RIVERTON — Some see junk. Tim Little sees horses' hooves. A dinosaur's neck. An ant's torso. Or, maybe a spider's body.
Some call it assemblage art. Little calls it fun.
"I've always liked putting stuff together, always liked doing things like puzzles," he says. His artwork is kind of like a puzzle only on a grander, three-dimensional scale.
He makes horses with names like "High Octane," "Full Throttle" and "Horse Power." They're kind of cool, he says, because they are made out of pistons, transmission parts and other bits and pieces scrounged up from auto body/transmission/bike and other shops and junk yards.
With the exception of some new-but-never used parts from some old Hudsons, most of what he gathers up is pretty much dead and useless.
"I love to take something that's old and discarded and bring it back to life, give it a new purpose" he says. And the older, the better. "I really like antique stuff; it always seems to look more interesting."
Little's always on the lookout for new parts. He has several auto-parts and other mechanical-minded shops that routinely let him rummage through their junk piles. He gathers up other things here and there and now has an impressive collection of his own in the backyard/garage workshop of his Riverton home.
"It's so fun when I come across some parts and think immediately how I can use them," he says.
Old lawnmower blades? A crank from an old motor? A motorcycle kick-stand? They make great body or animal parts, he says.
He even uses a lot of things "that I still don't know what they are." When one of his horses was on display at the Springville Art Museum, "I met a guy who could name every part in the horse and tell me where it came from. That was amazing."
Little also admits that not everyone sees what he does in the piles of junk.
"I was up in Wyoming, looking through a junkyard with my sister and told her to let me know if she saw anything that looked like a horse's head. She laughed and said, 'What looks like one to me and what looks like one to you are two very different things.' "
Little sometimes doesn't know exactly where the junk will take him. His operative words are "kind of. I have a picture in my mind how it should turn out. The finished piece never comes out exactly as I pictured it, but it's kind of like it."
Sometimes he has to work on balance to get creatures to stand by themselves. He likes them to be free-standing but sometimes will add a base, or a log, or an oil pan to make it all work.
He also tries for some symmetry. "I know some metal artists who like to just grab and weld. But I want something that looks like something when I'm done. I like the legs to match, the hooves to be all the same." So it may take longer to get it all together. "But it's also fun because no two finished works are ever just the same. The parts are always different for each one."
Little did not start off with auto parts, however. It was wood that drew him into art. "I've always liked working with wood," he says.
A self-proclaimed desert rat, Little grew up in Mesa, Ariz. "I learned to really love the outdoors," he says. He took art classes, but he actually started out his career as an apprentice to an Old World furnituremaker in California. Then he did a stint refinishing pianos in Las Vegas and moved on to rebuilding nickelodeons.
That was an interesting job, he says. "I'd look at old photos and have to measure them out exactly. Then I'd make the missing parts." It was pretty amazing to get it all done and actually have it work, he says. But it gave him a huge appreciation for early builders. "There were some amazing mechanical geniuses in the early 1900s."
Little began doing some silversmithing as a hobby in high school and ended up making a lot of jewelry. "But I eventually got burned out on that. It was always the same; I didn't like that."
Then one day, he was walking along an old reservoir and found a huge piece of driftwood that had been partly burned. "But I looked at that and thought it would make a great dragon head."
It did — after he cleaned it, shaped it, polished it, carved it and decorated it. He liked it so much that he moved on to more creations from stray pieces of wood.
Little and his family moved to Utah about five years ago. "We wanted to have seasons," he says. "I love all the different colors they bring." Four years ago, his son gave him a wire-feed welder, "and I just started playing around." He started using metal and wood together and then moved into mostly metal.
It was such fun, he says, and he began to have enough success that he eventually turned to doing art full-time.
Little has shown pieces in a number of local galleries, including the Michael Berry Gallery in downtown Salt Lake and the Covey Center on the Arts in Provo. He's been juried into the Springville Museum of Art's Spring Salon the past two years, with a dinosaur and a horse. "Vern Swanson told me that my horse was the most popular piece in the show this year," he says. "That was good to hear, because as an artist you work alone, and you're always curious if anyone else likes it."
He's also been featured in the Faces of Utah Sculpture show at the Utah Cultural Celebration Center.
Little seems to find endless possibilities in the junk he collects. He's done a series on figures in the dentist's office, crabs and other sea creatures, a bunch of little road runners. He's made "camera bugs" out of old camera bodies. He recently did an ostrich for a fund-raiser at Hogle Zoo. Another recent piece is a dinosaur made of motorcycle gas tanks and exhaust pipes. (You can see some of these creations on his website at www.timlittlesfineart.blogspot.com.)
One of his collections features stick-figure people in precarious situations: being bounced off a snowboard, for example, or falling off a wheelbarrow. He painted the figures blue, and called it is "Black-and-Blue" series. The whimsy comes with some bruises.
His goal, he says, is to "make something you haven't seen before, to create something fun and exciting with a WOW factor."
But he also thinks his pieces have a contemplative side; he'd like you to think about where the materials have come from, their history, how they were used. How they are all part of our material culture.
"As an artist," he says, "I try to see beauty in everything from old car parts to unique pieces of wood."
e-mail: carma@desnews.com