ARTISTS IN PORTRAIT : S.D. Sculptor Takes a Stab at Recording His Intellect

Sculptor Kenneth Capps is a passionate iconoclast who has no compunction about biting those hands that might feed him.

A fiercely independent thinker, he finds himself working in the face of what he calls encroaching mediocrity. Just thinking about the trip from his Carlsbad home and studio to San Diego sets him off.

“You drive down the freeway, it’s one antiseptic (building) after the other,” Capps said, his voice rising. “I think we’re living in the most antiseptic culture of mankind in this country. I think they’re trying to put everyone to sleep. My God, and they’re very successful doing so.”

Solitary as a clam when it comes to work, he prefers strict isolation so that he can tune out North County’s architectural noise. He works either at his home studio or a rough-hewn shop in a scruffy, aging industrial park along Highway 101 near Encinitas.

Despite a history of working with iron and other metals that dates back to his years as a teen-age mechanic and motorcyclist, Capps denies that the hands-on work is what stimulates him.

“I was thinking about it the other day,” the burly artist said. “I have no love affair with steel. I have no love affair with welding. Mostly, working’s about preparing yourself to work and about getting yourself in a state where you can do your strongest production. It’s trying to reach this working state. It’s honing in--all those adjectives of piercing thought, piercing through thoughts.”

The trick is to snag the right idea among all the thoughts, he said.

“So much is like there’s this continual bombardment of information going through me all the time. I always feel like I’m behind. I’m just only catching a fragment of it. And then when I start working, it’s so frustrating because I feel like there’s so much that was lost between what really went through me and (what) ends up happening . . . .

“The only priority is the most immediate state of my intellect and trying to record it. That’s all it’s about--recording my intellect.”

Capps is vague about his background, acknowledging that he “dropped in and out of college. I had a hard time getting my act together, you might say. So I did a variety of things.”

Before ending up in the UC San Diego art department, he raced and built motorcycles, establishing a relationship with steel that still pervades his life.

“I was at a gut level with the internal makings of the machinery,” he said of motorcycles. “I mean literally. I tried to build this thing and I tried to stay on it. I tried to compete. It was like a bucking bronco.”

Even today, a particularly fascinating piece of sculpture can have the same attraction, and he will want to be inside a piece that has a mystery to him.

Some of Capps’ hefty, geometric steel shapes have been acquired by museums, colleges and government agencies, such as the San Diego Unified Port District. The port district placed three of Capps’ “konoids” at Bay Park in Chula Vista.

Despite such diverse purchases, Capps claims he doesn’t have a following of admirers.

“I have no audience. I’m working in total isolation. People think that Kenneth Capps is this rich, famous artist. I don’t want them to know how poverty stricken I am. The reality of it is that I have no audience.”

Capps believes that collectors allow themselves to be influenced by gallery directors, critics, museum directors and curators, rather than depending on personal tastes, and he intends to build his audience through exhibits in museums and galleries.

However, he eschews art world talk of “meaning and content” in his pieces.

“The real content is the physical content of this image and it should have no conditions. But unfortunately most art is based on conditions.”