Exhibit A: Man of Steel
BY NORM POWERSPHOTOS BY MATT ROSE
Stefan Bonitz has never been comfortable with the term “recycling,” though the metal sculptures he creates are fashioned from the objects he finds in junkyards. “I like to look at it as reincarnation,” he says.Finding new uses for discarded material is nothing new to Stefan, whose mother, Elizabeth, worked as a seamstress and encouraged his childhood artistic impulses. “My mother was a young child growing up during the war in Germany, and that experience led her to a life of creating things that you need or desire out of any materials that become available,” says Stefan.
In that spirit, Stefan is a familiar figure at area scrap yards, where he searches for the basic shapes and forms for his metal creations. “I consider myself a collector,” he says. “The tools needed to form large, round objects are far too expensive for an individual’s art studio, so I often use the ends of tanks and cylinders that have been discarded.”
His mother taught him to sew when he was a boy and Stefan still thinks of sewing cloth and welding metal as similar pursuits. “Joining two pieces of material with a weld bead is done with the same looping motion of a stitch,” Stefan says.
Many of his works, however, are monumental in size and may not immediately bring to mind the delicate tracery of a fine stitch.
His Not All People Were Small In The Olden Days, a 15-foot-tall whimsical figure with round metal plates for feet and discarded hardware for features, seems industrially daunting as it greets visitors outside Stefan’s Steebo Design on Haywood Road. A closer inspection reveals the careful workmanship of finely-crafted artwork.
As further evidence of seeing the delicate in the monumental, Stefan points to Albert Paley’s Passages, which occupies the plaza outside the Federal Building on Patton Avenue. “Many people comment to me that they don’t like it, and I ask them if they have been up close to it and the answer is almost always ‘no’,” Stefan says. “I find the beauty when I explore the process — the massive plates that have been formed into perfect arches and the monstrous welds that are carried out with perfect precision and uniformity.”
Metal wasn’t always Stefan’s chosen material.
The first piece of art he remembers creating was a childhood confection that brought his first competition prize. It was called Rock Group. “I seem to remember it being a small stage made from cardboard and several small stones with faces and instruments made from Play-Doh,” Stefan recalls.
But his artistic energy was diverted for a time by a fascination with bicycle racing. His passion for racing lured him away from Asheville to San Francisco in the 1980s with plans to spend his time racing on the West Coast. “I was exposed to a community that lived and breathed art,” Stefan says of the four years he lived in the Bay Area.
Among the artists he met was Howard Munson of the San Francisco Institute of Art. Munson admired Stefan’s sketchbooks and invited him to attend the classes in printmaking and bookmaking that he was teaching at the time.
Inspired with his newly awakened art consciousness, Stefan traveled back to Asheville in the late 1980s to open a gallery. The gallery exhibited and sold work by mountain artists as well as Stefan’s own mixed media art. Back then, his work incorporated leather, fabric, acrylics and an eclectic array of objets trouvé.
In 1995, Stefan and his partner in the gallery went their separate ways and new possibilities presented themselves as Steebo Design took shape. “I wanted to be able to join metals for structural purposes, so I took welding classes at Asheville Buncombe Technical College,” Stefan says. Then followed a six-month apprenticeship with Reed Todd, a fellow worker in metal, along with a growing fondness for the steel shapes waiting to be unearthed amid piles of junk.Wood, glass and fabric still find their way into Stefan’s art, although mostly confined to smaller pieces intended for interior spaces. Steel, though, is what fascinates him. “When I work with steel, I look at it as a liquid that is frozen at the temperature of our atmosphere,” he says. “With the right tools or the application of heat, it is actually a very soft medium. Many people comment that my work has fluidity and life.”
A good example is Strollin, a life-size sculpture of a mother wheeling her baby’s carriage, which won a merit award at the Lenoir Sculpture Festival. Both figures have a remarkable energy and warmth despite their metallic physiques, the baby leaning forward from the stroller and, it seems, about to speak. Strollin is now installed on the grounds of a collector’s home in Jacksonville, Florida.
Stefan’s smaller architectural works are more modest in scale, but no less innovative. Stairway railings, trellises, and small jewelry stands are all imaginatively styled with swoops, curls and angles that belie the material’s rigid nature.
His pieces have been shipped all over the country and, at one time, his commissions became so numerous he had to stop accepting them while he cleared a 12-month backlog of work. With that task completed, Stefan is once again building an inventory for clients.
“I keep wish lists so that clients can let me know if there’s something they would like to purchase,” he says. “I’m excited that I have now taken the route of being true to myself in creating my own art inventory, and I believe my clients will end up very happy with the results as well.”
Meanwhile, Stefan continues to sift through the things we cast off, looking to breathe new life into them — finding beauty and possibility where most of us would not even think to look.
For more information, call 828-253-4610
or visit www.steebo.com.
