DURHAM -- Brian Mergenthaler could be the poster child for artisans selling their work at the annual Festival for the Eno, which focuses on the environment in general and the Eno River specifically. Not only does the metal sculptor work with recycled material, some of it comes straight from West Point on the Eno, the city park along the river where this weekend's event is held.
"We go to the Eno a lot to hike, and I find metal stuff in the woods there all the time," said the 37-year-old Durham resident, who helps keep the Eno clean while he's adding to his parts inventory.
The backbones of Mergenthaler's wildly creative pieces - old typewriters and sewing machines - do have to be purchased, albeit at rock-bottom prices. He finds most of them on Craigslist, at estate and yard sales, and at secondhand shops.
"It seems like everyone has their grandmother's sewing machine in the attic."
He settled on these machines because the pre-plastic versions are replete with all shapes of metal.
"The shafts of sewing machines make great legs and arms," he said. The ruffle attachments all look like chickens to me, but I do different things with them. "And the typewriter letters, the way they fan out, I always see an Indian headdress. It's really amazing all the components inside these parts."
The yard of the home he shares with his fiancée and three rescued pit-bull mixes is dotted with beautifully rusted, unrefined creatures from 6 inches to 6 feet tall.
Mergenthaler lately has been concentrating on smaller sculptures.
"I couldn't keep dragging big old car parts home," he said. Instead, he might haul in a beat-up waffle iron, meat grinder and lighting fixtures, anything he could "reimagine."
Out of the kitchen
Before Mergenthaler started concocting intriguing creations with metal, he was doing the same with food in the kitchens of several Raleigh restaurants, starting in 1995 when he moved to the area at the behest of a friend from his childhood home in Champaign, Ill.
For more than a decade, he cooked at restaurants including NOFO, Humble Pie, Vertigo (in the Poole's Diner building), and Frazier's, when celebrated chef Jay Beaver led the kitchen.
"That was an amazing experience," he said of working with Beaver. "We made everything from scratch, and they all had multiple parts. It was big-city cooking. But we worked noon to midnight every day. I loved cooking, but working those kinds of hours and managing the people, that lifestyle is rough," he said.
It was restaurant work, indirectly, that led Mergenthaler to welding and sculpture making.
"There was a warehouse behind Poole's where all these guys were doing steel fabrications, and I ended up working with one of them for a while," he said.
When Mergenthaler moved to Durham in 2007, partly because he could find affordable rental houses, he turned his focus from the kitchen to the garage, where he makes his art. The creative process wasn't all that different, he discovered.
"With food, I'd have a vague idea of what I would make. I'd get all the ingredients together and stare at them for awhile. I'd have ideas, which would change throughout the day," he said. "I made the staff crazy, because I changed my mind all the time, and I never made the same thing twice.
"With my art, it's the same thing. I lay out all these pieces. I'll think, 'This looks like a leg, this looks like a face.' Some of the better stuff I've made came from something else I ended up not liking. I'd cut it up and make something else."
Finding his muses
When Mergenthaler started making sculptures (he also paints), he would build them with a certain person in mind, try to capture something about them and give the work to that person.
"My sister told me I needed to start selling my work instead of giving it away," he said. "She said, 'You can think about the person when you're making it, but you don't have to give it to them,'" he said, smiling at the memory.
Not all his muses are positive, but they are therapeutic, he said.
"I'm working right now on stuff based on my teachers from high school," said Mergenthaler, who had a reputation for tardiness and skipping classes. "They are not people I liked."
A more agreeable inspiration was his guidance counselor, for whom he made a birdlike creature standing over a nest holding an egg.
"She was a little scary and overbearing, but also she was looking out for me," he said. "She knew that school was not the right thing for me."
As the artist grows happier, so too does his art, he said. "I'm more likely to think of the positive people and influences."
Mergenthaler, who recently took a less-demanding cooking job with a caterer to help pay the bills, expresses much respect for the machinery used for his artwork.
"I like seeing how intricate and complex they are and thinking about people who made them," he said. "It's like I'm dissecting history."
