Harold Kyle Transcript Music Credits:  Excerpts from “Low Rider,” performed by War, from the album, Why Can’t We Be Friends? Excerpts from "My Luck“ by Broke For Free from the EP Directionless, used courtesy of Creative Commons and found on WFMU's Free Music Archive.  Harold Kyle: The balancing pieces, what it does for me, at least, is gives the sculpture a fourth dimension. All sculpture have height, width, and depth, but the movement, even though its slight, gives it a little bit of a fourth dimension and every now and then, I’ll incorporate a mirror into it which will actually give it a fifth dimension because now the viewer is actually a part of the sculpture for at least that moment while they’re looking at it. They see themselves, they are actually part of the sculpture. Jo Reed: That is sculptor and auto-mechanic Harold Kyle. And this is Art Works, the weekly podcast produced by the NEA. I'm Josephine Reed. There are a host of people out there whom we interact with in the workaday world who also make art. We never think that the cashier at the dry cleaners might be a writer. Or that your mechanic is a sculptor.  But in fact, these are the folks responsible for most the artwork that's created, but we often don't see it.   They are talented and dedicated to their artwork, they just can't make a living at it. Today, we're launching a new series that celebrates the work of these artists and their commitment to their art. We're calling it Dual Lives. Dual Lives will feature a diverse group of artists from all parts of the country who work at their "regular" jobs by day and come home at night to paint, write, sing, and sew. Harold Kyle seems like a great way to begin the series.  Harold is an auto mechanic who's been making sculpture from found objects for 40 years. He's made art from forks and spoons, from discarded campaign signs, he makes art from pitchforks and hammers as well as from discarded car parts like fenders and headlights and steering wheels. His sculpture can weigh anything from 10 ounces to over 300 pounds.  Harold Kyle had his third one-man show this past autumn at the Mattawoman Creek Art Center in Southern Maryland, where he showed some 50 pieces of work in the art center's two spectacular galleries and on its expansive grounds.  It’s a rare instance where the museum docents encouraged viewers to touch the art work.  Harold insists on it. He’s made much of work to be touched. It's art that moves by the wind or by curious hands. This starts the pieces spinning, and swaying, creating dancing shadows on the walls and lawn.  Many of the pieces that move look as though they are balanced on the head of a pin, they are that precise, yet the shapes are look fluid with graceful lines. Harold was kind enough to have me at his Southern Maryland home the Sunday before Christmas. After a tour of his enormous yard, filled with the sculpture, we sat down over some tea.  Here's our conversation: Jo Reed: I think it’s fair to say, you inhabit the world of cars. Harold Kyle:  I do. Jo Reed:  Both in your day job and in your night job. Tell me about your day job first. Harold Kyle:  Well, I’ve been doing body and fender work for the past 50 years, the past 40 of which have been in Sheehy Ford in Marlow Heights. I work in that body shop, but the owner has been kind to me since I started there, he lets me use the body shop as a studio. Which is almost unheard of, I mean yes, it’s very nice of him to let me do that Jo Reed:  And tell me how your boss at the auto shop first found out that you were doing sculpture? Harold Kyle:  It was kind of interesting because I made a spaceship out of car parts, the closest thing if you imagine the TIE Fighter from Star Wars, that’s about the way it looked. But it was Thunderbird bumpers in the back and Econoline bumpers stretched down with the wings coming off, and all the lights worked and everything flashed, and I had little CO2 jets on so it looked like it was taking off, and it made little beepy noises and stuff. And he came back, the owner now, this is Mister Sheehy came back one day and I had it in the body shop. And he liked it so much that they ended up putting it on the showroom. And then it stayed on the showroom for a while, and then he put it in different libraries around the county, he had a truck take it around to different libraries in the county, and then it ended up over at Prince George’s Community College for a while. And he said, “Well what else are you making? Do you do this all the time?” I said, “Yeah, right now.” I was working at the house. And he says, “Oh, feel free to do it here whenever you want.” And I said, “Do you mean it?” And I said, “I’m pretty prolific, I can spend all day doing this.” He says, “No, just as long as you buy your own material and do it on your own time, you’re free to do anything you want here.” And I said, “Thank you very much.” And for the past 40 years I’ve done just that. Jo Reed:  Wow. That is great. Harold Kyle:  Yeah. They don’t make them like him anymore. Jo Reed:  Now how did you get interested in turning body parts, car body parts into art? Were you always interested in art? Harold Kyle:  Well, actually for the longest time I refused to use car parts, because I didn’t want people to think that I was just a car part artist. I went out of my way to use things that had no connection with cars at all, I wanted you to see that I could work with steel, that I could take something to its limits and not just take an old car part and make into something that looked pretty neat. But then I realized, why am I turning away from this gorgeous cache of parts that I can use for almost nothing? And some of the pieces have been coming out really well. I think I started to tell you earlier, we used to have a guy came by and bought the old car headlights and they would remanufacture them, and you would sell them what they called a “cord”. And he would give you five bucks for a headlight even if it was busted, right? And then that dried up, and the pile got bigger, and the pile got bigger and bigger, Jo Reed: that’s a pile of headlights that’s growing? Harold Kyle: Yeah, and one day our general manager came by and she said, “Harold, if you’re not going to do anything with the lights you’ve got to get rid of them.” So I spent the next two days cutting the lights open and taking the pieces out, the chrome pieces out behind the plastic, and then I started arranging them on the floor. The first two came out really neat so I gave them to her for her office, which, you know, greased the way to let me do some more in the shop. So I made six more and they were in my show three years ago, and they ended up buying those six for the customer lounge. And I am pretty sure that the new corporate headquarters for Sheehy when it opens up will have several of my pieces still. Jo Reed:  Now when did you start wanting to do art? Harold Kyle:  I used to go downtown when I was a kid, Jo Reed:  Downtown D.C.? Harold Kyle:  Mm-hmm. I went to school at Mackin High School at Fourteenth and V Street and lived in Capitol Heights. So, I was always close to downtown, I liked going downtown, and I’d go by the museums all the time. But it wasn’t until I got in the Navy and was stationed in San Diego, I was just a stone’s throw away from the San Diego Museum of Art. And I went over there one day and I was working as a welder in the Navy, so I was already working with heavy steel and things like that anyway. I went over there one day and I saw some work by David Smith, and I thought, “Well yeah this is really gorgeous, and I think I can do that.” And I went back to the ship and started noodling around with some steel, and came up with what I thought was a pretty neat little piece. I still have it, I ended up calling it the “Doobie Tree.” It was just a little thing made with wheel grinders, and it just was kind of neat and I thought, “Well this is neat.” Made a little wooden base for it over in the shop next door and I thought, “Well this is pretty good, I can do this,” right? And then when I got out of the Navy I went back to school, I went to Prince George’s Community College. I started there in ’79 and stayed until ’99, so I spent the next 20 years taking art classes down there. Which was really good because there was a large community of local artists that we refer to ourselves as “lifers.” Usually if you go to a four-year college the sculpture, ceramic, whatever you take, is usually a class or two and then you move on. But on a community college level, a lot of the people come back year after year after year, we have everything from people just getting out of high school to senior citizens. Like, in a four-year college you would meet other artists maybe, and maybe your professor was pretty good at what he did, but on the community college level we had people who had been doing like ceramics for 50 years. And you learn a lot from these people, you know, there’s something you actually couldn’t learn in the four-year schools. And we had a large group, probably 15 to 20 people that were there year after year after year, some of them almost as long as I had. So it was really good, that’s pretty much where I started, when I got down there and really got involved into art, I really knew that this was what I wanted to do. Jo Reed:  That’s so interesting, because it also gave, I mean it gave you so much, it gave you a support group, it gave you other pairs of eyes, it gave you advice, it gave you a space to work. Harold Kyle:  Right and not only that, like I said, there were three professional ceramicists in our ceramics class. I mean these guys did this for a living; you don’t see that in a four-year school. These guys, the nice thing about the community college was they had their own kiln, and you could do these things, everything was there; they had a foundry, you could do castings, ceramics, they did raku firings out back so you could do raku ceramics. It was nice, everything was all centered, it was really a great place to work. And the ideas just kept coming, you know? You’d see somebody else and something would pop, you could see it pop and it was just kind of neat to watch the little light bulb come up over the top of your head, you know? The next thing you know you’ve got this beautiful sculpture or ceramics piece coming out, it’s really nice. Jo Reed:  Did you always want to work with found pieces, or did that develop? Harold Kyle:  That kind of developed. I used to do all my own cutting with the steel, I would start with a blank piece of half-inch plate steel and I would cut triangles out of it, and I would arrange the triangles into a bridge or something like that. And then I started finding these pieces at machine shops, they were just basically already cut for me. And I’ve always had this fascination with positive and negative spaces, the way machine shops will cut a circle out of something, the piece that’s left is just as interesting as the circle was, and sometimes even more so. And you still have the illusion of the circle being there even though the circle’s gone now. So yeah, the found objects were really kind of neat. Jo Reed:  You talked about positive and negative spaces and how that works in your pieces, balance is also important. Harold Kyle:  Mm-hmm. Right. Jo Reed:  Many of your pieces have some kind of motion, and they’re balanced, it seems so precariously. Harold Kyle:  Actually, I do that to take it as close to what it will do as possible. Jo Reed: you’re saying you want to push that balance to its limit? Harold Kyle: Right. A lot of the times I stretch that right to the end, sometimes, well in all honesty the backyard was full of pieces that fell off and didn’t quite live up to what I had hoped to. But that’s a matter of just trial and error too. But for the most part the balancing pieces, what it does for me at least is gives the sculpture a fourth dimension. All sculpture have a height, width and depth, but the movement, even though it’s slight, gives it a little bit of a fourth dimension. And every now and then, I’ll incorporate a mirror into it, which will actually give it a fifth dimension because now the viewer is actually a part of the sculpture, for at least the moment while they’re looking at it and they see themselves, they are actually part of the sculpture. So I can actually get five dimensions instead of just the normal three. And I try to look at things like that, it’s like how would this work if it twists around like this, or if it moves? What’s it going to look like later on this afternoon when the sun’s hitting it this way? What’s the light going to do to the mirror? Whose house is it going to bounce off of across the street? The one was really neat and it just wiggled all over the guy’s house across the street, you know? So yeah, you just never know what’s coming up next. Jo Reed:  And the way you play with shadows, there’s pieces where I didn’t know what I was more fascinated by; what was on the pedestal or what was on the wall behind it. Harold Kyle:  Some of that was preplanned and some was just by chance. The yellow piece that you saw, that was by chance. Jo Reed:  Was that really? Harold Kyle:  It was really chance the way that worked out. Jo Reed:  Wow. And that’s a sculpture called “Grid in Space” and it has 10 to 12 delicate steel lines emanating about three feet in the air and then slightly bending over. As I said, it’s such a delicate looking piece and the silhouette is pretty spectacular. Harold Kyle:  The way it fell over like that was strictly by chance. I had laid it down on the ground and it was actually laying down flat. And when I set it up it fell over that way, and my first response was to grab it and go, “Oh no.” And then I just let it go and it fell over and stayed there, and I was like, “Oh wow, that’s really pretty.” So I just welded it down and let it stay just like that. Jo Reed: See, this is what’s so interesting to hear you talk about your work and to see your work, is that there has to be such precision involved on one hand, but on the other hand you seem to be perfectly open to chance at the same time. Harold Kyle:  Oh yeah. Jo Reed:  How do you weigh that back and forth? Harold Kyle:  Well to give you a good example would be the yellow and orange pieces I was showing you outside, that balance in the wind and move. When I first got those, they were the leftover parts of a piece that the customer wanted circles, and these were the leftover stampings from what the circles came from. And for the longest time all I could come up with was stacking them up, and then, oh six, seven months ago I started slicing every other hole and twisting them, and then would just twist around and come to a point. And the first red one I did out there, it just came around and it was like, “Okay,” and then I just welded it down. And then the second one same thing, and then the third one I thought, “Well what if I put it on a point?” And it went right inside that circle basically all by itself again. And it was like, “Well I like this, I wonder if it will last outside.” And so far it has. Jo Reed:  You just seem to be so fascinated by being able to balance on. Harold Kyle:  It tickles me. I tickle myself sometimes, you know? You’re wondering, “Okay, can I make this work?” And I honestly wish I could remember the guy’s name, but it had to be over 20 years or so ago, there was a guy who had a piece down at the college, and it was a chair. And the chair had all these other things hanging off of it, but the chair was balanced on a point, so the whole sculpture kind of moved around but it was the balancing part of a chair. If you just pick a chair up and balance it on your finger you’ll eventually find a place where it settles in. And that’s basically the way I do these things, I’ll move them around a little bit and see where they settle, and if they settle in right, that’s where I mark them and then just leave them right there. Jo Reed:  Let me ask you this, and I don’t know if I asked you this as directly, but what fascinates you about geometry so much? Harold Kyle:  You know, it’s one of those things I’ve been fascinated with it all my life, I just love the way circles, and squares, and triangles, and cubes, and cones, and cylinders, the way they all relate to each other. Again back to the positive and negative, I just love the way a circle goes like this and a circle down here will form a cone even though there’s no cone there, but your mind will form a cone. The geometry of a shadow, I was never that good at geometry at school, but I think I’ve made up for it with my fascination with the shadows and stuff. A guy at the last show said that he was an engineer, and he could tell just by looking at it that whoever was working on this was into engineering. Well, I’ve never really been into engineering other than working on the cars, but I found that to be a very nice compliment. Because it is engineering, to try to make these things balance out and still make them look nice, it’s just really neat, it’s fun to do. Jo Reed:  And you succeed so well. Jo Reed: Well you have many pieces that, I guess, can be called indoor/outdoor. Pieces that can be kept indoors, in a garden, or in a yard. Harold Kyle:  Yes, yes, some of them are definitely outdoor pieces, but a lot of them are really nice inside too. Like the little balancing pieces, they make nice shadows in the house, even with the light like this you’ll get five or six different shadows cast as it spins, and it’ll just make lovely little shadows as it goes around. I always get a kick out of it because until you see it move, you really don’t get the full gist of it. Especially the one balancing piece that was on the rock, until you moved it and saw it move inside the other piece, it was really quite ordinary just sitting there like, “Okay, what’s he trying to do with this?” But once you see it move and rock inside itself, it takes on a whole new meaning. Jo Reed: that piece had two spherical shapes, one inside of the other and they were on top of a rock and they moved independently of each other but were balancing, again, pretty precariously on that rock. Harold Kyle: Yes, and I find not only with adults, but kids, they just go, “Ooh that’s neat.” And, I find it’s not really that spectacular, I mean balancing toys and things like that have been around for hundreds of years. They still make little balancing toys with little fishermen or little boats and stuff like that, you see them in celebrity stores and stuff like that. I’m just taking it to the next level. Jo Reed:  Some of your pieces are very, very large. How did you manage? Harold Kyle:  Not very well, in all honesty. I had a backyard, it was so full of sculpture that when I moved to my present house here, I ended up giving a lot of stuff away, just because I just couldn’t deal with trying to move it. Jo Reed:  Was there an average weight? What are we talking about? Harold Kyle:  Oh, Jo Reed:  Couple hundred pounds? Harold Kyle:  Three, four hundred pounds some of them. There’s a piece down at the Art Center that’s actually 14 feet tall, some of the earlier ones were probably 10, 12 feet tall. I got away from that real quick. Jo Reed:  Well, I think that’s always a consideration, there’s the artistic vision but then there’s the practical aspects of life. Harold Kyle:  Well actually one guy said something that kind of hurt my feelings back in my early days before I thickened my skin a little bit, he was like, “Well, it’s okay, but it’s just big.” And I was like, “You know, I think he’s right, you know? Would it look as good if it was just small?” You know, I’ve always thought if somebody’s looked at your work, is quite comforting. I mean I like to see that it’s not pleasing everybody, but I like to see that at least they took the time to look at it. Jo Reed:  Yeah, I could see that. In other words, of course you want people to like it but if they think about it, Harold Kyle:  You win. Jo Reed:  You win. Harold Kyle:  I remember an art teacher told me a long time ago that if you go to a museum and look at people and watch them in a museum setting, if they’re at one piece for more than 30 seconds it’s quite unusual. For the most part you’ll get 15 to 20 seconds, if it’s something really neat they’ll look at it for 25, 30 seconds at most. If I can hold somebody for 35 seconds or more, I win. I remember when they first opened the Hirshhorn, I couldn’t get enough of that place, I was walking around outside like I had died and gone to heaven, you know? All the sculptors that I ever met that I ever liked were there. Jo Reed: How do you go about creating your pieces? Do you sketch them out first? Do you start with the matter? Where do you begin? Harold Kyle:  Actually it’s depending on what I have. If I had like the whole bunch of those headlight pieces, I would lay three or four out, see where I could go with it, what kind of pattern I could make that was pleasing, how to rearrange things and stuff like that. And just go from there, and if I got one to work really well I’d go with the second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, until I ran out of pieces. I’ve never been stuck for something to do, I can make art out of almost anything, a little pat on my own back for that. But I can, I can make art out of almost anything, I realized that a long time ago. Doesn’t have to be big, it doesn’t have to be shiny, it can just be. And there’s art in almost every artifact; that’s the first part of artifact, is art. Jo Reed:  Can you describe a hammer that you showed me? That you showed me in your shop, if it’s possible to describe it. Harold Kyle:  I will try to do that. I work in a body shop, like I mentioned before, and I had a coworker who also worked there for 40-odd years, but he was the shop painter. And for the first 25 years or so we worked there all the paint came in little quart cans, so whenever he mixed paint up, he put it back in the can and he had this little short handle ball-peen hammer that he would hammer the lid back on the can with. And eventually the paint would splash up on it, and it got thicker and thicker, it didn’t really look too much like a ball-peen hammer anymore, it just looked like a big glob of paint, but you could tell it was still a hammer. And, about 15 years or so ago they stopped using the tin cans and went to all plastic, and this particular hammer laid on the same bench where paint was splashing on it five or six times a day for the next 15 or 16 years. And eventually the paint built up to, it was close to an inch thick. And I saw it back there one day and I said to him, and I said, “Can I have it?” And he said, “Sure, go ahead.” And I started cutting down into the layers of paint, and the only way I can describe it is a rainbow gone crazy. It’s every color of every car that’s ever been made for the past 40 years. And it built up in all these layers that you couldn’t do if you tried. And when you cut down across it, it was like cutting into old tree rings. It was really kind of neat. Jo Reed:  You seem to have the ability just to see what’s there. Harold Kyle:  Sometimes yeah, I think so, if I had 125 years left I don’t think I could come out with all the ideas that I have now. And I’m still being bombarded with new ones, every time I go somewhere I see something new that I think would be neat, neat to try or neat to do. And I’m forever picking stuff up, I just, you know, I drive people crazy, I’ll pick stuff up when I see it. Harold Kyle:  Evil Mickey was pretty neat; it’s made out of some gears, it’s a ring gear and some transmission gears. And I had read this book of all the famous people who had made something of Mickey Mouse; abstract, sculptures, ceramics, but the whole book was filled with Mickey Mouse-famous people. So I thought I was going to be famous someday, so I had to make a Mickey myself. So I made that Mickey Mouse, and I thought it was just hilarious, I just loved the way the eyes wiggled around and the way his little whiskers bounced, and he just had that big smile on his face. And I brought him in the house, and at the time Ryan I think was 10, Jo Reed:  Your son. Harold Kyle:  Yes, my son Ryan. And he looked at it and he says, “Oh Daddy, what are you going to do with that?” And I said, “Well I’ll put it in the house.” He says, “Oh Daddy, please don’t put that in the house, that thing is evil. It’s an evil Mickey Daddy, please don’t put evil Mickey in the house.” So Mickey got banned into the woods up until the time for the show. So I thought, “Well you know what? Mickey’s been in the woods long enough, I’ll bring him out.” But I did put him in the show as Evil Mickey. And then Mary Agnes Swan, who’s the president of the Art Center, decided she really liked it but she insisted I change the name to “Good Mickey” after she bought it, and I said, “It’s no problem, you buy it you can call it anything you want.” So that’s the little story about Evil Mickey. Jo Reed:  Now tell me a little bit more about the show, the show was where? Harold Kyle:  This was at the Mattawoman Creek Art Center, it’s located in Marbury, Maryland, inside Smallwood State Park, it’s an independent art center, nonprofit, but it’s open to anyone in southern Maryland to be a member or show their work in the gallery. Jo Reed:  And the gallery is really quite beautiful. Harold Kyle:  Isn’t it gorgeous? Jo Reed: Two really good rooms. Harold Kyle:  When I think about that, if you had that gallery in Georgetown, you’d be in a 10 million dollar gallery. It’s just gorgeous, with the open-beam ceilings, the lighting from the windows and the lighting inside is all new, all new track lighting. And with the mantel there it’s just enough hominess to take it away from just being four walls and a ceiling. Jo Reed:  And that was a one-man show. Harold Kyle:  Yes it was. Jo Reed:  And you did very well. Aside from getting wonderful reviews, you also sold a lot of artwork. Harold Kyle:  Yes I did, I was very pleased with that, especially down there in Southern Maryland. Its 35 miles due south of Washington, even this time of year is just gorgeous as you can get. Jo Reed:  And do you give your art away as Christmas presents? Harold Kyle:  I do. I’ve scaled down this year, this year I’ve decided to do coffee cans. I take coffee cans and I torch them, and I make lanterns with the coffee cans. Jo Reed:  Tell me what your next big project is. Harold Kyle:  I had a piece at the last show it was called “The Guardian,” my son’s very disappointed that it sold, I was not. But he was disappointed it sold, he really liked that piece. But it was made out of inch thick plate steel, although it was only maybe five-foot tall, it probably weighed in about 350, 400 pounds. And I’ve got the similar kind of metal at work and I was thinking about making my son another one. Jo Reed:  Harold thank you, and thank you for giving me part of your Sunday before Christmas. Harold Kyle:  Oh my pleasure, absolute pleasure. Jo Reed:  I so appreciate that. That was artist and mechanic Harold Kyle.  You can check out his sculpture in today's art works blog at arts.gov.  And you can also find Harold on Flickr...at HaroldKyle1949  This is the first podcast in a series we're calling Dual Lives: a celebration of artists with talent and dedication who have to work regular day jobs to make ends meet. You've been listening to Art Works produced at the National Endowment for the Arts.  To find out how art works in communities across the country, keep checking the Art Works blog, or follow us @NEAARTS on Twitter. For the National Endowment for the Arts, I'm Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening. Transcrip will be available shortly.