"As an artist I want to make sculpture that exhibits the skills and techniques that I have developed as a metal worker over the last 30 years. My method of sculpting steel is uniquely a product of my involvement and experience’s in the metal fabrication and ship building industry of LA. As a sculptor I have taken this experience and modified it into techniques to carved and shape steel figurative sculptures that are uniquely identifiable as my work." Over the last 4 decades, the 69-year-old, self-taught artist has gained national recognition for his remarkable, life-size, and sometimes larger-than-life welded and carved steel sculpture that have won awards and appeared in shows across North America from Montreal to California. His list of commissioned work includes a full-size steel buffalo for New Orleans art benefactor William Goldring and a nine-foot-tall steel rooster for the E. & J. Gallo winerys in California. Gallo is Italian for “rooster.”Another dramatic work depicts the Greek mythological winged “Icarus” that now stands perched over the Tennessee River in Chattanooga’s River Gallery Sculpture Gardens. Closer to home, Whiting’s “Man Conquers Chair” stood on Poydras Street in New Orleans from 2012 to 2014 as part of the Helis Foundation’s Poydras Corridor Sculpture Exhibition. Also he has carved from steel a life-size statue of the proclaimed father of Zydeco music Amédé Ardoin for the St. Landry Parish Visitors Center at I-49 north of Opelousas.The creative incubator for his art is located on five secluded, wooded acres east of Breaux Bridge where Whiting lives with his wife Michelle Vallot, a retired federal public defender, and founder-operator of Zydeco Foods. Their house, set in a large garden with a pond, rusting sugar kettles, round millstones, and his statues, is itself a work of art built in the 1960s by a landscape architect Whiting has developed a painterly style of cutting and working steel unlike anyone else. Just as painters use brushes, paints and canvases, Whiting uses oxy-acetylene torches to carve graceful figures and mythological deities from three-inch steel plates that he purchases at local salvage yards. Each project begins with a concept either drawn from his imagination or commissioned.“These images are all in my head,” he says. “When I was a kid, I went to the cinema all the time. I was always in a fantasy world. Once Whiting has a concept, he cuts out a series of silhouettes of that design in three-inch steel plates. He then layers one over the other and welds those layers into a single block. Next he uses his torch to carve the image from the metal block. He describes the process as a “fusion of classicism and contemporary execution.” To achieve that fusion, he lets the torch decide what the finished work will look like.“It’s like magic,” he says. “There’s nothing like the torch.”