City of Stone, Work of Art : Sculptor’s Obsessions Find Surreal Form in Open-Air Artists’ Cooperative, Supplies Store

For kids, there is Disneyland. For sculptors and the Bohemian at heart, there is Art City.

Wedged between an auto salvage yard and an oil depot in Ventura’s scruffiest neighborhood, Art City is one of the West Coast’s largest sculpture supply businesses, a sprawling stone junkyard of the surreal that carries everything from alabaster and bowling balls to soapstone and steel coils.

But that’s only one dimension of this quirky place. Scratch beneath the surface and like rough rock that conceals rare marble, Art City reveals a thriving artists’ cooperative where up to six sculptors share studio space, inspire each other and create their three-dimensional visions.

And at the heart of it all stands Paul Lindhard.

Lindhard, a 41-year-old Ventura sculptor, is the “mayor” of Art City. His vision created it 3 years ago in an industrial compound off Ventura Avenue; his energy and labor keep it functioning today as both a studio and supply business.

For Lindhard, Art City is the full-blown realization of ideas he had toyed with in five earlier studios and 10 years of teaching sculpture at Santa Barbara City College.

“It’s something I’ve thought about for years,” Lindhard said. “The studio’s a way of having a freewheeling creative environment for people, a sharing of energy. I get to watch people flower from their raw potential.”

Many of the sculptors who are beginning to blossom in the art world credit Lindhard for their interest in the cool, dry medium of stone.

“He was an inspiration,”said Steve Knauff, a former Lindhard student and Art City denizen who recently won a commission to design a monumental sculpture across from San Francisco’s City Hall. “He led me to think in entirely different concepts about what is possible . . . that nothing is too unexpected or too crazy to attempt.”

Like many Lindhard proteges, Knauff makes occasional pilgrimages back to Art City to recharge his creative batteries in the clean Ventura air.

For Lindhard, greater commercial success is also close at hand.

Earlier this year, the city of Oxnard awarded him a $24,000 commission for its “Art in Public Places” program. The work--an abstract “emerging form” to be carved from a 12,000-pound chunk of red-and-black California marble that Lindhard wants to transport by helicopter from the Mojave Desert--will grace McGrath Industrial Park in northeast Oxnard.

Lindhard is also planning an informal gallery at Art City to showcase the works of co-op sculptors.

And thanks to numerous scavenging trips to gather stone from desert quarries, wood from orchards gone to seed and industrial artifacts from Ventura’s dumpsters, Lindhard said, his inventory will now lure the most demanding of sculptors to Art City. Art City sells about $1,000 worth of materials each month--a figure he soon hopes to double.

The extra income from commissions and sales will allow Lindhard to devote more time to art. And Lindhard’s most monumental work is the ever-evolving Art City.

“Paul builds environments,” said Somers Randolph, a Montecito sculptor who has known Lindhard for 20 years. “Sculptors come here and they understand. You walk in and immediately you feel at home.”

But Art City is not a typical domestic scene. A jumble of thrown-together “studios” cluster in the center of Art City’s 1-acre lot. They are cobbled together with wood beams and topped with corrugated fiberglass roofs. Most work spaces are open to the air, although some have moveable wall partitions. Along the perimeter are wooden pallets, hunks of metal, concrete cylinders and an inexhaustible variety of industrial bric-a-brac, some of it stacked 10 feet high.

“I like creating out of chaos,” said Lindhard, an unassuming, blond man with intense blue eyes.

He is laconic, sheepish when talking about himself. But mention stone, and he grows expansive. He wants to stock Italian marble, for instance, and explains how he’d go about collecting it.

“Seeing it down in the stone yard wouldn’t do it for me,” he said. “I want to climb the mountain, hike around, go through the rubble. I’d happily spend several weeks sifting through thousands of years of quarrying.”

He has a profound love for the mountains and has been known to say small prayers of thanks for finding good stone, which he collects with almost spiritual fervor.

“I feel passionately about it,” Lindhard said. “That’s the only reason this business exists, because I got so enamored that I started collecting a lot more than I could possibly use. It was like having hundreds of tons of children.”

He picks up a petrified stone, which he calls a Bonsai rock. “I couldn’t improve upon it,” he said, handling the stone as if it were the Hope diamond. “This stone is a follicle from the mountain. It could be a billion years old.”

At Art City, works in progress are everywhere. On a bench stands the stone torso of a woman, a piece of sheer, purple hosiery knotted around her waist. An 8-foot musical note, which Lindhard is carving out of marble for a shopping center in Redlands, lies half-finished, next to a plywood model of the work.

Commonplace items are put to innovative uses. A rusting scoreboard from a high school gymnasium functions as a wall partition. The backing to a red vinyl booth from Ventura’s Sportsman Restaurant is flipped on its side, suspended from a beam and, presto, a doorway arch.

No artifact is too bizarre or impractical for Lindhard’s collection. He is especially partial to things that come in large quantities, like the hundreds of black-walnut tree stumps that he wrenched from a Fillmore field with a pickup truck and ropes. Or the artfully arranged piles of old tires, stacked at crazy angles in a mute paean to the Automobile Age, a rubberized Watts Towers. Or the chalky slabs of Texas limestone, dotted with fossils.

In one corner of the compound, Christmas lights cast an otherworldly sheen on faded political cartoons clipped out of newspapers and tacked on wooden beams. In another, Dan Layman, a video artist who owns Roscoe’s Auto Salvage next door, has rigged up a set of strobe lights that enact a nightly laserium show.

Then there’s the giant wood milk crate, home to a bevy of baby dolls--the kind with glass eyes and synthetic, hay-like hair--whose bare limbs lie tossed together in an undignified heap.

“At some point in time, a dump truck full of baby dolls might make an interesting conceptual piece,” Lindhard said.

But Art City is no gray, industrial wasteland. Orange canna flowers poke out of clumps of grass. Bougainvillea tumbles down corrugated fiberglass sheds. Olive trees and eucalyptus provide shade, and in a cordoned-off plot, the artists grow tomatoes, squash and garlic.

Throughout, there are cacti and succulents, donated by Santa Barbara artist Leila Dwight, who keeps a studio at Art City and extols its cross-pollination of artists and communal values.

“When a pillar needs to go up, there are eight sets of hands conscripted to help,” she said.

Until he moved to San Francisco this month, two of those hands belonged to Robert Catalusci, a 24-year-old former Santa Barbara City College student.

Catalusci sculpts tortured wood torsos splashed with angry red paint and driven through with railroad spikes. Or metal assemblages like the chilling “Lovers at Ground Zero,” which depicts two skeletal armatures in frozen motion on a rusted swing set. For months, the work stood on a grassy patch at Art City, evoking a post-nuclear playground.

“We were a real community,” Catalusci said of Art City. “It was just great to bounce ideas off your friends and have moral support.”

The steady procession through Art City has not gone unnoticed in the professional art world.

“A lot of important artists will come out of there. It’s a fountainhead, home to the best group of sculptors on the West Coast,” said Bennett Roberts of the Richard-Bennett Gallery in Los Angeles, who estimates that about 100 sculptors work in the Santa Barbara/Ventura area.

Lindhard has been midwife to an entire generation of sculptors, his friends said. The artists come and go, but Lindhard stays, sculpting smooth, sensual, disciplined figures at odds with the sprawl of Art City.

But then, Lindhard is at odds with much of the professional art world. He has exhibited his work at several Southern California galleries. One of his works, “Wind Spirit,” is on the mall in front of the state Capitol building in Lincoln, Neb. Others are in private collections.

But Lindhard doesn’t go out of his way to court commercial success. “In the past 5 years, I’ve lost all interest in galleries,” he said.

These days Franky’s Place, a Ventura restaurant, is one of the few West Coast places that displays his work.

For now, he concerns himself with his sculpture, Art City and monthly trips to the quarries of the Mojave Desert and the gypsum mines of Utah, New Mexico and Colorado, where he goes armed with such handbooks as “Gem Trails of California.”

With friends drafted for the occasion, Lindhard uses brute force and an A-frame truck (which is equipped with a crane) to load the booty onto a flatbed and cart it back to Art City.

“You should see Paul running around in a quarry, hiking across a half-mile of stone to get to a little gem that’s wedged under 2 tons of rock,” said Randolph, the Montecito sculptor. “He’ll spend 2 hours moving the big ones to get the one prime piece.”

Browsers can choose from Mexican onyx to California verde antique marble and Colorado pink and white alabaster. Lindhard also sells carving woods like manzanita burls, avocado, black acacia, cypress and black walnut.

“He has one of the best selections in California,” gallery owner Roberts said.

Sculptors come from as far away as Oregon, New Mexico and Virginia. David Breedon, a Charlottesville, Va., sculptor, spent a month at Art City last spring and came away impressed.

“Paul’s a good critic, and he’d give you the shirt off his back,” said Breedon, who praised the unpretentious atmosphere. “There’s not a lot of distractions. You can concentrate on your work from daylight until dusk.”

Art City is not Lindhard’s first stab at living art.

Lindhard also ran another studio between 1983 and 1985 in Santa Barbara’s Savoy Theater, back when it was a dark, dank site ripe for revitalization.

With friends, he converted a portion into living quarters and studios and presided over the “Backdoor Gallery,” where 20 artists would gather once a month at midnight to discuss and exhibit their work, entering from the rear alley.

The Savoy era ended in 1985 when a new owner evicted Lindhard. So he dismantled what he could, beam by beam, and moved to Art City in eight semi-truck loads, 200 station wagon trips and 150 pickup truck trips, Lindhard recalled.

Lindhard has no regrets about leaving Santa Barbara.

But every once in a while, when the ocean air chills his bones, Lindhard wishes that stone didn’t weigh so much.

“Sculpture’s real physical. It takes a toll,” he said. “Moving all this stone around, sometimes I feel 80 years old.”