There are artist and then there are
artists. Just don’t look for John Lacz to start sporting a beret any time
soon.
A welding helmet will suit him just fine.
That’s the
headgear of choice when John — an auto body repair specialist by trade
— heads into his studio to wrestle with 200 pounds of steel that will
emerge from his creative crucible all soothing curves and shimmering,
iridescent shades with colors that shift and change, much like light through a
prism.
“To be thought of as an artist?” he laughed.
“That’s something that took me by surprise the first time I heard it.
I’m a body man. That’s all I ever wanted to be.”
"There's an Alexander Calder quality to the sculptures of John Lacz, an
auto body man who's using the tools of his trade to create exquisite works of
art." (Bob Lapree/New Hampshire Sunday News)
It’s true.
He’s been an auto body man since he was 15.
He was a
student at Manchester Memorial High School when he took his first job at A-1
Auto Body and, but for a brief stint in the service — he did a 16-month
tour in Vietnam with the Marine Corps — he’s been a body man for the
last 40 years.
Life’s funny, though.
“We’d done
a lot of landscaping and my wife wanted to get a piece of art to go in the
garden,” he said. “I wanted something I could afford but I
couldn’t find anything I liked, so I figured I’d try my own
hand.”
That was about five years ago. Now the body man is
assembling a body of work — in wood and metal — that is on display
all over the carefully plotted landscape of his Bedford home. That work is
available exclusively here in New Hampshire through Art 3 Gallery in
Manchester.
“John’s job is to make your car beautiful again,
so certainly there’s a creative aspect to his work and that shines through
in his sculpted pieces,” said Art 3 owner Lee Forgosh. “People who
love their gardens, like John, love his sculptures because they enhance the
beauty and they bring the butterflies, too.”
Plus, they’re
rust-proofed.
Unless, that is, you ask otherwise.
 “I’ve got this one piece a woman
wants to use as a stand for a bird feeder, but she wants it rusty,” John
shuddered. “She doesn’t want me to paint it. She wants some kind of
rustic, natural look. I told her, ‘I’m a body man. It goes against my
grain to let something rust,’ but she insisted on it, so it’s sitting
out there, rusting.
“It’s interesting to watch it
though,” he admitted. “Some areas are rusting into different colors
than others, but it’s funny. I’ve fought rust all my life. Now
this.” This is hardly what he envisioned when he opened his own shop. That
was back in 1975. He called it Lacz Auto Body — he pronounces his last
name LAX, by the way — and that’s what it still says on the sign
outside his shop at 220 S. Beech St.
He figured he’d spend his
time fixing bent and dented fenders, which he did. What he didn’t figure
on was the need for an artistic outlet for his endless energy. Still, after he
and his wife Terry built their stunning contemporary in Bedford — John was
his own general contractor — and after he landscaped and planted all of
the acreage that surrounds it and after he took down one last tree, he decided
to make something of it.
The tree, that is.
It became that
first piece of sculpture.
It never made it out to the garden.
Terry
liked it too much to leave it outdoors, even though the automotive base-coat,
clear-coat layers of Sherwin-Williams paint that John lovingly applied to the
piece will make it forever immune to the effects of weather.
It stayed
in the house.
So John made another.
After creating a number of
wooden pieces — ranging in height from three to nine feet — he
decided to branch out a bit. Since he worked with metal in the body shop, he
figured he’d forge a new line of sculptures.
“I buy the steel
from (A.W.) Therrien Roofing,” he said. “They have a sheet metal shop
— them and companies that make things out of steel, like bridges and stuff
— but believe it or not, the price is going crazy right now. They tell me
it’s because of all the Olympic construction that’s going on in
Athens and China.”
Once John gets the steel to his auto shop
— before he goes at it with his array of torches, grinders, welders and
sanders — he studies it. “Sometimes I draw out a rough sketch of what
I want to do, and sometimes I just start in on it and they kind of grow, but
then I had one piece that just sat here for two or three weeks — almost
like I had writer’s block — before I could move on it.”
While it may sound odd, you have to consider the nature of abstract
art. Landscape painters need only to reproduce what they see. Representational
sculptors, likewise, have an image to recreate while photographers have an
image to capture.
Abstract art comes from another place. John has come
to understand that.
“I have a couple of pieces of wood that
I’ve hardly touched for the last few weeks because I just don’t know
where it wants to take me,” he explained
. But how to explain his
art?
Or determine its value?
“Sometimes when I’m
working on a piece of wood in the basement, I’ll be listening to the radio
and a song will come on and something will just jell with that piece and the
piece itself will tell you what to call it. My wife thought one metal piece
looked like a bird in flight, so I called it ‘Bird on Wing.’
“As far as price, I have a fairly good idea of how much time I have in on
each piece,” he added. “Some are upwards of 300 to 400 hours. I
factor in time and materials, so naturally, the one I love the most will cost
the most. Because I love it, it takes that much more to take it away from
me.
“It’s kind of nice when someone buys a piece,” he
added, almost shyly. “It’s like a compliment. I had someone in the
shop the other day and he wanted to take a picture of a piece. Someone said I
shouldn’t let him. They thought he might try to copy it, but I let him. I
thought it was a compliment.
“But the best compliment,” he
smiled, “is when they want to pay for it.”
They pay between
$1,200 and $5,000, depending on the piece. “They’re selling,”
said Lee Forgosh, “because people are interested in his work. “I was
interviewed about John for a car repair magazine called ‘Damage
Report’ — that’s a new publication for me — and the writer
said there are two types of car guys. There’s the mechanic who makes the
car run. That’s the engineering mind, and then there’s the artistic
mind that makes the car beautiful.
“That’s John,” she
added. “He sees beauty.”
He creates it, too.
Part of
the beauty — beyond the fluid lines and sensuous rolling curves — can
be traced to the paint he uses. It produces a chameleon-like effect, one color
shifting ever so gently into another and yet another. One piece morphs from
copper to gold and back to bronze. With a simple tilt of the head, another
piece shifts from royal blue to vermilion to a regal purple.
“The
pigments in the paint contain crystals,” he explained. “They’re
grown to act like prisms and they actually change based on light
refraction.” This is about art, not science, however, and this man who
creates beauty also collects things of beauty in the form of exquisite Italian
glass and avant-garde furniture — and let’s not forget that
classically restored 1966 Mustang 2-plus-2 in his garage — but the most
beautiful thing about John is his absolute absence of airs or artifice.
“I’ve always said to anyone who asks, ‘I’m just a body
man,’” he smiled, and he glanced at his fingernails —
perma-stained with paint — as if to punctuate the point.
“This stuff about being an artist? This is new to me. It’s probably
better if I don’t think about it.”
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