Guy Dill’s bronze sculptures are sexy – sleek, strong and very masculine. The push and pull of smooth metal forms arranged together and often, metaphorically speaking, held together with a strong metallic embrace. They are graceful and beautiful without a hint of whimsy – emotionally solid. Dill himself is a lot like that. He seems well grounded in his personal life – which he likes to keep private – and his professional life where he is not afraid to take risks. The metal sculptures are his bread and butter, but he also works in marble, dabbles in printmaking and has recently earned recognition for his charcoal drawings. In his Venice Beach studio he also has new work that hasn’t been seen in public yet – amazingly subtle, it’s almost the antithesis of his bronze work. But there is a common thread that runs through all of Dill’s work. Whether it’s three-dimensional or two, it always comes back to forms and lines and how the two work together – a lover’s dance that is intoxicating.

Just a couple of blocks from the beach, Dill’s 12,500 square foot studio sits behind two giant steel doors that slide sideways to reveal an open-air courtyard, flanked by a studio on one side and what amounts to gallery space on the other. Dill is a very fit 62 years old. To stay in shape he rides his bike and works. Making sculpture is a hard, sometimes backbreaking job and Dill is a workaholic. He’s in the studio almost every day. Deliberate and thoughtful, he loves to talk about art and is reluctant to talk about himself. It’s clear that the work is paramount.

Dill came to art in a round about way. Born and raised in Malibu, Dill’s mother was a portrait painter and writer and his brother, Laddie John Dill, was also a painter, but Guy had yet to tap into his artistic side. Guy was always encouraged to follow his passions, and as a young man those passions leaned toward the sea and sailing, until fate interceded. It was the mid 1960’s and Guy was in the Coast Guard, successfully avoiding combat in Vietnam. After several weeks at sea, Guy would look forward to visiting friends at Chouinard, a prestigious art school in Los Angeles.

Guy especially liked to tag along to drawing class. He loved everything about it, from the smell of oil paint to the live, nude models. The instructor didn’t mind but suggested that if he was going to hang out he had better bring a drawing pad. Guy figured that if that was the price of admission he was willing to pay. He started drawing.  One teacher even put him in a box – literally. A refrigerator box was outfitted with a light bulb and a peephole, and through that small opening Dill would sketch the naked model. A pretty interesting exercise for a young guy with limited art experience. He laughs when he thinks about it now. He says the instructor wanted him to learn how to draw the model from the “inside out.”

Eventually he had enough to put together a portfolio and with some encouragement applied to Chouinard. He really didn’t have any artistic ambitions, but even if he wasn’t ready to admit it, he was hooked. “The way they (artists) thought drew me in. People sharing ideas in a language I understood. It wasn’t so much that I was striking out to be an artist. That was not my intention.” In fact, he had plans to travel the world.  He had secured his captain papers and was ready to start a company of charter schooners. After his stint in the Coast Guard he went back east to put all the pieces in place. With his boat temporarily in dry dock, he was hanging out in Montreal when he got the call – Chouinard had accepted him. It was decision time, and in the end art was more seductive than the sea. When asked why he chose art, Dill refers to the writing of Joseph Conrad – specifically this passage:

“In the immutability of their surroundings the foreign shores, the foreign faces, the changing immensity of life, glide past, veiled not by a sense of mystery but by a slightly disdainful ignorance.”

Dill believes in the journey, and art seemed to offer a trip with a deeper meaning and a better language to define the story of his life.

Guy returned to Los Angeles and immersed himself in school, but it would still be years before he considered himself an artist. “The badge of being an artist was a big deal for me,” he says. “I was doing what I was doing  because I was fascinated by it, but I wouldn’t label myself because I had such high regard for artists.”

Eventually he would have no choice but to acknowledge the label and his own life long commitment, but for the moment he was a young artist about to make the next bold move in his career – moving from painting to sculpture. “My degree was in painting, but essentially the day I graduated I stopped painting because it was not fulfilling in the physical sense.  Painting is a different species, but I think drawing is the link. The language of drawing is the sharing of an idea with yourself.” He had a lot of ideas and was ready to go to work. He set up shop in what was then a hippie enclave with lots of cheap, available real estate – a perfect place for free spirited artists to cut their collective teeth.

Venice, California, is a funky coastal community just south of Santa Monica. Muscle heads and misfits share space with tourists on the boardwalk. Trendy boutiques, cafes and design shops fill expensive real estate along Abbott Kinney and Main streets. With a history of social consciousness and tolerance for just about any lifestyle, Venice has long been a haven for creative types. Back in the day, Beat poets and artists hung out at the Gas House on the boardwalk or at the Venice Café on Dudley Street. Pacific Ocean Park (POP), an amusement park built on top of an old pier, anchored the social scene. Hollywood special effects people designed many of the attractions, but the popularity of POP faltered as bigger parks like Disneyland and Marineland came on line.

During this time Guy Dill and his contemporaries put down roots in Venice. After POP went into bankruptcy and left to deteriorate, Dill and some of his fellow artists created studios in abandoned space along the old pier. It was here that Dill started his sculpting career. In the beginning he would build things incorporating a particular space – a type of installation art. More traditional sculpture would come later when Dill abandoned the space as part of the art.  “Struggle is an interesting word,” he says. “If I was struggling I wasn’t aware of it. The struggle might have been in the studio with issues of the work – conflict of one thing working against another, or just putting something together – that can be a struggle, but ’struggling artist’ that wasn’t me.” Dill was having fun.

The 1960’s were evolutionary years for Southern California artists. Some young guns were making noise in the art world – names like Ed Ruscha, Billy Al Bengston, Ed Moses, Frank Gehry and Craig Kaufmann, and at the center of the L.A. art scene was the Ferus Gallery on La Cienega Boulevard in down- town L.A. The Ferus was the brainchild of Irving Blum who would later discover Guy Dill and give him a coveted spot in a group show. “There was a new crop of young artists known as the ‘Venice Mafia,’” says Dill.  “We were young, we were doing original work. There was a sense that something important was happening. It was exciting.”

But even while Los Angeles and her artists were establishing themselves in the art world, there was still the old school view that all great art and artists belonged to New York City. In an article titled “LA Art? Interesting – But Painful,” published in the New York Times in 1972, Peter Schjeldahl essentially said there was no debate over New York versus Los Angeles. In his opinion if an artist wanted to be influential, he or she needed to be working in New York City. Even Guy Dill, the quintessential California kid, felt the pull and in the early 1970’s moved east. “I went there to get an education,” he explains. “I never thought of it as a proving ground. I thought of it more as grad school.” He spent six years, on and off, in New York, but never abandoned his L.A. roots. “I always kept a studio and a car in California,” he says. “That’s all you really need in L.A. but eventually I got tired of splitting my time between the East and West Coasts, so finally I just came home to Venice Beach.” For Dill, the ocean – “the edge of water and earth”  – was an energy source that he needed.

Dill met his wife of more than 30 years at an art opening; they married and had two children, and set out to blend careers with a family. In Venice, many houses have been built on pedestrian only streets with alleys in the back where garages are built. Guy and Mary Ann wanted to buy a small house on a large lot with an alley. “Took some years, but we found it and we bought it and put up a studio (no garage for this family). It was exquisite. The space and the light were amazing, and we never put a car in it. That was my first studio. Later, I was fortunate to get a little more land and put up a more conventional building. It was a compound. And it was nice with the kids. They were there and I was there.  We did it inch by inch. I got a piece into a collection and then I could afford a concrete floor. It was slow, but that organic movement was never a hindrance. It never slowed my work. The work was always primary.”

And that work was also evolving. Early on, Dill was working in cardboard and wood, mainly because that’s what he could afford, but he liked the material and has continued to use it throughout his career. “Cardboard is a wonderful material,” he says. “Cardboard is like flesh. It’s soft, it’s warm, it’s pliant, and it’s got a nice color to it. It’s not a mean material at all. (Robert) Rauschenberg, (Frank) Gehry and myself were doing these cardboard works at the same time in the early 1970’s. We planned a show but it never came to be. But last year we finally put together a cardboard show with Bob’s blessing and Frank’s blessing – a show of cardboard works and it was so interesting.”

Architecture has always been important to Dill. “If the architecture has integrity, then I have a respect for that.  I’m not looking to be the building. I’m not looking to compliment the building. I’m leaving the building alone. And the work has to be the same way.  There is a kind of frisson between the two – a co-existence,” he says.  Dill has worked with and even influenced some of the best architects of his era. In 2005, he was part of an exhibit showcasing artists who had a direct impact on legendary architect Frank Gehry, a show that Gehry himself curated.

Whether it’s a large public piece or a smaller gallery sculpture, Dill always starts in the same place – with his models made out of cardboard or paper. “If there is something there that I can build on then I will move into more permanent material,” he explains. “I’ll look at wood because it’s closer to the real thing. Something that has more refined edges – more information about what a final relationship might be like: edge-to-edge, volume-to-volume.  I get a cleaner idea of negative space. Paper and cardboard are like a soft lens. I don’t see the clarity.”

When it is time to build the actual sculpture, Dill moves to his “shape palette.” In one section of his studio metal forms, in a variety of sizes and shapes, are neatly stacked, some of them wrapped tightly with a heavy plastic to protect the bronze against oxidation. The heavy machinery – welding equipment, saws, and tools – is arranged neatly in the back. The work is physical and requires several pairs of hands.  At any given time, up to five people are working in Dill’s studio. His main guy has been with him for 25 years. “I’m a lucky man. He is an A-plus craftsman. We are very unalike, but he needs to be a welder and I need to be an artist. I revere him as a craftsman, and he respects me as an artist.”

And the same kind of relationship with craftsmen in Pietrasanta, Italy, has Dill rekindling his love affair with marble. The solid stone does not allow for the same type of perceived movement that his bronze work achieves, but they are just as graceful. “When I aligned myself with this company in Italy, I could execute much more formal works because they did it so well. When I found them it was a huge door that opened for me because I can literally do anything I want in marble.”

Dill talks about his materials as if they were children, each with a distinct personality: bronze is easy to persuade, aluminum is cooperative, cardboard is friendly and marble can be cranky and bitchy. “I don’t have a favorite – that means I put one above the other and that’s not how it is. It depends on how I feel. But I do know that if I’m going to use any material, I’m going to have to show it some love.”

That caressing touch shows in his work. On the finished sculpture there is no hint of the brute force necessary to get there. Making these sculptures is technically and physically difficult, and the materials are industrial and rigid – tough stuff.  Manipulating bronze, aluminum or marble is hard, but Dill makes it look easy. His edges are beautifully blended, and the surfaces buffed to a smooth finish, but beyond that, there is a symmetry and balance that adds movement and life to an inanimate object.

Intrigued by the leftover, cut up sheets of metal strewn about his studio – the by-product of cutting forms for his three dimensional work – Dill decided to do a little artistic recycling. He started using the shards to create large metal wall panels, featuring familiar shapes. He’s also used the panels to experiment with printing and embossing. Dill likes trying the new stuff. The embossed paper pieces are particularly beautiful and they are so new no one, outside of his studio, has seen them yet. They are subtle and understated – as delicate as his sculptures are solid, but like the wall panels, they are tied to the forms and shapes that constitute the core of Dill’s art. All of it works together.

As a young artist, Dill used to worry about running out of ideas, but not anymore. He compares himself to a musician. “Some hear the music in their head and then write the whole thing – amazing,” he says. “Then there are musicians who get three notes in their head and they go to work. That’s me. I get about three notes and that’s enough. I look for that beginning. It’s a jumping off point.” Dill admits that getting older is frustrating not because of age but rather because of time. “I feel like I’m just starting to get good,” he laughs. “The older I get the faster I work because I have so much more to do.” As long as he hears the music in his head – those critical three notes – Guy Dill will be working in his studio every day.

Written by: Erin Clark

ARTWORKS Magazine: Fall 2008