art for the outdoors
Feature Story
It can be as small as a wind chime, as peaceful as a waterfall, as sublime as a kinetic sculpture or as captivating as a metal animal. In the end, however, yard art beauty is in the eye of the beholder. And oh those beholders’ eyes see an eclectic mix for sure.
“It’s anything that dresses up the yard,” said Eric Eckhardt, one of the owners of Affordable Antiques & Metal Art. “We’ve got animals and flowers and cactus.”
Maybe the better question is why would people feel compelled to dress up their yards in such fashion?
Yvonne Duran of Desert Bloom has a pretty interesting response.
“If you’re going to be in your yard pulling weeds, you might as well have something nice to look at,” she said.
Indeed, that pretty much sums it up right there.
Mark White of Mark White Fine Art in Santa Fe sees his work as a canvas and enhancing the outdoor world in which it sits. His initial inspiration came from exposure to his daughter’s pursuit of modern dance.
“It’s the artistic side of what I do and pursuing optical illusion, that side of it, really started with my daughter’s modern dance,” he said. “My need to understand what it means to motion and people in motion and people dancing together and lines that cross at the intersect and the feelings that evokes. I try to create pieces that are mesmerizing and hypnotizing. My background in psychology makes me want to make art that hypnotizes people. Literally, spirals, acute angles and intersecting lines. When I produce pieces like that, they have a psychological effect on the response.”
That’s really the bottom line when it comes to art of any kind, the personal response of those who view it.
“We get all kinds of stuff,” Eckhardt said. “It varies from day to day. I like the cactuses. They’re welded out of metal, species like Saguaro and barrel cactus. We get stuff from near and far.”
Desert Bloom is a family affair with father Bennie Duran and daughter Donna Duran creating the works and mother Yvonne Duran behind the scenes.
“My family is very artful,” Yvonne Duran said. “When my husband retired as an electrical contractor on road projects, we felt we were too young to not work anymore. This is a retirement situation. We’re not here 24/7. We want to enjoy this business. Enjoy this part of our life and business and we’ve been doing that for 12 years.”
The joy is readily apparent in the metal creatures that Desert Bloom brings to life, but it all kind of started with large cement pottery that Native American artists were commissioned to paint.
“My husband had an idea of Native American pots that you see on the freeway, decorating the airport,” Yvonne Duran said. “He thought, ‘If I’m working with big equipment, then I can take this piece of pottery, pull it out of the ground and up on the top of the land. When you build a foundation, when you pull it up out of the ground, you can shape it like a pot.’”
Then it’s a matter of adding the authenticity.
“We only have Native Americans paint our pots,” she said. “We bring in the Native Americans to paint the pots with their tribal influence and patterns.”
Then things just kind of took off.
“That’s how it started,” Yvonne Duran said. “From there, people wanted lizards. We made lizards from 24 inches to eight feet. We couldn’t make enough lizards to make everybody happy. That’s how the metal work started, by being creative.”
Desert Bloom’s pieces come in all sizes, but the exterior is adorned with some large-size decorations.
“They want it to look very real,” she said of her husband’s and daughter’s work. “Sometimes people, I think they look at big pieces outside and they’re intimidated. But once they come in, they realize it’s a lot of fun.”
White’s work has a characteristic eye-catching poetry to the motion that makes it hard to pull away.
“I’ve continued to develop and experiment with various motion-related sculptures,” he said. “I used to make ones that swayed in the wind, bounced in the wind. And initially I did a lot that turned in circles or crossed lines, counter revolving in ways that continue to fascinate me. I still haven’t explored all the ways this kind of motion can have an effect on your psyche.”
White has even created crossover pieces that incorporate both wind and water movement to further extend the sense of well-being connected with his work.
“I have developed several pieces that moved by water,” he said. “I have crossovers between wind movement and water movement, in terms of creating the force to achieve movement.”
In the beginning of his career, White incorporated electric motors, but he found that took away from what he was trying to accomplish.
“I pursued electrical power quite few different ways, but the thing I was seeking was the capricious nature of wind and objects that respond to that varied stimulus, that amount of variability,” he said. “So I gave up on the ones that were digitally contrived by motors. If you do it right, every piece mesmerizes and hypnotizes and is fascinating. The pieces repeat themselves and create optical illusions, optical interference patterns. I build pieces that play on focus engines in your peripheral vision, very different objects and how they move.”
One of the things Yvonne Duran always wonders is, “Who buys this? And I have to answer, all my residential customers. I rarely sell to businesses. It’s really odd.”
What that does show is that art is an intensely personal taste, different with everyone.
“You can go from A to Z and customers are out there,” she said. “They don’t have specific choices. They’re open to how they want to landscape and add a piece of art to their yard. We’re open to a lot of different things and we take our time to make sure we have metal that look like a bear or a horse, or another one of our favorites with the buffalo. Maybe somebody wants something different. It just keeps growing into other things. It’s just been a lot of fun. You get immersed into all of this. It just takes you over.”