ART / Allan Jalon : Todd’s Work Is Linguistic, So to Speak

Michael Todd’s analogies for how he creates sculpture tend to be linguistic and musical. “I start by building a language,” said Todd, whose abstract pieces in metal are on view at the Laguna Art Museum and Chapman College’s Guggenheim Gallery.

“When I start, I want to have shapes around me,” he said. “Each shape is a different word or phrase or sentence or paragraph--some are heavy paragraphs and some are light. Then there is the silence between phrases, the spaces between the shapes.

“I think of myself as a composer in space.”

Starting a piece at the Guggenheim Gallery called “Western Mountain,” earlier this year, he first cast 10 versions of the jagged, mountainlike shape for its base and placed them around the 7,000-square-foot warehouse in Los Angeles’ Silver Lake that includes his studio and home. Then he tried combinations of geometric forms with the base, looking for the “visual-mental tug” that tells him there is “a dialogue between two shapes.”

When that happens, he and his assistant weld the pieces lightly, study the result and decide whether to make a more conclusive weld. This is how Todd, who has been showing sculpture around Los Angeles for 20 years, spends the day. He has no supervisor but his muse. He has no salary, though he sells enough work for a comfortable life style, complete with a getaway ranch in Ventura County. “When the work is going well, it just flows, like music,” he said. When it’s not flowing he might stop and go see a movie. “Movies have some kind of beneficial psychic result for me. Maybe it’s the escape. Then I find I can start again.”

Balding, with a soft, reasonable-looking face, Todd is a self-described loner who enjoys his creative solitude, the constant trial and error with his shapes. He often works with metal rings that sometimes contain, sometimes seemingly set free from gravity, a constellation of cubes, grids, crosses and free-form shapes that the artist likens to jazz and verbal “punctuation.”

Todd, 52, said he aims for a blend of abstraction, emotion and metaphor. He said his basic skills give him a technical freedom: he holds art degrees from Notre Dame University and UCLA and worked in Paris on a Fulbright Fellowship for three years. His work partly reflects that of artists he has admired, including painter Arshile Gorky and sculptor David Smith.

All the classes and absorbed influences have joined into an intuition that guides him when, for example, he uses the metal ring in “Western Mountain” to hold up a shape that looks like a midair puddle.

Where did the shape come from? “I got that from pouring molten bronze into sand. It creates a kind of spill shape, a different shape every time. I spent an entire day pouring 20 or 30 of those shapes and trying to decide which one I liked. You just get a feeling about what will work.”

At the same time he was working on “Western Mountain,” he proceeded with about 10 other sculptures, moving back and forth among them. All the sculptures in such a series, he said, become part of one sweeping progress toward a better understanding of some basic problem. The challenge with the “Western Mountain” series was: “How to get that ring up into space. How can I throw things out into space, sort of like planets, and freeze them there?”

It isn’t just a technical problem, Todd said. He spoke of his work as an attempt to “defy gravity,” and said there is a spiritual aspect to that effort.

He described his strict Catholic upbringing in Chicago. He said crossed metal sticks welded to one side of the ring have an intended tie to fledgling artistic efforts in which he painted “some really grotesque” scenes of Christ on the cross. The metal ring represents his response to Western and Eastern concepts about transcending physical bonds.

“In the circle, there is a suggestion of cosmos. In Japanese Zen brush painting, a very simple circular stroke represents the cosmos, everything and nothing. There is a suggestion of continuity. I leave the circle open to suggest the way out, of not being trapped. . . . I guess that if Einstein can believe in God, then I can, too. I’m attracted to the idea of the supreme intelligence and being surrounded by that intelligence.”

Translating such concepts into physical forms comes more easily on some days than on others.

He said he is most creative in the morning. He goes to work about 8 a.m. across the studio from his wife, Patti Alexakis, a painter. Two days a week, he has an assistant help him with the labors of welding and casting.

“I’m very self-motivated,” an attribute he said fostered while living in New York in the mid-’60s. “Back there, life was sort of grim living in the canyons of Manhattan, where the only essential beauty of life is in your studio and the outside is unattractive. You learn to stay inside and work.”

Sculpting is highly physical labor, at least when he is not deluged with the paper work that artists have to do: sending slides to art consultants and dealers, writing letters, paying bills for supplies. He said he typically ends the day exhausted, falls into bed and watches television. “I don’t have the energy I had when I used to work 12-hour days,” he said.

But hasn’t the reward of seeing “Western Mountain” and other pieces go on exhibit pushed up his energy level?

“Oh, yes, it’s a charge for a few days. Then you have to get back to the studio and get back to work.”