The Mad, Mind-Boggling Assemblage of Bill Skrips
Cerrillos Studio: A Surreal Space of Searched Materials
By Brian D’Ambrosio
Cerrillos Studio: A Surreal Space of Searched Materials
There is much to behold if you are able to peer through the smudged windows, into Bill Skrips’ studio space in Cerrillos. The front door sign is turned to “Closed” most of the time, even if he can be seen or heard working inside. It is not offered to the public as a traditional gallery, in which to saunter or schmooze or observe his art. Next door is The Black Bird Saloon. With so many people wandering the streets, he said that if he let even some of them in, he would never get any work done.Plus, there isn’t all that much free room to step without crushing a box of sandy baseball mitts or tripping into a big drawer or chest, or even trampling on a work in progress.
“I picked this up from the Snydersville Flea market in Pennsylvania,” Skrips said of a box of Lionel train switches and lights from the early 1900s. “A lot of people like to talk about their work, but I like to talk about the stories of where the ingredients came from and the process of the hunt for materials.”
He’s especially interested in bits and pieces from East Coast foundries produced in the 1920s and ‘30s - handmade and slowly slouching toward rusted. These investigational “hunts,” as he calls them, spur him on creatively.
“I look for things that have been carved or welded or painted by others,” said Skrips, pointing to a pair of old metal-bladed ice skates he bought in Eldorado, then to a tiny human figurine riding a rat toy epoxied inside of a cigar box.
Knee-deep in divergent materials, Skrips’ studio is a warehouse crowded to overflowing with industrial leftovers, steel flasks, copper instruments, wooden and metal odds and ends, drawers of all types of tools, and seeping cans of paint.
“I am primarily a sculptor,” he said. “I gather all kinds of mind-boggling material. I guess one could say, well, hoarder? I find great stuff all of the time.”
Skrips was born and raised in suburban New Jersey, the product of a blue-collar family. His father worked in the construction industry and, as a leisure pursuit, he scavenged unrelated, commonplace materials and combined them to make assemblages. He would take home scraps of paper, old books, fabrics, and various building supplies, like screws or bolts, and other manufacturing miscellany, such as wrenches or pliers.
“He made three bucks a week,” Skrips said. “My mom was a factory worker. We were a pretty poor family. He was a hoarder in the sense that anything in the basement that he had, he was allowed to hoard. I was an only child, and it was not a disturbed childhood like certain artists. I had a good childhood.”
Skrips enrolled in visual arts classes in the ‘70s and lived in New York City for 30 years. He came to New Mexico for the first time about 15 years ago on a short road trip, and the desert had enough charisma, mystique and freeing sense of isolation to draw him back to the state within just a few months.
Humorous and dark, absurd and surreal, gritty and playful, Skrips has been heavily impacted by quirky outsider artists(self-taught creators with not much interest in conforming to the prevailing conventions of the art world) and surrealism (the illogical or dreamlike liberation of the unconscious mind through creativity).
Influences include Joseph Cornell (1903-1972) a pioneer of assemblage; Roger Brown (1941-1997); and James Nutt, a founding member of the Chicago surrealist art movement.
Similar to them, Skrips’ installations are spare and fortuitous and would be difficult to replicate. The gist is to make use of all different sorts of effects–an antique electric dentist’s drill, or soft steel candleholders, or the raggedy innards of an encyclopedia from the 1910s, or license plates, or bicycle wheels – and to create something, even if he is not quite sure why or how he is doing it. No matter how smartly and strangely he explores the process and creative strategy of conceiving and making a work of art, Skrips says that it is really only a simple matter of “making stuff.”
“Things flow together and it is not magic,” he said. “I pull things apart. If you see something destroyed, that means that it is going to go here or there. Germs of ideas come mostly working. There is nothing holy about it.”
Artist’s Job to Forage, Play
To complete one of his charming assemblages of trash and trinkets, Skrips brings into play objects from a boatload of sources, including flea markets, garage sales, swap meets, abandoned buildings, and discount stores. There is a sensible cost analysis to the artist’s dazzling lunacy, to not pay too much for something that he is only going to split to pieces, like an antique violin, or board game, or model car.
“Everything is labeled a so-called ‘collectible’ these days,” he said. “Five bucks and under, I can handle that. But one-hundred dollars? What artist can afford that?”
Skrips said that sometimes, even after hours of severing, stacking and attaching fragments together, that the finished form or desired shape just doesn’t materialize. That is why, he said, an incomplete sculpture might be ignored for a few months. If he gets stuck, however, he is always able to look elsewhere for inspiration in the boxes of gadgets, devices and raw materials piled up in the shop.
“It’s our job as artists to play,” he said. “If I have destroyed or given up on a piece, then the play didn’t work. This flying guy right here (a mishmash of metal, copper, wooden blocks and rubber hoses, resembling a model airplane), he’s not ready to sell. I sell stuff to make more stuff and to create some empty space.”
A lover and purveyor of stories about whimsical art and the charming eccentrics who create it, Brian D’Ambrosio is at work on his newest book, New Mexico Eccentrics. He may be reached at dambrosiobrian@hotmail.com