Twisted mister
During his hard life on the street, Bryan Boyer discovered an artistic calling
Twists and turns. Every life has them. They can weave one’s character into strong moral fiber; they can trip and entangle someone into a mire.
The strongest twists and turns made by the human hand are constructed of metal. Strands of wire hold together the mightiest of structures, and the daintiest of telecommunication systems. One line might easily break, but many woven together is another matter. Brian Boyer can’t stop his hands from crumpling and warping wire into new shapes, and he found his life reshaped by the same twisting. A man on the brink of ending his own life now finds himself excited to get up in the morning and reluctant to fall asleep at the end of the day because he has a compulsion to create.
Most of the time, the wire becomes trees. Gleaming silver, radiant red, glimmering green, whatever colour the wire happens to be, he warps and distorts it into art. It’s selling like stocks on Wall Street, buyers clamouring for it from local shops like Studio 2880, Two Rivers Gallery, 3 Sisters Rock ‘n’ Gems, and Ridge Side Art where he has been the featured guest this past week as a live in-studio artist. He has been especially supported in his efforts by artistic allies John Westergard of Direct Art and Ridge Side Art’s Christina Watts.
Boyer said he’s used to the attention, despite the discomfort he feels from it. He has abiding anxieties, and he has an emotional personal history. As someone who considers his fixational artwork an extension of his inner self, that can be daunting.
“I call my art business Forrest Wire,” he said, letting the double entendre sink in. His wire figures are almost always trees - forest - and he uses the process to calm his frenetic mind - for rest. “It’s my zen. It’s my quiet place. I can’t twist and talk at the same time. Normally I like to do it outside, but I get inundated with people coming up to me to talk and ask questions, and it’s very emotional for me to talk about. I love telling my story, but it is exhausting.”
In short, he suffered routine violence and neglect as a child in Ontario at the hands of his parents. He became an alcohol and drug addict early. He qualified as a steelworker but he was essentially homeless most of his life. He suffered exposure, malnutrition, poverty, shame, and carried the weight of the compounding traumas his life exposed him to.
To make ends meet he became a thief and a drug dealer. He lived for three years inside the shelter of some enor- mous twisted roots of a blue spruce in Victoria Park in Niagara Falls.
“It could be raining sideways but I would be bone dry inside,” he said. “It took me a long time to put it all together - my artwork, men and that tree. It was a person to me. It was my shelter, it was my depression, it was my protector, it was my exposure, I yelled at that tree, I cried in that tree. It was everything. And now I have a thing for trees.”
After a turbulent relocation to the Okanagan, where local street people figured him to be a cop or an informant and put a bounty out on him – $50 in drugs to anyone who stabbed him – he decided to end it all. He had the rocks picked out with which he would laden his clothes, then walk out into Okanagan Lake at the Penticton beach.
Fate jolted him out of that plan. “I looked like a chewed up cat toy.
I was a mess of a person,” he said. “I wasn’t sad about it. I didn’t talk to anyone about it. I just suddenly understood why people decided to end their own lives. I was there, in that place. I had come to that conclusion.”
He spotted an electrical installation company’s compound. There was some loose wire on the property. He was well aware that some people steal wire to sell as scrap metal to spend on drugs, but he stole that wire that day with something else in mind. He bloodied his hands using a broken bottle to strip the rubber coating off, but he had an idea. He was going to twist that wire into a shape, a sculpture.
And someone came along who worked at the welfare office as he was working on that sculpture, and was fascinated, and said “you could sell that, you know?” The thrill of that epiphany surged through him like 1,000 volts. No, he didn’t know that at all. What? He was going to the welfare office for a small emergency amount – $20 – planning to eat a last meal, smoke a last cigarette, and submerge in the lake. Now he saw a clear income stream, a distinct purpose for himself, and a flash of light in his life he had scarcely ever felt before.
He sat in front of a coffeeshop near the beach and whipped up 17 tree sculptures. He sold 12 of them immediately.
“When I was in Grade 8, my teacher, Mr. Kasmir, pulled my pencil out of my hand, slammed it down on the desk, and shook my hand really hard. He said ‘you are the reason I do this job.’ I thought he was maybe being sarcastic, or just being funny, but part of me also knew he was giving me a really meaningful compliment. I just couldn’t allow myself to believe it. It took me my whole life to figure out what he meant.”
He encountered almost instant success in the Okanagan with his creations. He didn’t sell them for much money, but the material was free because he was stealing it, the time commitment was free because he had no gainful employment or obligations, so any amount of money was a rare infusion.
He still had a boatload of baggage, however. Setbacks abounded, but so did momentum.
He was hampered by drugs, alcohol, unemployment, malnutrition, infirm body, few positive people in his life, a lifetime of learned behaviour - most of it bad.
But he also had determination and a new sense of purpose.
One of the Okanagan’s renowned names in the art world, Vaelei WalkenBrown, spotted his work.
She offered Boyer space in her gallery to sell his art. It was a popular item, and it made Boyer into a commercial artist for the first time. He now had himself a profession.
Without entering those fatal waters, he had nonetheless been baptized by art.
About a year ago, he moved to Prince George. It’s where his girlfriend lived. He had turned his life around sufficiently enough that he could maintain a relationship and this is where she lived.
He doesn’t steal his wire anymore. He has a supply partnership with Primus, Norcap and Northern Electric to legitimately obtain the copper and aluminum he uses for his sculptures. He also collects wire from discarded tube televisions because the internal lines are festively coloured. He spots rocks, bits of driftwood, and other found objects that he intermingles into his wire creations. He paints them with epoxy, he even uses acid to create desired effects.
So complex are the items of Forrest Wire that even light and electricity are involved in some of the sculptures. His industrial fingers were already trained for that sort of trade, so he easily incorporated it into his wire windings, making ever more complex creations.
Some of them are simply sculptures for the sake of art. Others have double use like being a lamp or candle holder.
“I don’t know of anyone else out there who does this, other than him,” said Watts. “He has his whole life story wrapped up in his work. He’s just the epitome of what an artist is. People gravitate to him and they gravitate to his art. I tried to do it myself and wow, it’s so hard. He has skillmanship. See, he’s even inspiring new words.”
His pieces sell for anywhere ranging between $75 to several hundred dollars. He laughed that “12 different times” he had been insistently given more money by the buyer than the sticker price. His prices may rise.
He does not do custom orders. He has had too many negative experiences when the work did not match the vision of the commissioner. “I don’t really do people,” he said, meaning he’d rather spend his personal time with the impulses and creative cajoling of his own brain. It’s an organ rife with electrical circuitry. It’s just how he’s wired.