male announcer: Today on "Studio Space," hosts Kati Texas and David Ferney take you to the studios of two artists who work with flame to create unique sculptures.

♪♪♪ announcer: Scott Hemphill draws upon his love of the sea to create whimsical copper sculptures.

Then visit the studio of world-famous kinetic artist Duane Flatmo, and learn how he became liberated by a trip to Burning Man and went on to create "El Pulpo Mecanico."

♪♪♪ female announcer: This activity was funded in part by the California Arts Council, a state agency, and by viewers like you.

Thank you.

♪♪♪ Kati Texas: Hi, I'm Kati Texas.

David Ferney: And I'm David Ferney.

Today on "Studio Space," we'll be exploring creations of fire and metal hammered out of copper and scavenged materials from two world-renowned artists.

Kati: I'll be visiting the multitalented Duane Flatmo, and his mad, mechanical menagerie.

But, first, David takes a tour through the process of creating copper creatures with Scott Hemphill.

[tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap] Scott Hemphill: I have an idea, I set out, and I finish what I start, which is-- a lot of people won't do.

They won't finish what they start because they get tired of working on that piece because it takes hours and hours, but that's when you finish it, and that's when you have the fun.

[Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap] ♪♪♪ Scott: Ah, another day at the office.

Check this out.

Welcome.

♪♪♪ David: We're here in Eureka in Old Town, in the studio of Scott Hemphill.

Thanks so much for joining us on "Studio Space," Scott.

Scott: Thanks for havin' me.

This is my galleria, my studio, my work space, my second home away from home, if you will.

Then I have my shark tank over here with all my little scuba divers.

I'm a scuba diver.

I haven't dove in a while, but I still like to get back in the water, and this is where a lot of this comes from.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Scott: I got copper--exposed to copper sculpture back in 1989, when I was stationed here with the Coast Guard, started doin' the kinetic sculpture--was inspired by Hobart Brown and tried to get some information from Hobart.

He didn't--he kept that pretty close to himself, so I transferred to Puerto Rico with the Coast Guard and kept doin' my copper on my own, struggled and struggled and struggled for years.

Then about five years into it, it all kind of came together, and I was like, "Wow, I can pretty much do whatever I want."

David: One of the things I totally appreciate about your work is your great sense of humor, that it seems like you have such a fun time creating all of your stuff, and it has such a whimsical air to it, that it's very entertaining to check everything out.

Do you focus on trying to do fun stuff?

Is it just what comes out of Scott?

How do you approach your great sense of humor in your work?

Scott: That's a great question 'cause, a lot of times, if you run out of ideas, then what do you do?

What do you do?

That's what scares me the most.

So sometimes ideas just come out of nowhere.

Two or three o'clock in the morning, you wake up.

I'm like, "Oh, that's a great idea.

I need to get up and write it down or draw it or whatever," and then there's the idea.

David: But the humor is just that it's just part of your character?

Scott: I think that probably comes from some of my coast guard experience and seeing some of the stuff that we had to deal with and then, kind of, incorporate that into my art.

Keep it light.

David: Yeah.

Scott: I always like to say always have a pen and piece of paper available, and you get an idea, maybe just a little doodle, but that little drawing or doodle, whatever it is, may turn into the next big piece.

And I always do go back to drawing.

Sometimes I'm on it, I'm hot, like, draw, draw, draw every day, and then other times you're in a slump, and you're just not there.

So it kind of comes and goes.

It doesn't have to be perfect.

It doesn't have to be right.

That's why it's art.

There's no boundaries.

David: And, obviously, a lot of your sketching evolves into your copper sculpture work?

Scott: Right, there's some ideas that you draw, and it's like, "Wow, this is awesome," and it'll go right to a sculpture.

I've had many drawings that will do that.

You draw the idea the night before, no idea what it was, where it came from, and then, the next day, you're down here in the studio, actually putting that idea to actual copper sculpture.

Scott: And then my latest piece, the bigger piece, this is "Shark Buoy," his name.

I'm workin' on him right now.

I just finished his teeth.

The teeth took about two weeks to do.

The teeth are all FreeForm steel, melted, and then, once I get those all in, I weld them in, and this whole piece will come out, and then all these copper panels that are on the table here will be riveted onto this.

The eyes will be made out of glass from the glass guys in the back.

David: Is there anything project-wise that you've always had in the back of your mind that was like, "Oh, someday I really wanna do this" or "I've always wanted to get into one of those," or anything that's kind of floatin' back there in the creative mind that you're like, "I'm gonna do that someday"?

Scott: I still have the ideas.

Like, the shark here, for example, is somethin' that I've wanted to do for a while.

I would like to do one even bigger, but that's on the to-do list.

But to answer your question, I think I've pretty much done what I wanted to do.

David: I know that you dabble a little bit with kinetic sculpture.

You have your car, and you work within that community of the kinetic-sculpture community.

And it always fascinates me that that hybrid of engineering mixed with art and those personalities and art creators in our community, which I include you as of those people that are real engineer-minding but also like to do the creative art as well on top of it.

I love your car project.

It's really wonderful.

Scott: Yeah, that design was Ken Beidleman's design, and then the design that Steve Salzman--he built the machine.

Didn't work for him, so I purchased it from him and fixed the things that needed to be engineered for it to run right, and then incorporated my art with it too, which is fun.

You have somethin' that you could ride and have fun with, and then it's a piece of art too, and people love it.

♪♪♪ David: So why copper?

Why not wood or steel or some other form?

Scott: Good question.

There's too many painters in Humboldt, and so I'm color-blind, so that's out.

There's a lot of people who draw.

They draw better than I do.

So when I was exposed in 1989, with Hobart Brown's copper, I was like, "Wow, that's pretty cool."

And that's where I started.

I was inspired by that and thought, "Well, why not?

If he can do it, I can do it."

David: So I was curious about how long some of these projects take you--some of your works.

Scott: It's changed over the years.

Small fish, like some of these, would take me about 12 to 15 hours, back in the day.

Going through the process over and over throughout the years, I've figured out that I needed to make a decent pattern, and once I had the pattern, it goes really quickly.

So I took the time, and I made the pattern.

Here's the sides of the shark, the head, the tail, the dorsal fin.

All the pieces that I need for the shark are right here, so then, once I draw all the shark pieces out, cut 'em out, it'll take me about three hours to make one of these guys, plus 30 years, so that's your answer, a lot of time and effort.

David: Can you talk to us a little bit about what the process of working with the copper is like in the sculpture?

Scott: But over here is where all the magic happens.

Have my oxygen-acetylene torch, Victor 100.

I brought this back.

This is the original torch, basically.

Do all my tank work and fire the torch up right here.

These are the tools that I mainly use.

It's pretty basic.

It's pretty simple.

You're mainly using your hands, the torch, and this pounding stump and a lot of hammers to make stuff happen.

David: So it's all a reaction with the fire and the copper is all the coloring that you get?

There's no chemical action on it or-- Scott: This right here is-- after I've annealed the piece of copper--annealing basically makes the metal so it's pliable, malleable.

I can move it around.

This is a piece that has not been annealed.

So now I'll take my torch, and I wanna get this cone to where you see that smaller cone.

That's where most of the heat is.

That's where you want it being close to the copper.

If you get that too close to the copper, it'll burn it up.

It'll burn a hole in it.

So I'm just gonna take it.

I'm gonna run back and forth.

You can check it out.

Now you see that metal startin' to change.

It's gonna be like a salmon-red.

See that red?

When you see that red, you know you're good.

You just keep goin' back, and that's the first stage of the annealing.

Scott: So you might anneal a piece ten times by the time you're done so-- David: And then you do brazing with brass, right?

Scott: So the technical term is "brazing," so I use brass rod with a Jet Flux, which is liquid flux that burns through the flame, and then I put the bead on the two pieces-- David: Right, 'cause that's like with the gold edges, the brass.

Scott: The golds and the gold edges is the brass.

The brass is like the glue that brings the two metals together.

David: Yeah.

Scott: And that's annealing.

David: Yeah, I love the colors that come out of the process.

Scott: You get the really cool colors.

♪♪♪ [tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap] ♪♪♪ Scott: Thanks for comin' down and checkin' everything out.

It's been a good time.

Enjoy the art.

♪♪♪ Scott: All right.

Duane Flatmo: Hold on.

Let's do it again.

You don't want me to come in?

[Duane singing] ♪ Dah-da, da-dah ♪ Duane: But I used to put mascara on my face, and I would put an old hat on, and I'd get a knapsack.

Kati: Oh, like, like-- "The Littlest Hobo."

Duane: Yeah, oh, yeah.

Kati: Okay.

Duane: Red Skelton, you know?

Kati: Yeah.

Duane: And I would put a little knapsack with my lunch in it, and I'd walk down the streets, and then come back, and I'd sit on the grass and eat my food.

I was really reenacting that, but I thought it was a job, you know.

My mom said, "What do you wanna be when you grow up?"

Most kids said, "Oh, I wanna be a fireman," "I wanna be a policeman."

I said, "I wanna be a hobo."

And they go, "Duane, that's not a job."

"I will make this a job."

♪♪♪ Kati: Hi, there.

I'm Kati Texas.

Thank you for joining us today on "Studio Space."

Today we are with Duane Flatmo.

Thanks so much for inviting us to your organized junk pile.

Duane: Well, Kati, when you asked me to come, I said, "I have to do this.

Kati: Of course, I've always been a fan of your work and love, like, havin' fun and building stuff with you, but I was hopin' today we could talk a little bit about you and what brought you where you are.

Obviously, you've been involved in a lot of different kinds of art forms.

You're painting.

You're sculpting.

You're adding motion and fire to them.

How would you describe what you do?

What is Duane Flatmo's art form?

Duane: God, what is-- well, I tell you, I think it's all just one big experiment, in a way.

The way I look at my art is, every time I build something, I wanna try to outdo myself again, and I wanna try to keep getting better, and I wanna bring stuff out where people, they have to step back a bit when they see it, you know?

That's the ultimate if you can do that.

Duane: So we'll take a little stroll around here.

I do a lot of graphic art, so these are some of my graphic stuff that I do for local companies, FoxFarm Soil and-- Kati: Oh, and here's "El Pulpo."

Duane: Here's the logo to the "El Pulpo" machine.

Kati: Which is here but all in pieces.

Duane: Yeah, so, yeah, the "El Pulpo" machine is like the latest in a succession of starting this stuff, way back, when I was building things really small, and I was building kinetic sculptures every year, and I was getting better and better at mechanical things and stuff, and then I found-- I ran the Kinetic Sculpture Race for 33 years and-- Kati: You ran in the Kinetic Sculpture Race.

Duane: Yeah, and I raced that thing and finally just got tired of it, and I went out to Burning Man one week, and I was hooked out there because you could build big things, and you didn't need to build them lightweight.

You just build it heavy and put a motor under it and drive it around, so it was really liberating.

It was liberating to be able to just not think about the lightness and just grab things and put 'em on if you like it.

If it looks good, make it happen.

So, you know, this started out as a handicap, the H car, handicap van.

It was a Ford Econoline.

Had all these benches in it and-- Kati: And it apparently spawned a church.

There's a following?

Duane: Yeah, somebody started a church, called The Church of El Pulpo Mecanico, and it's just somebody who-- I thought he was kind of crazy at first, but I started seein' this church come up on the Internet, and my mom called and said, "Duane, did you start a church?"

I went, "No, Mom, I'm not doin' a church or a cult or anything.

Somebody did that."

I've been building this little octopus thing over the years, and we were thinking about building somethin' for Burning Man, and I wanted to build somethin' really big, and I wanted it to shoot a lot of fire.

So I started collecting junk on the roads.

I had a white bucket.

Built this in, like, two months and brought it home in my suitcase.

Took it all apart, put it back together here, and we just started building.

So you can see there's one cam that goes up the middle.

So, basically, it's a cam that goes around, and it's got little bumps on it, and as they go around, they push things in and out, so you got this way, that way, the eyes go in and out, and it's just one shaft that goes up through the center and has one cam for the eyes that push 'em in and out, and one cam for this.

It's a very simple mechanism.

Easy to work on.

Kati: One right up the middle, and it works all those different things goes up-- Duane: Yeah, if I get really good at something, like I know I can paint, I start doin' some landscapes, and I go, "Well, that's fun, you know.

That's great."

I've done a bunch of landscapes.

Now I'm gonna move on to sculpture, and I start to do sculptures, and then I move on to somethin' else, so I like to bounce around a lot, so I guess I'm a multidimensional artist, I guess, because I paint, sculpt, and you know-- Kati: Some people describe your graphic stuff as--what?

Neo-cubist?

Duane: Mm-hmm.

Kati: Is Picasso an artist you admire?

Duane: Well, you know, he wasn't for a long time.

I was into Brach and Hieronymus Bosch, and a lot of that-- Pieter Bruegel, strange, you know, nightmare-- Kati: That dark sense of humor coming through, yeah.

Duane: Yeah, all those little things going on and those pheasant feasts with those animals eating, and you're like, "What does this mean?

What was this guy on?"

Or whatever, you know?

And Picasso did come along, but he wasn't, like, my-- people do think so because my look has that look to it, and the way I came up with that was, one day, I was drawing a face, and all I did was-- we have these two lines on our mouth right here.

I just took this line here, and I brought it over here, and I put the mouth on the side of the face, and that just changed that face so much, and then I started to go big eye, little eye, mouth on side, boom, and then it's an experiment you can just keep workin' on doing different faces.

I mean, you could spend your lifetime painting faces.

I mean, it's amazing how many different types there are and long, thin, fat, you know, and caricatures and-- Kati: Definitely, and you have to find projects that, like, inspire you, and then you're answering the questions that you have, and you're learning the things that you're curious about.

Duane: And how you can make money at it because the ultimate is to make money at something you love to do, and if you are building lots of fun things and everything, that's one thing, you know, be an artist, but unless you can make it a sellable piece of art, you know, you're gonna starve, you know?

Kati: Now, I think that's one of the things that I learned from you was I saw you treat art like your job.

You'd get up in the morning, and you go.

You're on a schedule.

You go.

You do your art.

You get off work.

You go do your thing.

I mean, kinetic season is a whole different game, but I would describe you as a blue-collar artist.

It's just your job.

You're a working guy.

The skill you happen to have that's marketing is this, like, super-fun, creative stuff.

Duane: Yeah, yeah.

Kati: Do you have a favorite series or a favorite kind of thing or a favorite project that you've done?

Duane: I think, out of the two things in my lifetime that are my most accomplished pieces are the "El Pulpo Mecanico" machine, and the Arkley Center mural, and that's the biggest mural I've done to this point.

Kati: It's huge.

It's like six stories?

Duane: Yeah.

Kati: By far, the biggest mural-- Duane: Yes, seven.

Kati: Seven stories high.

Duane: Don't cut me short.

Kati: Okay.

Duane: Don't cut me short.

Kati: Well, tell me about the mural.

Where did the idea come from?

Duane: Well, the mural-- you know, they were wantin' to do something to do with the theater and performing arts and stuff, music and all that kind of stuff, and I had just gone to France, knowing that they wanted a mural, and I thought, "What if I took shots of all the different architecture," which I was totally blown away by in France, Paris, got the Arc de Triomphe and got d'Orsay Museum and the Luxembourg Gardens, and I came home, and I started collaging this whole scene with an arch through it and just looked beautiful, and then I needed the musicians in the foreground, and so I went through all these old '30s and '40s books, black-and-white photographs of musicians, and I took four people, put 'em in there, and then I brought it to the Arkley's, and they looked at it, and Cherie just looked at it, and she goes, "That is beautiful.

You mean you can put that on that wall?"

And I was like, "I think--" no, but I didn't say, "I think so."

Kati: "Probably?"

Duane: I should've said--I go, "Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah."

You always gotta act like you know what you're doin', right?

Kati: Oh, yeah, yeah.

Duane: Figure it out later.

But, no, I was so excited, and then I gave a square-footage price, and I said, "This is this."

Now that I'm working on it again--I'm doin' some repaint--I'll see parents will be bringing their kids to the ballet classes, and the little girl will get in the foreground, and the mother will take a picture of the girl doing the pose in the mural, yeah, and it's kind of a backdrop for that.

And that's Cyd Charisse up in the top, doing the dance, and Gene Kelly was holding her up in one of the old movies, and I took him out and just had her there 'cause she had a beautiful pose in the hot-pink dress.

And so it's taken-- it takes about five, six months to paint a mural like that, and it used up a lot of paint.

Kati: I bet.

Duane: And it's scary, you know?

You get up on that boom truck, and, you know, it moves around.

You start to learn how to just kind of flex with the whole thing, and you don't--at first, you're scared, but you know it's not gonna tip over, you know, so it's exciting.

You talk to people and stuff.

Kati: Well, and you've been a mentor to many young people.

I met you in the Rural Burl Mural Bureau painting, which was really fun.

So you have definitely had an influence on a lot of young folks.

Duane: You know what's neat is--and it's the best thing-- is I remember, long ago, my mom said, "You would be the best father, Duane.

You're the one who doesn't wanna have kids in our family.

And Greg never had a son--" and my sister, you know, the name Flatmo didn't carry on.

I go, "You know what?

I'm not about just carrying our name on.

I'm about--you know, I'm not gonna have kids, but someday, in my reasoning--" my mom's reasoning was "If good people don't have good kids, then there won't be good kids out there.

We need people like you, Duane, to have kids, you know?"

And then, I said, "Mom, if I don't have kids, I will work with kids someday," because there are plenty of kids out there who have broken homes, bad fathers that beat 'em, that talk down to 'em and don't give 'em enough accolades for what they're doing in life, and you cannot go on with a good attitude and a good clean soul if someone's always on you about that kind of stuff.

So I told my mom, you know, "Someday, I'll do that."

And it's so funny that I-- you know, Nancy Flemming, Libby Maynard, got that whole program together in the California Arts Council.

I started working with these kids, and I'd get-- I must've gone through 70 or 80, in 12 years of doing that on the weekends, and I treat them all-- now I see 'em all the time, and they're all grown up, and they're doing great, and to watch them, it's like my own kids, sort of.

Kati: Yeah.

Duane: And they--sometimes they'd come up and say, "Duane, I'm doing great.

Look, I have a kid now.

I'm 39 years of life."

Duane: "Thirty-nine?"

Kati: "I met you when you were 12."

Duane: Yeah, and they'll say, you know, "You were like a father to me," you know?

And some of 'em call me on Father's Day and say, "Happy Father's Day."

You know, it's so funny.

Luke and a bunch of those guys call me, so that makes me feel good.

Kati: Oh, great.

That's definitely, I think, a good thing you've done among many good things, I'm sure, but I-- Duane: Well, I pulled Kati out of the gutter too.

Man, you were-- remember, you were just-- Kati: Yeah, I was hitchhikin' around the coast, I've--yeah.

Duane: You-- you owe me so much.

Kati: Thank you so much for inviting us into your amazing shop.

It's been a real pleasure gettin' to chat with you again.

Duane: All right.

Thanks, Kati.

Kati: Yeah, and thank you so much for joining us today on, "Studio Space."

♪♪♪ Kati: We hope you enjoyed today's episode.

David: To visit with other Humboldt County artists, go to studiospace.tv.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ announcer: This activity was funded in part by the California Arts Council, a state agency, and by viewers like you.

Thank you.

♪♪♪ ...