KENAI, Alaska - No pencil.
Not a paintbrush.
Never an eraser.
When Pat Teakell taps the right side of his brain, his most
effective artistic instruments are the ones he's always
known.
The 35-year-old oil field pipe welder's hands are best suited for
his DeWalt 4-and-a-half inch angle grinder and his torch.
His canvas? Steel covered in mill scale.
His medium? Friction and flame.
His art? Truly unique.
Standing in his Nikiski garage, Teakell peers through his safety
glasses at the project in front of him — a close up sketch of a
wolf's gaze. He flips the switch bringing the grinder buzzing to
life and leans in toward the rectangular piece of steel in front of
him.
"You've got to use what you already know," he said.
Teakell's art is what he knows — wildlife and welding.
When he touches the grinder to the steel, he removes the dark
covering called mill scale exposing the shiny, vulnerable,
untreated steel below. Instead of shading in shadows, he is carving
out highlights.
Each stroke of the grinder is forever. There's no way to take it
back. No eraser. It's the frustration and the thrill, he
said.
It's about feel.
"It's a one shot deal," he said.
Sparks fly as he steadies the electric yellow instrument in hand.
The strokes aren't perfect — the grinder is always changing and on
closer look, lines are composed of smaller individual scratches and
nicks made by whatever texture the interchangeable head
holds.
Some smooth, some rough and there's mostly always a degree of
uncontrollability, he said.
Details are tough. It's like "planting flowers with a back hoe," or
"doing surgery with a butcher knife," he said.
His grinder skips and bounces along the steel. His whole body moves
with the motion of the stroke.
"It's trial and error — there's no right way to do this because no
one else is doing it," he said.
The New Mexico native started welding and working with metal in
high school. In shop class he took easily to ornamental iron work
and fell in love.
He soon started his own side business where he worked through a lot
of metal shaping arts, creating cut outs and silhouettes of
cowboys, Native Americans and western symbols like Kokopelli.
Art and industry were tied together from the start with
Teakell.
While the majority of people live in either society's technical
camp or its artistic camp — are right brained or left brained,
classical or romantic — Teakell contends he's both.
He's learned to look for the shapes and lines instead of the object
of the art. He can slip into a different state of mind — live
wholly in the right brain's creativity while still operating
equipment meant for the left brain's technical, logistical
strengths.
"When the two collide and you have structure in the creativity,
it's a really nice mix," he said.
But the right side of the brain is a muscle, he said, and the more
he flexes it the stronger it gets.
Many years ago at Clovis Community College in eastern New Mexico,
Teakell found a mentor in local art instructor Bruce Defoor who
still gives him advice on his work.
It was under Defoor's guidance Teakell started to think about the
way he sketches — drawing only what he sees and not what he thinks
is there.
In his current work he calls grinder sketches, he likes to play to
the strengths of the grinding wheel. He's often happier with a
piece when it feels more like a sketch, including only the most
important details.
"I found that if I try to get too much detail, it takes away from
the piece because I'm using such a large, blunt instrument," he
said.
But the lack of detail doesn't mean a lack of planning.
Back in the shop, Teakell's walls are lined with patterns he's
made. The pattern for the wolf piece he was working on Saturday
rested nearby. He uses a photo, makes a quick enlarged pattern for
accuracy and uses chalk to mark a roadmap for where he'll steer the
grinder.
It's hard not to jump right in and start peeling away. Planning and
accuracy are both key, he said. Otherwise the emotion of the piece
just won't come through.
"I have a completion drive," he said. "I want to get it done and it
is hard for me to step back and say, 'Wait a minute, I got that
wrong.' But by doing pieces I wasn't as happy with, I learn by
looking at them every day and thinking, 'I wish I would have fixed
that eye a little bit.'"
In addition to his grinder sketches, Teakell employs many of his
work skills on creating cutouts. Various metal salmon also line the
walls of his home, some doubling as ornamental coat racks.
On the salmon pieces, he uses flame, heat and oxidation to create
colors. The level of heat controls the color — grey-blue is
hottest, tan is mild. It's quite a different philosophy from
grinding, although the two are equal halves of his technique, he
said.
With the wolf piece, Teakell carefully heated the metal to a
glowing yellow with speckles of brown to create a pair of piercing
eyes.
"Sometimes different steels turn different kinds of colors and you
don't know what you are going to get," he said.
He then starts back in with the grinder drawing lines and curves
around the eyes with the flow of the animal's snout hair and
eyebrows.
Teakell's unique style of grinding and heating metal into art
struck him when he was in Wichita visiting family about two years
ago, he said. While in a gallery there, he saw an artist use a
grinder on a piece of aluminum and coat it with transparent paints
in an attempt at abstract impressionism.
"A light went on in my head," he said. "All my life I have been
removing this mill scale by grinding swaths as if I were mowing a
lawn just to get it off of the steel.
"Why am I not using that shape as part of the work? It was a
no-brainer. I wondered why I didn't think of that sooner and it has
revolutionized the way I am doing the work."
When Teakell gets off of a 10- or 12-hour day, he sometimes finds
it hard to drag himself into the garage to start working with the
same tools again. But he said he doesn't feel work mixes with his
hobby.
"What I'm doing is so much different at home from work," he said.
"Even though I am basically using the same type of tools — the
grinder is the same I might use when I am welding pipe — but, no,
it is completely different.
"But getting better with one helps me get better with the other
somehow."
Teakell said he works up a lot of the salmon pieces when he has
time to sell them later and spends a good chunk of time on the
grinder sketches. He takes orders sometimes, but he would rather
work on his own and sell them later.
"Doing an order really puts some pressure on me because I don't
want to disappoint somebody," he said.
Unlike other mediums — painting, drawing or photography — Teakell
has to be himself. He must let his right brain take over.
"They'll give me a picture and I'll say, 'Look, I can represent
this wolf, but it is going to be a Pat Teakell wolf,'" he
said.
He also has to find the sweet spot between doing a piece that will
reproduce well with the grinder and flame, a subject he wants to
spend his time on and one that will sell.
"When all those things collide, that's the piece I do," he said.
"Not all ideas are going to fit that. You know, man, I could do a
real good duck-billed platypus, but who cares?"
Local creatures — wolves, bears, salmon and others — are his bread
and butter.
"As an outdoorsman, it is a real natural fit," he said. "Alaska is
a real natural fit for me."