Mapleton wood artist Karl Hale continues to have his work cut out for him
Mapleton artist and woodworker Karl Hale poses for a portrait at his shop Thursday, June 15, 2017, in Springville. His work has been featured in various woodworking competitions as well as in the Springville Museum of Art.
Mapleton artist and woodworker Karl Hale poses for a portrait at his shop Thursday, June 15, 2017, in Springville. His work has been featured in various woodworking competitions as well as in the Springville Museum of Art.
“I didn’t even know art until three years ago, didn’t have any idea it was part of me, and now it’s just so invigorating,” Karl Hale said.
A section from Karl Hale’s “Tell Me the Stories of Jesus,” photographed in his home in 2015.
Karl Hale has recently started working on a smaller scale, crafting wooden plaques that he can sell at a lower price point. “My Instagram art friends still like them, so I assume they’re artistic," he said.
After doing woodworking fulltime for the past four years, Karl Hale said that to his dismay, he's currently seeking more traditional fulltime work. "I mean, I’m going to keep doing this, but having a fulltime job really limits your time you can spend on it," he said.
Karl Hale’s piece, “The Light and the Life,” pictured, was recently among the award winners at the Springville Museum of Art’s Spring Salon.
By most accounts, Karl Hale’s “Tell Me the Stories of Jesus” was an absurd undertaking. It was only the second piece the Mapleton artist had ever completed. But that wooden rolling ball sculpture was complex, hypnotic and enormous, using $5,000 worth of wood and standing taller than Hale himself. It took he and his son six entire months to complete, but it put Hale on the map as a Utah artist.
“And it’s sitting in a trailer because I can’t fit it through my front door,” Hale explained in his Springville studio on Wednesday afternoon. “In so many ways it was just totally ridiculous. It was a completely ridiculous idea. I felt compelled to do it, it got me good attention. It definitely didn’t drive any business success at all, or it hasn’t yet.”
The state of that piece is a fitting metaphor for Hale these days. His woodworking skills, and his artistic ideas, are grand and awe-inspiring. Getting those to actually fit somewhere is the challenge.
Hale quit his full-time job as a software engineer a few years ago, diving headfirst into his singular form of woodworking. Rolling ball sculptures, known more commonly as “marble runs,” have been around for decades. They’re occasionally made of wood — more typically of metal or plastic, since those materials bend easier than wood, and can be more easily repaired — but no other wooden marble runs are as ambitious as Hale’s. His pieces have been featured at The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ Church History Museum, Brigham Young University and the Springville Museum of Art — the last of which recently awarded Hale one of the top prizes in its Spring Salon.
But all that recognition doesn’t necessarily pay the bills. Hale has eight children between the ages of 6 and 22. He’s now seeking more traditional full-time work again.
“It’s totally disappointing. Absolutely disappointing. There are no two ways about it,” Hale said. “I love the wood, I love this total surprise in my life that is art. I mean, I didn’t even know art until three years ago, didn’t have any idea it was part of me, and now it’s just so invigorating. Not only for the pleasure of the activity is it disappointing, but also for the frustration of feeling like this is unique. Feeling like the stuff I’m doing is not being done.
“I don’t mean to complain,” he continued. “It’s been an amazingly awesome ride. And I fully anticipate the ride continuing. But it can’t continue like this. I’ve got to make more money some way.”
Popular Utah painter J. Kirk Richards offered Hale some advice. Richards told Hale that when he sells a painting, “that’s gravy.” His prints, though, are his real bread and butter.
Hale isn’t a painter, though. When it comes to his type of woodworking, there isn’t an equivalent of a print. Finding out how to do something smaller and more easily replicable, with a lower price point, is a new endeavor for Hale. He’s been designing and producing small wooden plaques that he sells for $30-$40 dollars. The plaques can be somewhat mass-produced on one of Hale’s machines. That machine can cut eight plaques at a time, which takes approximately three hours. Hale then does handwork on the plaques for another three hours. He’s been selling them at the Provo Farmers Market and online.
“My Instagram art friends still like them, so I assume they’re artistic — artistic enough to be art, but easy enough that I can churn out a bunch at a time,” he said.
What seems to excite Hale the most, though, is a middle ground between these two artistic extremes. That middle ground is captured in “The Light and the Life,” his award-winning piece currently at the Springville Museum of Art. “The Light and the Life” is a marble run, but slightly less sprawling. It sits on the wall, with different layers subtly stacked on top of each other. A blazing sun sits atop the piece, sending marbles downward into a tree’s winding branches, which work through the branches, trunk and roots, then back up into the sun and down again. It’s not completely flat, yet not traditionally three-dimensional, either. Hale describes it as “2½-D.”
Hale said this piece was mostly conceived as a compromise of sorts. It reconciles his grandiose instincts with basic business needs (marketability, reparability, reproducibility, etc.). That “The Light and the Life” was praised for its artistic merit changed Hale’s paradigm. Now he has a dozen similar designs in his head.
“It was awesome, because of course I’m trying to make it artistic,” he said. “But that’s also my hidden nervous point, is I have no artistic training. But I got an award for it, which was a good learning experience, that business needs can drive art successfully.”
The enormous pieces on which Hale built his reputation still interest him. In fact, he wants to eventually go even bigger than before, with pieces that fill an entire wall, or even an entire room. He’s submitted some ambitious public art bids with that goal in mind. Now, though, he recognizes those grand ideas alone can’t sustain him.
“My biggest challenge,” he said, “is that I dream big.”