As a young ceramicist professor at Chapman University (then Chapman College) in the late 1970s, Bret Price would take advantage of his regular faculty meetings to daydream and doodle. He wasn’t interested in the politics of academia. He just wanted to make art.
During one such meeting, he was consumed by what had happened earlier; during a regular session with a clay bowl and his kiln, Price had haphazardly stuck a piece of rebar through the oven’s peephole and watched it contort as if it were a wet piece of clay. He knew the steel would melt, but in the next faculty meeting, it dawned on him that this could be done on a much larger scale.
It would be something he had never seen before.
Today, Price’s towering red sculptures on Avenue of the Stars and Constellation Blvd. dominate Century City Sculpture 2015, a yearlong outdoor exhibit showcasing 20 artists, with over a quarter of the pieces belonging to Price. Officially launched March 10, Century City Sculpture 2015 is a collaborative effort between the community and the Arts Council of the Century City Chamber of Commerce, curated by longtime resident and art dealer Carl Schlosberg.
Price also created “Ball of Chain,” a 4-foot-wide globe made up of chains on the Watt Plaza in Century Park East.
“I knew that I could heat a big piece of metal and bend it significantly, and that would be different from anything I have ever seen,” Price recalled.
It was that initial desire to create something groundbreaking that has driven much of Price’s life work and was the guiding principle in his art philosophy.
He bent his first piece of metal in 1979, and it took him three months to finish his first “monumental piece” in the parking lot of the Chapman arts department (it sits on display on campus to this day). Though now he could make the figure in three days, at the time, what he was doing he couldn’t look up in the library; it would have to be achieved through trial and error.
“What I do is I heat things and I let it cool,” Price put it plainly. He likened the preliminary stages of designing and building to Improv Theater, finding that his pieces come out better when he doesn’t try to force their image.
Price’s method involves building a heating chamber around large pieces of steel, applying concentrated and intense heat and then manipulating the material to create a sense of softness.
“If I’m bending a section of steel that weigh 1,500 pounds, it’s red hot, but it still weighs 1,500 pounds,” Price said. “So there’s a certain level of danger involved.”
Once the steel gets hot enough, gravity will start to bend it, so Price builds a support system that allows him to control the manipulated steel, “to keep it form going someplace I don’t want it to go.”
“The action of the bending process starts after it’s bent,” Price said. “You have to figure out how its going to present itself and be what is it so that it looks good. Just because you bend a piece of metal doesn’t mean it’s going to look good. So most of the work goes in after the bending. It’s an interesting way to make a living.”
The five of the Price’s red pieces were made from 2002 to 2011 in his studio in Ohio, where he makes all of his monumental pieces. And according to him, getting it across the country is just a matter of calling the right people with the right equipment.
Price said he could be working on anywhere from 10 to 14 pieces at a time, often setting something aside if it has no clear direction. Except for a few occasions, he names them when he’s done.
“I sit down with the photographs of the piece at the end of the day,” Price said. “I try to find something that triggers some kind of nuance from the piece. I can’t go through life with numbered pieces.”
With names like “Roll-Up,” “High Hopes,” “Zig Zag,” “Triad,” and “Godot,” Price’s red monuments compete with the high rises of Century City as they reach heights of up to 30 feet.
“I like to create movement, I like to create unexpected balance and I like my work to have lift, for the most part,” Price explained. “So I’m dealing with unexpected forms and unexpected balance, and they’re really exercises in expression of form. As simple and as complex as that is, that’s what I do.”
And the red comes from his own predilection for primary colors in his large-scale sculptures.
“I like a red with a little blue in it, rather than a yellow. I like a red that goes towards blues rather than the oranges. It’s a softer red, a gentler, kinder red,” Price said with a chuckle. “It’s just a good color. I just react to it. I do a lot of different colors on my smaller work, but on the big ones, the red seems to work very well.”
Price grew up in Los Angeles and experienced his first art class at L.A. High School. Then, while a pre-med senior at Pomona College in Claremont, he took a ceramics class that would eventually force him to change his life’s trajectory.
He fell in love with the immediacy of clay, and with two courses left to finish his degree; he switched to an art major and took on an extra semester of work.
“I’m drawn to stuff that’s original and stuff that’s non-derivative and has something I haven’t seen before. That’s what I try to do,” Price said.
While living in Orange with his wife, Price has found a new artist’s studio enclave in Santa Ana called the Logan Creative. Along with his son Gregory, 31, a glass-casting sculptor, they work and share the former spiral staircase manufacturing building with other art studios, art exhibitions, workshops, and performance spaces.
“I’m about to go back [to Ohio] and bend an 88 foot long piece of steel that weighs 5 tons,” Price said. “It’s the longest piece of metal I’ve ever done. I’m really excited.”
