shape forms the first melodic phrase. So, that you start from the analogical and you then move to the metaphorical in counterpoint to realize art.
Excerpt from Jeffrey Rubinoff, “Liberation of art from the analogue,” commentary during the 2009 Company of Ideas Forum, p. 9 (PDF)
From Studio to Sculpture
In the winter of 1968 a fellow graduate student taught Rubinoff the basics of welding. He embraced the torch, and steel, drawn to its touch, feel, smell, and sight, even the sparks that flew when the flame hit the metal.
Joan Pachner, Jeffrey Rubinoff and David Smith: A Dialogue in Steel (1969-83)
Continue Exploring
Continue from the studio into the sculptures themselves, or go deeper into Rubinoff’s method and ideas.