Welded Forms in Yard : Sculptor’s Steel ‘Garden’ Blooms With Art Oddities
The bright daisies that once bloomed in Mark Bulwinkle’s front yard have been displaced by a dark tangle of steel stretching around his house, over the roof and skyward, like a mutant metal berry bush.
Nestled together are wildly funny, confusing and, to some, offensive metal cutouts with titles like “Tied Up,” “Weird Chicken,” “Weldo,” “Woman Out for a Walk,” “Scaredy Cat” and, at the top, “Dog Barking at the Moon.”
“They’re welder’s poems, that’s what I call them,” said the bespectacled, jeans-clad Bulwinkle, a printmaker, ceramics artist, sculptor and shipyard welder.
“People come by and ask if I’m an artist, and I say, ‘I don’t know. Am I?’ ” he said, surveying what he has wrought.
Ghoulish to Comic
There are ghoulish, glaring faces next to simple, comic scenes and sexually explicit forms that make passers-by gawk and giggle.
“Some of it’s almost psychopathic and there’s a whole other end of it that is real cute. It’s just the way I bump into things . . . maybe it was the shipyards,” he says.
“People are like that. Inside of each person there are a lot of different things,” said Bulwinkle, who wants his work to make people re-examine their ideas and adjust their conventional perceptions.
Although Bulwinkle agreed to an interview, he jealously guards the address of the home that serves as his workshop and personal gallery. Even so, the modest house sometimes attracts curious sightseers to the quiet neighborhood.
Asked how neighbors feel about his non-traditional landscaping, he says: “I know some of them hate it. It’s kind of live-and-let-live here, as long as you’re not really bothering anyone.”
Full-Time Job
What began as something he dabbled in for years has become a full-time, profitable job. Bulwinkle has pieces on display at galleries in San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Connecticut and New York. He also works on commission and sells to collectors.
At Jamison Thomas galleries in New York, Portland and Salem, Ore., Bulwinkle’s art is among the most popular, said critic William Jamison, adding that it appeals to adults and children alike.
“The first and foremost thing about Mark’s work is that it is so direct . . . it touches a real chord on what American life is all about. There’s a sense of humor about his work and at the same time, it sometimes is right on the cutting edge,” Jamison said.
“It has sort of a folk-like quality, a sort of innocence, a frank, direct quality,” said Alice Jennings at the John Berggruen Gallery in San Francisco. “It’s hard not to like it for those qualities.”
Once Unappreciated
When he began about 20 years ago, most people didn’t appreciate his work, the Boston native recalled.
“Now everybody has degenerated to that point,” he said with a wry smile. Bulwinkle studied printmaking at the San Francisco Art Institute and says he has blended techniques learned on an Alaskan pipeline project as well as in the shipyards. Steel lends itself to cutout forms and its flatness makes it much like paper, he said.
There are six years’ and two tons’ worth of work tangled in his small backyard. In the middle are lights, wheels and a water fountain. There also are human and animal-like silhouettes. A few old work boots dangle from the metal. Bulwinkle says he used a welding repair technique to help convey a “kind of desperation” in the piece.
Some of Bulwinkle’s works are left rusty, while others are painted “thick and rough like a ship.” Although he doesn’t like to mix materials, he uses wood or other substances if he thinks they make a piece “metamorphically correct.”
“I kind of do stuff and step back and say, ‘What the hell have I done this time’ . . . it’s real improvisational,” he said.
He works on one piece for a while, then moves on to something else before returning to the first. “I think it’s a good way of not repeating yourself--just becoming a manufacturer. I do something more spiritual.”
