NEW KNOXVILLE — Most people who make magic happen with knives, spoons and forks do so in the kitchen.
Gary Hovey, of New Knoxville, does it in the welding shop.
Hovey is an award-winning sculptor who creates animal figures using stainless steel flatware as his medium.
“I went to an art show in 1978 in Witchita, Kansas, and saw works by John Kearney. He made huge animals out of car bumpers. I thought, ‘Boy, if a guy did that in spoons, you could have it in your house,’” Hovey said. It would be another 26 years before the artist tested his theory.
In the meantime, he married his high school sweetheart, Tonnie, whom he met in a Kansas high school art class; learned bronze casting by working in a foundary in Oklahoma and welding by working in a shop in Washington, D.C.; and came to Ohio to take a job in maintenance at the Way ministry.
Gary was used to moving around. He was born in Virginia and grew up in a military family, changing locations often during his formative years. His interest in art began in grade school.
“I had a good teacher in California. He was encouraging and got me into clay work,” Gary said. Hovey’s parents saw his ability and were also supportive. When Gary found a “Draw me” advertisement in a magazine and sent in his sample drawing, he was accepted into the correspondence art school, whose lessons he enjoyed for several years.
But it was sculpture that captured his imagination and his heart.
“I have a knack I don’t have in two dimensional (art),” he said. When Tonnie enrolled in a commercial art school in Tulsa, Gary discovered the Turkey Track Bronze Works. The foundary did fine art casting for sculptors. Gary took a cut in pay to work there, but the job had other benefits. Employees were permitted use of the tools and materials every so often to create their own artworks. Gary’s medium changed from clay to metal.
“We had a 99.9 percent success rate in casting,” he said. “That’s unheard of. But it was true. Actually, it was 100 percent, but no one would have believed that.”
He spent three years at Turkey Track. It was after he returned from Washington in 2004 that he went back to his flatware idea.
“I came home and talked to Tonnie. She said I should try it. I got some flatware and made a running dog. I put it on the Internet and asked my artist friends, ‘Is this art?’” he said.
They thought so.
“Could I get $150 for it?” Gary asked. He got $200. Now, his large pieces sell for upwards of $5,000. His current project, a bear rearing six feet up on its hind legs, will go to the 2017 Decatur (Indiana) Sculpture Tour show with a $10,500 price tag.
“I still make little chicks that sell for $50,” he said. Each piece is individually priced and each is unique. He doesn’t use molds, even when he gets orders for lots of the same things.
“I’ve sold over 50 herons,” he noted. “If I need money, I’ll make herons.”
Almost every sculpture is an animal, although he also often creates a habitat for the animal to pose in. His ideas come from photographs he finds online and from requests.
When a tourist in Decatur saw an eagle, which had been purchased for permanent display by the city, he commissioned another one for his city.
Gary’s work is available through his website, www.Hoveyware.com, and in Sidney at Gallery 2:Ten.
“I’d like a celebrity to buy one of my pieces. That would be cool. Or a museum. That would be a feather in my cap, too,” he said.
The closest he’s come to celebrity ownership is the Toothsome Chocolate Emporium, a restaurant at Universal Orlando, in Florida, which has included five Hoveyware animals in its decor.
In Decatur, Mayor Ken Meyer said Gary’s work is always a hit of the town’s annual sculpture tour. That’s why the city has bought two pieces and is considering a third.
“People love looking at his pieces,” Meyer said by phone. “They look at it from afar and it’s a shiny eagle or heron and when you get up close and see it’s made from knives, forks and spoons, it’s amazing, especially if you meet him and see what he does, despite his disability.”
Ten years before Gary began hammering and welding cutlery into art, he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. The illness has prevented him from driving and he can’t hold a full-time job. It very nearly incapacitated him, but in 2009, he participated in a trial gene therapy experiment at the Ohio State University. Doctors inserted a gene deep into his brain.
“It didn’t stop the progression of the disease, but he can communicate,” said Tonnie. It has also permitted him to continue making art.
“(Doing so has) been extremely productive for him. It’s something he can do that nobody else can do. We’ve met so many people in the art community, and we’ve met people who have Parkinson’s,” she said. Gary urges them to do as much as they can now, to not wait until they are “better.”
The artist works on just one piece at a time. He lays out a pattern, a grid, on his shop floor to determine the size of the sculpture. Then, he almost always starts by making the animal’s head, which he welds from the inside out. Once the head is complete, he builds from the ground up.
“I put in bumps and muscles. I think that draws people to it. They like detail,” Gary said. Those bumps, curves, muscles and coat help to determine which piece of cutlery goes where.
“If it’s hairy, it’s going to be a fork. Knives give strength. The (flatware) pattern makes a difference. I’ll put in as many different patterns as I can. Someone might recognize it and say, ‘That was my grandmother’s pattern.’ Sometimes I decide as I go. Sometimes I make something and then change it. I try to use triangles wherever I can, because triangles are strong. I make corrections as I go. It’s all welded together. It’s a unibody, like a car,” he said.
“Sometimes, I stay up at night, figuring what to use,” where to position forks, knives or spoons. All of it will be flatware, except the base. He has a literal ton of stainless steel tablewear, stored in plastic bins, in a room of his shop in rural New Knoxville.
He flattens spoons, cuts and shapes handles into tiny shapes, cleans them with a wire wheel, welds knives together to create a frame. His animals have a sense of movement about them and a definite sense of fun.
“I like to incorporate attitude and, when possible, a story,” Gary wrote on his website. Some animals are more challenging than others.
“Cats gave me the hardest time. (Their heads are) a tennis ball with a mouth on it. But my three first ones looked like a dog, then a monkey, then a monkey dog. I can’t make octupuses. They’re too curvy. Snakes are hard. People who buy horses really know horses. They’ll say if the flank is wrong,” he noted.
The buying public aren’t the only ones who will tell the artist if something isn’t right. He relies on Tonnie to be his biggest critic.
“I’m kind of brutal about it if it’s not proportional, if something is distracting,” Tonnie said.
She also assists in marketing the work. The couple have tried to interest big city art galleries in accepting some pieces, but the art defies specific genres.
“We end up in a funny little niche,” Tonnie said. “We took him to a fine art gallery. They said it was too contemporary. We took it to a contemporary gallery. They said it’s too realistic. So, we fall into ‘found art,’ but they don’t quite fit there, either.”
Viewers don’t seem to care about genre. Gary has won numerous people’s choice awards in area art shows and a goodly number of first-place ribbons, too. He has been the subject of three videos: one for the OSU Wexner Medical Center, one for the Dayton public television series, “The Art Show” and one for Vimeo.com.
His work is a perennial favorite in the Decatur show, which has become a nationally recognized event. His six-foot tall grizzly is not likely to disappoint. Exhibit-goers will be dazzled by his skill and enchanted with his medium. And that, in turn, will excite Gary.
“When viewers look at a piece for a long time, then suddenly realize that it is made of forks, knives, and spoons — that is my favorite moment!” he said.
