ART / Cathy Curtis : This UC Irvine Professor Has Waited Since 1983 for His Arc Wave to Break

One day in 1983, when artist Tony DeLap was up in Los Angeles for the day, someone told him about an architectural competition for a gateway to Santa Monica, spanning Wilshire Boulevard at Centinela Avenue.

Nah, he thought. Competitions are too much bother.

But as he drove back to his home in Corona del Mar, he found himself thinking about the piece. It could be in steel, he mused. Maybe a big wave coming in. The next morning he picked up a pencil and started making drawings.

“Of course, as soon as you do that you’re hooked,” the bearded, ruminative artist remarked the other day in his spacious home studio. “It’s like a bad habit.”

His winning entry, “The Big Wave,” is a slender, 46-foot-high steel arc in the stylized shape of a wave that twists around on itself, illuminated by night with recessed lighting. The piece will finally be sited June 1, a few weeks after the close of an exhibit of his recent paintings, drawings and prints at Jan Turner Gallery in Los Angeles (through May 13).

As the years went by and the Santa Monica Arts Foundation still had not come up with the $100,000 budgeted for the piece, DeLap, now 61, began to wonder whether it would ever be erected. And then, when the money was finally raised, he was faced with the problem of having the gateway built and properly engineered on a budget woefully stingy by 1989 standards.

“We went to one fabricator who gave us a price that was $20,000 more than what we were doing (the whole piece) for,” DeLap said.

Finally, he went to a lawyer friend, James W. Obrien of Costa Mesa, “who really took the reins of this thing. . . . It needed to be done by someone who worked well with people, who had the ability to read contracts.”

Although DeLap likes “the permanency, the challenges” of large-scale work, he finds it hard to believe that an artist could actually enjoy dealing with all the rigmarole involved in creating a public project. Even in the ‘60s, when he was making free-standing plexiglass-and-aluminum sculptures that had to be fabricated commercially, he was frustrated by having to be so dependent on other people.

“I’d go to a machinist to get something done, and he’d say it would be ready in 2 weeks, (but) I knew it would take a month. I just decided one day that I didn’t want to live like that. What I really wanted to do is work in the studio by myself. I wanted to make things. I wanted to work out things.

“When I went back to working with wood and canvas and making drawings, it was real comfortable for me. . . . Those materials feel rich and kind of luxurious to me in combination.”

DeLap called the wood-and-canvas pieces he has been making since the early ‘70s, “paintings,” although they really operate, in a sly way, as sculptures.

Until recently, these geometrically shaped works had flat front surfaces. You had to step up to the sides of the pieces to see how they executed a little curvy twist--like a Mobius strip--as they moved toward the wall. (DeLap’s trademark torque can also be found in the silhouette of “The Big Wave.”)

“I always liked this perverse sense of the painting plane which is uninterrupted,” DeLap said. “I wanted to negate the (idea of) sculpture--until you move around (the piece) and see (the three-dimensional portion). I still like that premise, and I don’t think it will ever leave me in its entirety.”

The sculptural component of the new works is bolder, twisting out elegantly toward the viewer rather than coyly waiting to be discovered. DeLap said his use of projecting pieces of wood as well as shaped canvas relates to the three-dimensional work for specific architectural locations that he was doing just before he “went to the wall” in the ‘70s.

Some of those works are the so-called “floating beams”: horizontal wooden beams that--thanks to the canny use of glass--look as if they are floating in space. These were related, as all of DeLap’s work essentially is, to his lifelong fascination with the illusions created by professional magicians.

His basic approach to making paintings remains unchanged: “One of the things I feel kind of good about is that if you see the (new works) front on, the depth is a bit deceptive. You don’t always know how far out something (extends), so you have to move around.”

He also remains committed to a subtle--some would say cautious--use of color.

“I’m accused of being not interested in it,” he said, chuckling softly. “I think I’m really interested in color, but I do have to say that over the years I’ve cut the palette down to a pretty minimal existence. I don’t like color on sculpture that works independently from the form. It has to do with what I think the form can tolerate. . . . I like light paintings and I like dark paintings, and I don’t like too much in between.”

A professor in the UC Irvine fine arts department since it was established in 1965, DeLap said he is pleased that none of his students have tried to work in his style: “I think a teacher can instill values, but I would never want a student to emulate me.”

Just once in his teaching career did a student create an imitation DeLap, and that was a spoof. When the conceptual artist Bruce Nauman was a graduate student, he produced a piece that imitated DeLap’s style of the period: clean-edged, double-sided plexiglass boxes with machine-cut, stepped surfaces and an acrylic dot in the middle. But there was something strange about Nauman’s piece: The plexiglass had been melted in an oven.

“It was all kind of wiggly, but it still had the dot in the center,” DeLap recalled. “It was hysterical. I said, ‘Bruce, just give that up.’ ”

An exhibit of recent work by Tony DeLap continues through May 13 at Jan Turner Gallery, 8000 Melrose Ave., Los Angeles. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Tuesday through Friday, 11 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Saturday. Admission is free. Information: (213) 658-6084.