Chiselers Prosper : Sculptors see the shape of things to come in the current buzz of activity at Art City.

Surrounded by rubble, accosted by visitors and panting pets and distracted by matters of commerce, Paul Lindhard is trying to spend some quality time with a six-ton chunk of New Mexico travertine.

The rock stands twice his height. After weeks of chiseling, it still looks more like a rock than anything else. But Lindhard, a veteran sculptor, founded the Art City studios and supply yard in 1985 to make challenges like this possible.

“This is a male torso,” says the 44-year-old artist, tracing shapes on the stone’s skin. “There’s a midsection and chest--no arms--coming up out of the mass of stone.”

In the outside world--beyond this acre of scattered stones, motorcycle parts, dismembered dolls, tree stumps and general bohemianism--there’s a recession on. But these are some of the busiest days ever at Art City, and Lindhard is lucky when he can find a chunk of time for carving during the day. Among the new doings:

* Expansion. After five years as an island among the auto yards near Main Street and Ventura Avenue in Ventura, Lindhard’s enterprise has overtaken a second property nearby.

On the new site, at Peking and Main streets, Art City’s loose-knit family of about a dozen artists--almost all of them sculptors--opened a gallery Aug. 17. Four artists are renting studio space just outside the gallery, two more spaces are available, and a bright sign has gone up to announce the advance of the Art City empire.

* Stockpiling. The Art City sculpture supply business, which already carries one of the West Coast’s largest rock inventories, will soon reach unprecedented size.

Lindhard counts 200,000 pounds of travertine, 70,000 pounds of alabaster, 100,000 pounds of miscellaneous marble and about 25,000 pounds of soapstone, most of it gathered from around the Southwest.

In coming months, Lindhard expects shipments of another 200,000 pounds or more of Belgian and Italian marble and other European stones. Lindhard says that in the last three months he had his best quarter ever, selling 50,000 pounds of rock at prices from 30 cents a pound for basic alabaster to $2 a pound for rare marble.

* Landing commissions. Though artists lament that collecting art remains a rare hobby among Venturans, sales opportunities for at least some Art City sculptors seem to be growing. Lindhard recently placed a large work at Granita, celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck’s new restaurant in Malibu, and his six-ton travertine block is part of an $80,000 project for an Oxnard business park, one of the largest commissions of his career.

Further encouragement, for Lindhard and others, came July 8 when the Ventura City Council agreed to set aside 2% of the city’s annual capital improvement budget for art in public places. That policy is expected to bring an estimated $100,000 to $250,000 a year in new spending on public art in this area.

“I’ve lived here all my life. This is the bud. This is the blooming. Right now,” says Wyndra Roche, a 30-year-old artist’s representative who now spends Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday afternoons at the Art City II gallery.

Roche gets no hourly wage and didn’t sell any major works in her first two weeks on the job. But she’s counting on a surge in commissions to make the gamble worthwhile.

“I am very brave,” she admits.

Meanwhile, Art City’s studio space resounds with the noise of rocks being broken, works taking shape and plans being laid.

Catherine Hannon, a 22-year-old photographer and relative newcomer to the scene, says she was overwhelmed when she discovered the studios at Art City I last year. She since has joined in partnership with Lindhard to open the new space, and has several images hanging there.

“There are no really out-to-lunch egos,” says Lindhard, running down the list of artists who labor under Art City’s umbrella. But when more than a few of them are working at one time, he adds,”it’s like bumper cars.”

To Carve a Stone

Michele Chapin leans over a 40-pound piece of alabaster, her face protected by a mask and goggles and immersed in a cloud of dust.

The stone is shot through with deposits of anhydrite, which makes it more difficult to carve. But the anhydrite also gives it textural patterns and color contrasts. Chapin likes to emphasize those features, and often lets them determine the shape of her abstract works.

“I paint with my rock,” she says.

Chapin, 35, grew up in Orange County and spent three years at UC Santa Cruz. She didn’t get a degree, but did work on the founding of an art center there, and launched herself into a succession of jobs requiring work with her hands. At one point, she found herself atop a 52-story building in downtown San Francisco, working construction.

“I wore lipstick and a hard hat,” she says. “And I fitted pipes all day with a guy named Tyrone singing Motown.”

She came to Art City in 1989, watched the sculptors at work and resolved to learn stone-carving.

“I begged these guys to let me sand their rocks,” she said, casting a glance around the jumbled work space. “It’s been two years now.”

Still, she needs to eat and pay for the roof over her head. Six nights a week, she waits tables at the Hungry Hunter on Harbor Boulevard in Ventura.

Hanrahan’s Images

Just around a corner from Chapin’s work space, Mary Beth Hanrahan wrestles with a marlin. The marlin is cardboard; the artist is a young woman with a shock of short, bright blond hair.

Gaining an advantageous position, the artist glues a fin on the beast and offers an explanation: This is a project for a beachwear company, one of many commercial projects she takes. Soon the marlin will have a permanent place on an office wall, and she will have a little money to sustain her muse-chasing.

“I’m such a communicator that I love art that communicates,” Hanrahan says. “But I’m such a space case that I like things that don’t seem to make sense.”

Hanrahan, 32, has worked at Art City since October, 1989. She grew up in Woodland Hills, got a bachelor’s degree at UC Santa Cruz (where she never met Chapin despite their overlapping tenures there) and a master’s in sculpture at Humboldt State University.

In past free-lance commercial assignments, she says, she has conjured up department store window displays, designed props for Hanna-Barbera’s “Flintstones’ 50th Anniversary Video,” devised puppets for other children’s programs, acted as a production assistant on motion pictures and created calendars for U-Haul.

More recently, Hanrahan has painted murals for Aguilar’s restaurant, the Livery Arts Center and Art City II, all in Ventura.

Between those assignments, she works on personal projects like “No Middle,” a mysterious four-sided column that stands, next to a $2,500 price tag, at the entrance to the Art City II gallery.

“It’s sort of about fear,” Hanrahan says.

“I’m not much of a stone carver. But when I do carve, I’ve noticed, I’m better at imposing myself on the stone, rather than letting the stone speak.”

Knauff’s Apocalypse

Steve Knauff’s images come with a soundtrack--usually heavy metal, which the 31-year-old graduate student listens to on headphones while he works.

His 1988 piece “Conflict” stands beneath the beams of the new Art City II gallery: 22 tiny bronze men, locked single-file in mortal competition, 11 facing west, 11 facing east. Some have bloody holes in their heads and arms, all are yoked under a pair of wooden boards.

Knauff’s association with Lindhard goes back more than a decade, to the days when Lindhard was teaching at Santa Barbara City College and building custom houses to pay his bills.

Knauff was a 20-year-old student and had just started making politically oriented artwork. Lindhard, in his 30s, was more likely to be sensual or witty--voluptuous bodies or frogs at play.

While Lindhard ran studios in Goleta, Santa Barbara and finally Ventura, Knauff finished undergraduate work at the San Francisco Art Institute and started graduate studies at UCLA. When Lindhard started accepting pieces for the first show at Art City II, Knauff contributed “Conflict,” with a $5,000 price tag.

Another Idea

It’s later in the afternoon now, and Lindhard’s six tons of travertine are safe from the chisel for another day. The sculptor is busy looking into the future.

“This is the last year, I think, that I’ll have to never let up on the business,” says Lindhard. “If I don’t let up, it’ll be because I’m a workaholic and I can’t relax.”

Then again, there is that new idea he’s been turning over in his head.

At the entrance to the new Art City site, Lindhard wants to build a big art installation: his 1933 Dodge truck, struggling up a hill, prize rocks spilling out of its bed like fruit from a cornucopia.

If he does it right, the whole thing will look like a three-dimensional Thomas Hart Benton painting, full of energy, strength and implied motion. Next spring, Lindhard says, he’ll start on it.