Anywhere else, Richard Starks’ sculpture garden would be the talk of the town and far beyond. But in Gilroy, his metal wonderland is just a couple miles up Hecker Pass Road from Gilroy Gardens and that attraction’s famously sculpted trees.
Some of Starks’ sculptures are tree-sized, too, and a few are representations of trees. But it’s the former high school industrial arts teacher’s whimsy that makes you wonder whether the collection he maintains on his property could become a tourist attraction in its own right.
Some of his works are abstract, but many are not, such as Treble Clef, a symbol many musicians covet; Hammer Time, a strangely alluring tool; and Divorce, in which an anvil is driving a wedge into a rocky marriage.
He’s currently working on a monster-sized bass guitar. The strings are like fence strands, the tuning gears are stainless steel, and the body is made of corten, a mild, non-corrosive steel with extra copper and other metals that Starks favors for its rusted effect, in part because it doesn’t flake off like real rust.
In contrast, many of his creations are colored vividly, including a couple of aluminum works rendered in a shade he calls “candy blue.”
To truly understand Starks’ whimsy, it helps to be familiar with The Long Ships, a film released when Starks, 71, was in his late teens. Sidney Poitier portrays a northern African prince who confronts Richard Widmark with a contraption that resembles a huge slide with a center divide—an imposing blade that can bisect a human in seconds.
That contraption inspired Starks’ Kiss of Steel, probably his most vivid inspiration. In his interpretation, it appears to be a camper’s worst nightmare, an axe piercing a booted foot.
“I’d had that in mind since high school,” he said with a vaguely sinister grin.
He already was envisioning many projects back then. “For more than 50 years,” he says on his website (https://richardstarkssculptures.wordpress.com/), “working metal into imagined shapes has been my fascination. All the sounds, the sparks, the flames and the smells of metalworking were my inspiration to get started. Watching the molten puddle while I form a new weld is a hypnotic experience for me.
“. . . I spent endless hours doodling with pencils and pens. . . . Sometimes, I would even carve shapes in watermelon, or in chunks of cheese, then draw them with paper and pencil before happily devouring them. Later on in school, I took drafting and drawing classes where I learned formal techniques in visualizing and drawing shapes.”
Whimsy aside, it’s the scale of his projects that provides the initial attraction, mostly because it’s so easy to imagine the logistical problems that owning one might pose.
Starks has to wrestle not only with the large objects he moves to and fro on his property, but with the limitations he faces in the sculpting itself, as some pieces of metal are very thick.
As for the welding, “all my work is tungsten inert gas-welded because of its quality and strength,” he says.
If you’re commissioning a work from him, he wants to know the size of the sculpture, the equipment needed, what motivates you and whether you know where you’re going to put it.
“Where to put it? Not my problem,” Starks says. “My motivation is to make it. Sometimes it’s for a ‘future customer,’ and I just don’t know who yet.”
Mike and Alyce Parsons of Los Gatos are among Starks’ customers who have a huge artwork alongside their homes.
“We first saw Richard’s work at the Saratoga Rotary Art Show,” Mike Parsons says. “We asked him at the time if we could visit his studio. I was interested in seeing how he worked, as I have an interest in sculpture. My wife and I were blown away when we got there. It was interesting to see how he constructs his work, but what was really interesting was to see the vast amount of work he has displayed both inside and out.
“Sure enough we fell in love with a large metal sculpture called Loop de Loop,” Parsons says.
“This piece stood over six feet high and almost as wide. I poured a concrete pad beside our driveway, and Richard and a friend of his delivered it and bolted it down.”
Some commission smaller objects. “I own one sculpture [a shark illuminated from below] that Dick created for me that is on a smaller scale than most of his work,” says Mary Paquet, a San Jose artist who has been a fan for years. “Therefore logistics were not an issue as I could give it a place of honor inside my home.
“I am drawn to works in which Dick abstracts shapes while retaining the essence of an object. Indeed, his gallery, including the landscape around his home, is outstanding. When the time was right for me, I made a purchase.”
Starks, who says the prices of his works have ranged from $200 to $75,000, makes these extravaganzas more quickly than you might think—unless you’ve already been astonished enough by his prodigious output to start calculating how frequently he must be turning them out.
“I usually tell people a month.”
The fascination presumably doesn’t wear off that quickly. “I have also recommended his work to a friend in Los Altos Hills, an award-winning visual artist,” Paquet said. “While serving on art committees, she decided to buy a good size piece for herself and have it installed in her front yard amid natural plants and a dry creek. Her home on the hills overlooking the bay honors Dick’s work and is enhanced by it.”
The same goes for his driveway, Mike Parsons says. “The longer we own and look at Loop de Loop, the more we love it.”
Whimsy aside, it’s the scale of his projects that provides the initial attraction, mostly because it’s so easy to imagine the logistical problems that owning one might pose.
