Along the Muskingum River, just south of McConnellsville near the Morgan County Fairgrounds is a great place to catch some of the biggest fish you'll ever see.

Not what you were expecting?

Maybe you're more into deer?

Or birding?

These works of art - massive, free, and easily accessible - make up only a small portion of the burgeoning Ohio Art Corridor, brainchild of former medical rep turned welder David Griesmyer.

Hey, guys, thanks for coming.

Let's talk art.

David, with aspirations to start his own metal fabrication business, left the medical industry and moved to Ohio to learn welding in Marietta.

Now that you've been properly acquainted, we're going to let David take it from here.

A week after picking up this TIG torch and I was practicing, I let off the foot pedal and the metal solidified vertically.

And it's almost as if, like fireworks went off above my head.

This big epiphany that I don't have to stay flat.

And so that very minute I made a little hand coming out of the metal and just my heart just like, my goodness, I can do something I've never done before.

I made a foot and then an ankle, then a pant leg up to a knee, and I just kept going up.

I made a man who was hunched over, kneeling on one knee, and there he was, welding with his welding hood on a week after having picked up the torch.

I've never experienced this before in my life.

I have no formal art background.

The very next thing I did after I made this man welding was this sculpture behind me of this ballerina with a copper dress.

And I was like, This is what I want to do for the rest of my life.

I want to make sculptures.

I want to make beautiful things.

music My daughter had asked me, Dad, would you make me a dragonfly?

And so on the floor, I drew a 12 foot wide dragonfly wing, and I was like, Ohh, this is really big.

And I had all this extra rebar, steel bars around.

And and so I started welding these giant wings.

And then we started making the body and this thing is 25 foot wide now.

When we were making this, we didn't tell anybody in the community that we were making it.

And early, early in the morning, a friend of mine who has an excavator picked it up and we drove it to the center of town and without asking anybody for permission, we erected this 25 foot tall sculpture of a dragonfly on a cattail.

And everybody in the whole entire community was like, Where the heck did this thing come from?

And everybody was talking about this.

Just, you know, it's like a pop up sculpture that just, bam, it was big and it was new and exciting for the whole entire community that there was this thing.

And truthfully, I was willing to leave it there permanently until a county commissioner was like, Hey, Dave, we know it's yours, and we aren't sure about how to deal with this, so you need to take it back.

I'm like, Fine, I'll take it back.

But it spurred the idea if we do something large and we had more conversations about this, let's, let's do more large things.

And that is when it started really developing legs.

We can start putting sculptures leading to other towns and including other artists.

Ive driven across the United States many times.

There's always these giant signs that say in 275 miles, the world's largest rubber band ball.

And you're like, I really want to see it.

What's 30 miles out of my way now?

You know, so people get off the interstate to go see something that's unique.

People want to experience things.

They want to go places.

The Ohio Art Corridor is a destination experience where multiple pieces, sculptures, murals are being placed all throughout southeastern Ohio that you can drive to and see and have experiences touching and being a part of art.

It is an opportunity to showcase the things that are happening in southeastern Ohio.

This is the land of giants, the land of big things.

We want people to get off the interstate and drive through the small towns of southeastern Ohio, going from one sculpture the next, as well as then putting money into local economies, you know, stopping at the local coffee shop and local breweries.

Those are the things we want people to do.

My vision is to see every five miles a giant sculpture along the side of the road somewhere where you can like, all right, we're here.

But then five miles down the road is something new and you're driving to the next one.

I want it where you don't have enough time in the day to visit all the sculptures and art.

We would like this to be the largest outdoor art gallery in the world.

To make this a feasible thing we said, Look, let's make some rules.

We will incorporate artists that have already made large items like big murals and big sculptures if they're 12 foot or taller, they can be included.

If they're smaller than they have to be in at least a group of threes, so that it's not just somebody's sculpture in somebody's backyard and they have to be in a place where the public can come and visit.

We're looking for things that are indicative of the communities, things that are going to say This is a statement piece about our community.

The people of that town are saying, Yeah, we do want that.

We want to put our weight behind it.

Talk about School of Fish, it might not be provocative.

Yeah, it's not.

It's just three fish and it's three fish swimming, but it's large and it's fun.

And we've had students help make it.

And every student that put a little scale on one of the fish, we had them write their name on the back of that scale before it was welded in place.

So now we have buy in.

It's not just David Griesmyer, it's not just the artist that was working on it.

It's more than just one person.

And it's creating tourism, creating a positive energy with students and people who might want to come back and say, Look, I had a part in making that Appalachia sometimes gets a bad rap because of the misunderstandings of what's going on.

But it's such a tremendously beautiful place.

A beautiful place teeming with giants for those willing to look.

So who's ready to go fishing for art in southeast Ohio?