Scrappy stuff: Sculptor fashions hot rods, instruments from stainless-steel remnants
Tim Glover can’t part with drops, the odd-shaped bits that remain after he’s cut a sheet of steel.
He’s used metal and other materials for about 30 years to create beefy stand-alone sculpture, tabletop pieces, furniture, work that hangs on walls and monumental public art that measures 25 to 50 feet tall. So you can imagine how much sharp stuff would stack up in his studio at the northside artists’ enclave known as Itchy Acres.
“As soon as I take it to the scrapyard, I’ll regret it,” Glover said recently at the Art Car Museum, where 15 of his sculptures are displayed alongside large-scale, abstract drawings by Randall McCabe that one might imagine (at least in this context) as depictions of puffy exhaust fumes.
Three iconic, awardwinning art cars expand on the theme: Johnny Rojas’ steel-on-steel, 1987 VW Cabriolet “Batwing,” which Mad Max would covet; Mark Bradford’s shiny, reptilian “Spoonozoid,” a fierce contraption built of stainless-steel spoons and motorcycle components; and Jim Robertson’s “Jet Car,” a steel-clad Honda Accord stretched into a James Bond-worthy machine.
Muscle cars, eat your hearts out.
Not that the arton-wheels needs any embellishing, but two of Glover’s tabletop sculptures look like they could be attached to the hoods of the vehicles to soup them up another notch.
He made “Horse Head” last year from the drops of his 2014 “Hot Rod Mustang,” a hybrid Trojan horse-car tabletop piece that’s on display in the sculpture gallery at George Bush Intercontinental Airport. The jagged slivers of steel that resemble teeth in the “mouth” of the equally recent “Air Head” sat around Glover’s studio about 15 years, the trimmings of some pine-cone-inspired pieces commissioned by The Woodlands.
“Air Head” is dedicated to “Big Daddy and Bontecou.” Honk if you know what an odd couple that represents.
Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, an icon of hot-rod culture, created the anti-Mickey Mouse cartoon character Rat Fink. The pioneering female sculptor Lee Bontecou creates organic and aerodynamic-looking forms that reference the transformative state between nature and the man-made.
Bontecou’s thinking has inspired Glover for years. He doesn’t know whether to thank or blame an older brother, his family’s hot rodder, for his knowledge of Big Daddy.
The Houston International Festival commissioned Glover and his pal Paul Kittelson to make an art car in 1993; “Garbage Monster,” which had puppetlike capabilities, won that year’s award for best small vehicle.
Personally, however, he is more into surfing, nature and music than cars.
Glover plays fiddle and mandolin with the Cleaners, a group of fellow artists and writers who’ve jammed together since the late 1990s. They’re mainly versed in blues, rock and crossover, but he loves be-bop jazz.
This explains “Be Bop a Gasser,” the most elaborate of several stainless-steel wall sculptures inspired by hot-rod headers, the pipe systems that support high-performance engines. The part that looks like a mangled trumpet honors Dizzy Gillespie, who would have been 100 this year. A big plume of flames erupts from the business end.
“Because Dizzy could really blow his horn,” Glover explained. “Although ‘gasser’ also relates to a hot rod.”
Sometimes drops speak to him because they seem timely, like the decade-old stainless-steel remnant from the base of an oilfield-inspired “tree” he recently rediscovered. He loved how it depicted the line of the Texas-Mexico border as “almost a 50-50 positive-negative thing.”
He emphasized the border’s edge by trimming it painstakingly with 3-by-1⁄8-inch stainless steel.
“That’s one, 12-footlong stick of this stuff, welded on one end, tacked on the back. One little tack you can’t see — the rest heat, bend, tack; heat, bend, tack — all the way,” he said. He welded the front edge and buffed it smooth — an effect that creates the illusion of a canyon wall dropping into the abyss — then set it within a rectangular frame and topped it with glass to make a coffee table. The space where Texas would be is empty.
“Everybody can bring their politics to it and go, ‘Texas is really out of the picture. It’s really all about Mexico,’ ” he said. “I like to push buttons.”
Glover used a long, skinny pipe to create a piece depicting his dog, Dizzy, that demonstrates his ability to blend high and low.
The pipe is a drop from “Light Garden,” Glover’s sleek, 21-foothigh sculpture for the traffic roundabout at Washington and Westcott. But he’s painted it with the dog’s blackand-white markings, leaving prominent welds at the shoulders to add texture. The pooch’s deep, Rat Fink kind of smile adds to her primitive sensibility.
“I play both ends of the fabrication. Sometimes I try to be very controlled. But I do love the process of welding,” he said. “If it’s done well, the bead can be a beautiful aspect of the work. There’s all these different levels of technique and process that get addressed in a piece of sculpture.”
The elegant level, attesting to Glover’s widely admired engineering skills, shows in the cyclone-style gate over which Dizzy’s arching body flies. Glover easily could have found an old metal gate — “that would have been the easy thing,” he said.
Instead, he fabricated a gate of pristine stainless steel.
“To transform it into a piece of art, you have to copy where you’re coming from but transcend it through another material,” Glover said. “You’d never buy stainless steel for a cyclone gate; it would be way too expensive. That made a nice foil for her and became the base she could be mounted on, to give her this flying form.”
Glover also likes to make sculpture from the myriad found objects he’s accumulated.
He grew up in Ohio, and when he moved to Houston in 1986 after earning his master’s degree in at the University of South Florida, he felt as though he’d landed in a fabricator’s dreamland.
“You could drive around the city and grab materials from street corners. There were empty warehouses where you could just walk in and pick through leftover inventory from places that went out of business. Fill your truck up, drive back to your studio and just start making things,” he said. “It’s not that way anymore.”
Lately, he’s been inspired by materials from a mother lode he doesn’t want to identify, a friend he met while catching waves out at Surfside Beach who operates four warehouses for reselling objects — industrial tubing, baskets, you name it — bought by the pallet-load from companies that are closing.
“In some ways, it’s expanding my material vocabulary,” Glover said. “I’m either turning into a hoarder or I’m going to have to have more time to make art. (He teaches full time at Houston’s High School for the Performing and Visual Arts.)
Glover fashioned the undulating pillars of the kelp-inspired “Sea Bed,” one of the newest sculptures in the show, from slightly crushed, columnar baskets that he guesses were filter holders for an industrial cleaning process.
“They were so perfect a find, just as they are,” he said.
But now he has a problem — how to bang up the rest of his basket stock, which is in perfect condition.