Iron man
Working exclusively with nails, sculptor John Bisbee demonstrates a focus that's as strong as his materials
BRUNSWICK, Maine - The spike is red hot and ready for the power hammer. With a pair of tongs, sculptor John Bisbee loads it into the machine, and then bang. The piston thrusts and a sound like a flock of shotguns cuts through the overcast sky.
It is lonely work in this open shed, but strangely comforting in its rhythm. Lift. Load. Bang. Lift. Load. Bang.
"It's a physical mantra," Bisbee says. "Like having 100 men with hammers and I am their brain."
As soon as he's placed one flattened spike, still steaming, onto a cooling rack, he's onto the next. For months, Bisbee has been trying to go through a 50-pound box a day. That's 127 nails. In a metal-mashing meditation, Bisbee closes in on his goal.
Many of these spikes are meant for "Glyph," a wall-size piece that will be the first thing visitors see when they enter the Portland Museum of Art starting Thursday for Bisbee's career retrospective.
The show, which runs Jan. 24 to March 23, draws on 20 years of bending, hammering, and welding nails and spikes into sculptures. It gives the Portland museum, known for a collection with works by Winslow Homer, Monet, and Matisse, a chance to present a living contemporary artist. For Bisbee, 42, a Cambridge native and longtime Bowdoin College instructor, the exhibition means something more, a validation of years devoted to his art at the expense of virtually everything else.
Whether he's working with thumbnail-long brads or foot-long spikes, Bisbee's art is surprising in its scope. He's made sprawling wall pieces that bring to mind an invading army of kudzu, and mounds of jagged metal that pour out from the corner of a room like lava. He has used nails to make a purse and the twisting, delicate work known as "Spine."
"Most artists make an edition of a work," says Daniel O'Leary, the museum's director. "Every time John makes an object, it's different. He's got no ability to manage his impulse. He just wants to go on to the next thing."
'Art saved his life'
Bisbee always wanted to be an artist. His motivation stemmed, in large part, from his struggles in school. He attended Milton Academy, where his father, Tom, taught math. Though he would thrive on the athletic field, serving as co-captain of Milton's lacrosse team, Bisbee barely scraped by academically.
"I was very sad throughout high school," he says. "I wanted to make stuff, but they [the education system] took that away from me."
Bisbee enrolled at Alfred University, in western New York, studying art with the idea he would become a potter. He calls the day he quit the college lacrosse team, midway through his freshman year, his "declaration of action."
His mother, Ann Porter, a therapist who worked at Harvard University's counseling center for years, describes his decision another way.
"Art saved his life," she says.
For a time, he would ramble along the desolate countryside surrounding Alfred looking for materials for his art. He had grown tired of pottery and spent his days searching for inspiration.
He remembers the abandoned house. The roof had fallen in, and the inside was soaked. But it looked as if whoever had lived there moved out fast, maybe just packing a bag or two. The bed was still made. Beside the house, Bisbee saw a 5-gallon bucket of rusty nails. He turned it over and the nails fell out in a clump, sticking together in the shape of the bucket.
"I just thought it was fascinating," he says.
He started slowly, welding pieces of metal together and adding tiny, rusty nails as a kind of flourish. Some of those pieces, including 1988's "Purse," are in the Portland exhibition. As time passed, Bisbee stopped using other materials, and crafted pieces entirely out of nails. Even as the objects grew larger, the one constant remained.
Asked why he's stuck with nails, Bisbee shakes his head.
"No one ever says to a painter, 'Hey, are you still using paints?' " he says.
Susan Danley, the Portland Museum of Art curator who organized his show, has her own theories.
"You can project all sorts of things about nails," she says. "There's an aspect of John that's sort of this crazed Yankee tinkerer. The other thing about the nail is that it's this thing that seemingly doesn't change and yet he takes that as a challenge. I've got this nail and what can I do? Now I can make it look like a purse. Now I can make it look like Arabic writing."
Successes and struggles
Working with the spikes, you can forget what you're building. The power hammer demands total attention, 150 pounds of force with each push of the pedal. Get your hand caught in there and it's gone. Then there's the repetitive, twisting of the spikes. For some of the pieces, like "Cradle," Bisbee makes dozens of almost identical pieces, each with six spikes bent and welded. Stack them in the corner, twisted to each other, and the mass grows, rising and reaching out at the same time.
He has no trouble maintaining his focus.
"He's absolutely uncompromising and obsessive," says Jennifer Oakes, a poet and former girlfriend who lived with Bisbee during the '90s. "He doesn't separate his life into being a person who eats breakfast and being a person who makes art. He is an artist who is eating breakfast in order to have enough to go on to make his art."
The challenge, for Bisbee, comes when he leaves the studio.
"I literally will not take care of the minutiae that everyone else seems to take care of," he says. "Outside of work, I have a tough time caring."
That means no savings account, IRA, or house. For years, he concedes, "I lived like a rodent."
After graduating from Alfred in 1990, Bisbee moved first into an abandoned building in Wichita, Kan., and later to Spokane, Wash., renting a basement in a drug-soaked neighborhood. He kept sculpting, which led to shows in both cities and a residency at the prestigious MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire.
There, Bisbee met Mark Wethli, chairman of Bowdoin's visual arts department. Wethli hooked up Bisbee with a part-time teaching gig at the school in 1996, and he's lived in Maine ever since.
He has stayed in a room above Wethli's garage and also slept in his own workspaces. Five years ago, for the first time, Bisbee got his own house, a $550-a-month rental on nearby Stover's Cove in Harpswell. Even with his successes - winning the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park's Rappaport Prize in 2003, pieces placed in the Albright-Knox Gallery, in Bowdoin's museum, and in the personal collection of actress Glenn Close - he still struggles to stay afloat.
Porter, Bisbee's mother, says she's come to understand her son by reading "The Lives of Artists," a book written by 16th-century artist Giorgio Vasari.
"It describes people just like John," says Porter. "They paint or sculpt these magnificent works of art but they don't take a bath or clean their room. That's what John is like. He doesn't wear a watch because he does not want that part of his brain to take over the part of the brain that actually thinks about his work."
One-liners and monologues
Usually, once a year, Bisbee will shave. He's been too busy lately, though, and so his beard has grown into a scraggly, brownish-gray growth split into some five dreadlocked strands. He's grown so used to working in the cold that his body can't adjust to the mild temperature inside the galleries. Inside the museum, he sweats through his clothes.
Throw it all together - the beard, the hair, the dirty Dickies work pants - and Bisbee could stand in for Robin Williams in "The Fisher King."
That's not all he shares with the comedian. When others are around, Bisbee is perpetually in motion, reeling off a seemingly endless well of one-liners and monologues, most everything a non sequitur.
He makes speeches. Well, not speeches. More like interludes. They're delivered like lines in a movie that doesn't yet exist.
On Friday, his poker night, he keeps friends entertained with a series of stories, sometimes slipping into various accents. For one tale, he plays the surfer dude and recounts the time he overheard a stranger in a supermarket.
"He said, 'I don't put wheat products in my body, um, but I do eat them,' " Bisbee says, and everyone laughs.
"When I met him, the first thought I had was that he was uncontainable," says writer Jane Brox, who usually hosts the poker game at her Brunswick home. "He seems to feed off this kind of communal energy when he's in a group, and I think that's natural. The other half of him leads a very solitary life."
All day, installing the show in the museum, he's been talking smack with his assistants. Now, at the table with a few former Bowdoin art students and members of his rock band, Bisbee continues.
"Three dollars and 25 cents," he shouts, pushing his chips into the center of the table. "Eat it."
After losing a few hands, he rips off his sweatshirt, pulls out a plastic novelty medal that he wears around his neck, and pushes the bill of his baseball cap to the side. Slapping on his Foster Grant sunglasses, he says, "Let the reign of terror, the reign of darkness, begin."
A few minutes later, after Thai food and a beer, Bisbee takes a break from the game and smiles when asked about his life. He admits he's sad to think of going home alone.
"But to make art all day, to make music, to play poker?" he says, "I'm a lucky guy."
Geoff Edgers can be reached at gedgers@globe.com. 