Heavy-Metal Magic -- Sculptor Dan Klennert Finds Beauty Among The Scrap Heaps Of Industry

-- RENTON

The pile might start with a rusty old barrel, a scythe blade or a couple of piston connecting rods from a long-dead diesel engine.

A half-dozen such piles, in various stages of accumulation, are scattered inside Dan Klennert's shop. There are more out back. To them he continually adds more scraps, sometimes waiting months or even years for the perfect piece: Antique oxen shoes that dragged pioneer families across the Continental Divide, clawfoot bathtub legs, plow discs, cranks, gears, wrenches, a metal faucet handle.

Where others see scrap metal, redeemable by the pound, Klennert sees the neck of a pterodactyl, the thigh of a horse or the raking teeth of the dread Tyrannosaurus Rex. So to the slumbering metal he adds his spark of life, the arcing spray of a welding torch.

From these nested piles he raises fittingly eclectic, even eccentric, offspring. Two car-sized dinosaurs flank the driveway to his shop, birds preen and a skeletal man dangles from a stand in the yard. The shop itself is crammed with fish, a horse, a rock star and a madly grinning spectre on a chopper.

While much of the art world and its critics struggle in the miasma of deconstructionism, Klennert revels in what might be called reconstructionism. From junk - art.

"I try to use the shapes the way I find them," Klennert says. "I like the stuff that's been worn out and bent and broke, the old worn-out shapes worked by someone else's hand."

His art straddles an uneasy divide between craft and the kind of inspired whimsy that elevates iron into emotion. When it works, it hits with a clang.

MACHINIST, NOT FINE-ARTS GRAD

With his downturned horseshoe mustache, broad chest and beaten leather smock over blue jeans and a flannel shirt, Klennert looks more at home in a machine shop or a construction site than a gallery. Which is not surprising. He started as a machinist and still works in construction to support his sculpture.

"I'm doing what I love," he says. "It seems like a full-time job but it isn't. It's full-time enjoyment."

Klennert came to art in a roundabout, accretionary way, not unlike the way his own pieces emerge.

While working in a machine shop in his early 20s, he found himself fascinated by the shape and feel of the worn gears and shafts that came in for replacement. He put a few aside and started to weld them together in his spare time. At one point, his boss looked at them and said, "You're in the wrong business."

Klennert kept sculpting for friends and relatives, making cheap gifts as much as anything. Their response encouraged him. After a few years as a hobbyist, he decided to test the art market and take some of his work to the Fremont Art Show in Seattle.

At that point, he was sanding down and then repainting his figures flat black. He figured that's what people wanted. But a friend urged him to take an unfinished piece to the show, which proved to be a breakthrough for him. Before he had even parked his truck, somebody jumped in the back, grabbed the unfinished piece and asked to buy it. The other ones looked manufactured, the man said; the unfinished one looked organic.

"There are messengers that come to you in life," Klennert says. "It's a constant growing process."

INSPIRATION `ALMOST SPOOKY'

Although he started sculpting with old metal in 1972, only since about 1985 has he actually considered himself an "artist," Klennert says.

Over the years, other "messengers" have pushed him into using different materials in his sculptures. Where once he used only rusted metal, Klennert now incorporates wood, brass or whatever else works.

A recently completed horse sports a mane cut from a leather jacket Klennert found in a Bellevue trash bin. "It's just crazy how these things come to me," he says. "It's almost spooky. I looked at the old leather coat, it had fringes on it, and there was my mane."

Still other messengers have pushed him toward more abstract sculpture and works on a grander scale. He envisions making pieces someday that tower over the trees, dwarfing even his giant antique bicycle, about 15 feet high.

A GREATER FREEDOM

Even more than size, Klennert seeks a greater freedom in his work, both in his selection of materials and in his concepts. In recent pieces, he says, he has been forcing the envelope of his imagination, taking risks with chunks of metal he might not have used before.

And his shop is littered with abstract experiments, some complete and some models for future projects.

"That's what I want to do - I want to do good abstracts," Klennert says. "I'm just getting a feel and a balance for abstract art."

Financial success has come slowly, and he still struggles with what seem like arbitrary standards in the art world. Stapled to his office door are clippings about other artists who routinely sell scrap-metal sculptures for tens, even hundreds, of thousands of dollars. Confidence vies with envy as Klennert judges some of their work.

"I could do that in a half-hour, maybe 45 minutes," he says of one $70,000 sculpture.

Klennert hasn't gone entirely unrecognized, though. Cartoonist Gary Larson bought a life-size gorilla named "Rusty," and other collectors have paid up to $7,000 for his work.

But Klennert resists selling through galleries, doesn't have an agent and hasn't had much luck with museums or public art commissions.

A good place to see his work locally is in Bellevue. Klennert says he couldn't fit his big work in the Pacific Northwest Arts and Crafts Fair, so he headed across the street to the Best of the Rest, which runs concurrently. This year the two shows are scheduled for July 24-26.

Ellensburg is another good place to spot Klennert's work. There are about 20 mostly smaller pieces at Jaguars, a clothing and art boutique at 423 North Pearl Street.

Or, best of all, drive down Southeast 128th Street, just east of Renton, and look for the two dinosaurs on the south shoulder of the road. Sometimes they're lit up at night.

Klennert welcomes visitors if the gate's open. If the gate's closed, though, he's probably either lost in a welding reverie or out rummaging through scrap yards, still looking for that perfect piece of metal.