John Dotto

When metal fabricator John Dotto needs to get away for some creative time, he steals away to the office he designed and built – in a metal shipping container. It features a large cut-out window that Dotto covers with a slab of steel that rolls over the opening like a barn door.

Metal surrounds Dotto’s life like his office. While studying in the Visual and Public Arts Program at CSU Monterey Bay 17 years ago, he wanted to learn to weld so he could create metal sculptures. Figuring the best way to learn was to actually do it, he took a job sweeping floors at Metal Specialties, located on Del Monte Boulevard across from Monterey Municipal Beach.

“I was a dry sponge,” he says of soaking up what his mentors had to teach him. “I kind of fell in love with the trade.”

He never did finish the program at CSUMB, but 12 years ago, he took over managing Metal Specialties, and seven years ago he and his wife, Heather, bought the business. Dotto and his core crew of about a dozen fabricators employ a full range of metal fabrication techniques, including custom machining (cutting metal into precise shapes), blacksmithing (forging steel and iron), and waterjet cutting (using a powerful stream of water for precision cuts). A large part of the business is in building architectural structures.

Last month, the Monterey Conference Center announced Dotto would create a signature outdoor sculpture on the plaza outside of the newly renovated center, estimated to open this summer. The 17-foot-diameter, 4-foot-high metal sculpture will feature a school of fish shaped like a big donut, Dotto says.

But don’t call him an artist or sculptor­ – he insists on being called a fabricator.

Dotto took a break to sit down with the Weekly inside his metal office to talk about the sculpture and the business.

Weekly: Tell us about your plan for the Conference Center fish sculpture.

Dotto: I wanted to make something that looked like it came from Monterey. It’s a neat, amazingly tight-knit community [where] people made their living fishing, and since the building is pretty contemporary, it married the two together. It’s all going to be made out of a series of stainless steel cut-outs that resemble fish. I’m trying to capture the notion of movement. Each will be welded to the other, so each one will build off the next. Right now we’re at about 1,400 cut-outs; I think it’s about 9,000 to 10,000 pounds.

What do you love about the metal business?

We’re fabricators, so as a fabricator it’s kind of an undefined trade. There are aspects of it that are really technical and really defined, but it’s a unique blend of creativity and engineering. In most trades, you ask them to do something and out of 10 shops you’ll get two or three different options. But if you give 10 fabrication companies the same project, they will have 10 different ways of doing it. It’s a lot of high-deductive reasoning for our trade. So the appeal is always changing, at least for what we do. It’s a lot of problem solving. We happen to know how to use metal, but most of what we do is solve problems.

Your website says no job is too small. What’s the smallest job you’ll take on?

There are some jobs so small I say I can’t even justify charging you. Most people expect that we’re more expensive than we are. I get a lot of people who come in and apologize for the jobs they bring to us. But we’re a job shop. We do small handrails for little old ladies, or if you break a part off your bike we’ll glue it back on. We don’t discriminate.

You’ve built some stunning structures along the Big Sur coastline, using steel framing and metal finishes. Do you ever get distracted by the view while you’re high up on scaffolding, welding together steel beams?

Visually it can be overwhelming. I laugh because I’ll take progress shots – I like the shots of the things that are unfinished more than the shots of things that [are complete]. It’s funny, at least to me, because in most of the pictures we take the backdrop will look ridiculously nice. So we’re just welding in the middle of nowhere. You can almost see the curve of the Earth. It keeps it fun; we’re really pretty spoiled. I tend not to really self-reflect, I never pause and enjoy the moment, so the jobs that really make me pause and appreciate it are the ones on the ocean like that.