Master’s milestone

It’s not every day you get to visit the studio of a modern master.

A week ago on Halloween, Harold Balazs – a spirited soul who adores the absurd – invited me into his Mead workshop to have a firsthand look at his works in progress and an insightful look into the man who helped bring modern art to Spokane.

The most prolific public artist in the area, Harold Balazs has helped sculpt the visual character of Spokane. From the colossal interactive Rotary Fountain – the centerpiece of Riverfront Park – to the floating steel Centennial Sculpture, anchored in the currents of the Spokane River, to churches, synagogues, buildings and campuses, Balazs’ inimitable and boundless style has put modern art on the map in Spokane, and vice versa.

Balazs celebrates his 80th birthday tonight during a massive, salon-style exhibition showcasing more than 200 new works of art at Tinman Gallery, proving that creativity ages like a fine wine – say, a smoky Port – in the hands of a fine master artist.

“This will give you a better idea of all the things I do,” said Balazs in his cavernous, industrial-yet-homey workshop, pressing the play button on his cued-up tape recorder, which was hovering above a cluttered work table covered in enamels.

“What’s he doing in there? … He’s hiding something from the rest of us. He’s all to himself … What’s he doing in there?”

It was the haunting Tom Waits spoken-word piece, “What’s He Building?” from 1999’s “Mule Variations.”

“It’s all about me,” Balazs interjected impishly.

“I’m deadly serious about not being serious,” said Balazs. His creative inspiration has fortunately, for the Pacific Northwest, been given permission to play.

Pablo Picasso, one of Balazs’ influences (he’s also inspired by Joan Miro and Paul Klee), said, “It takes a long time to become young.”

Among Balazs’ new works are two small bronze limited-edition sculptures with moving parts, titled “Homage to Magritte” and “Ship of Chaos.”

“They’re toys!” said Balazs, challenging the seriousness of the bronze and making it desirable to twist, turn, touch and, yes, play with.

“I did a whole series of wooden toys when I was younger,” he said. “Most of them were based on the idea of the nutcracker. I’m trying to find some of those for my retrospective” (coming in 2010 to the MAC).

Balazs demonstrated his enamel making, pouring fine powdered-glass pigments into his stencils and smearing them around. He fires the decorated steel plates in batches in his enormous kiln at the center of his workshop. The colors change depending on the temperature and chosen number of firings.

“There’s just so many things that can be done with this medium, in a very gestural way,” he said.

“In some cases I like to eliminate all that blotching,” he pointed out. “I’m getting so shaky … I have to accommodate the fact that I can’t make an edge anymore,” he said. “This is my ‘sloppy period’.” He hasn’t gotten to the point of using his assistants to do his artistic work; can’t even seem to fathom it.

Balazs appears sprightly, climbing his steep, weathered outdoor staircase to his upper studio, where cartons of finished enamels, acrylic paintings on gesso panels, graphite drawings, mixed media sculptures, silkscreens, and wooden works waited to be transported to Tinman. His “Things That Go Bump in the Night” series of small black and white grotesques will be a quick sell-out.

Shrines, wax maquettes, calligraphy work, Egyptian cartouches, piles of huge drawings and curiosities were stashed in his studio, too.

The 162 new titles plus 30 bronzes and 27 grotesques will be displayed tonight in a show of massive proportions.

Balazs said he was planning to fill the gallery’s walls from floor to ceiling, salon style, with so much work that the paintings might have to be hung two-deep.

“Is that possible?” I asked. I’d never seen that before.

“Sure, you can make them three-deep. You can do anything you want!” replied Balazs, an artist with limitless imagination and determination, who – for those reasons – refuses to be curated.

“He is coming in to hang the show so we’ll see what happens,” said Sue Bradley, owner of Tinman Gallery. It’s his show and she will let him call the shots, she said.

“I am here because of Harold,” said Bradley. “Harold Balazs was my grand opening.”

That was in 2003.

“Salon-style” refers to the exhibitions of the Royal Academies of Art in nineteenth-century France and England (with earlier beginnings) when artwork had to meet the discriminating criteria of academic, representational traditions.

“Salons didn’t accept modern art, of course, but I took textbook art history and I saw the pictures in there and I thought that was the way it was done,” said Balazs, who has a Bachelor of Art from WSU in 1951, “so I’m realizing a lifelong dream.”

“I turn to non-objective because I see no sense in replicating the known visual world … it’s already there,” said Balazs of his abstract subject matter. “I also have a great faith in absurdity.”

Balazs has often said the intention of his work is to create wonder. When you create for wonder, he joked, “you wonder, what the hell did he make that for?”

He likes the idea of “juxtaposing disparate ideas,” referring to the “damn complexity of the world” and maintaining that dissimilar things can get along.

I asked Balazs what his eighth decade represents to him.

His answer: “I’m old!”

“There’s nothing special about being 80 at all. If I wasn’t still healthy I might have a different attitude.”

“I’m an avid reader and the older you get, the bigger your vocabulary is; you just have more sources to draw on.”

He talked about some recent reads, mentioning “The Elegance of the Hedgehog” by Muriel Barberry, a philosophical best-selling novel in Europe that is “most curious!” and Edward Gorey’s “picture books,” describing them as “very macabre and dark, with a twist.”

You can see how some of that imagery has found its way into Balazs’ work. “Homage to Magritte” looks like it could be a 3-D figure out of “Guernica,” Picasso’s masterpiece.

Picasso is also known to have said, “We don’t grow older, we grow riper.” In the case of Harold Balazs, who turned 80 in September, the artist is fresh, rich and ripe as ever.