Know Assemblage Required : Santa Ana Artist Cornelius O’Leary Goes to Pieces

SANTA ANA —  It’s hard to put your finger on the most idiosyncratic thing about Cornelius O’Leary, a 28-year-old Santa Ana resident who is one of Orange County’s most unusual and promising artists.

Is it that he spent seven years as an undergraduate at UC Irvine, studying everything from Native American culture to sociology of death, but left without a degree?

Is it his studio, a tightly organized, jampacked study in the intersection of human invention and natural science?

Or is it the vision that has led him to make a mock tract-home model on the inside of a fur coat, a flock of geese from a batch of coat hangers and a twinkling aerial view of a landscape from a computer board a friend had simply asked him to hang on the wall?

Unwilling to display his work in public simply for the sake of exposure, O’Leary appears in group exhibitions only occasionally--most memorably in “The Elegant, Irreverent & Obsessive: Drawing in Southern California” at Cal State Fullerton in 1993 and “Nature Re(contained)” at the Irvine Fine Arts Center last year.

Next up is “Accumulation/Creation,” a group show opening Feb. 12 at John Wayne Airport, in which a portion of his motley collection of industrial castoffs and natural objects will be displayed along with the pieces he makes from them.

One morning recently, O’Leary, who retains the clean-cut appearance and straightforward manner of the Eagle Scout he once was, greeted a visitor outside his studio, a narrow warehouse around the corner from the train station.

Only after O’Leary finished discussing the sources of each object in his street-front window display (including a dragonfly made from a baseball bat, balls and fan blades, and a moose skull he found on a road in Irvine) did the conversation move indoors. Pulling work from nooks and crannies, pausing often to think, he talked about his meandering route to art-making.

O’Leary grew up in a “very Catholic” family in Buena Park, the dutiful eldest son of a schoolteacher and a telephone operator, and was active in sports and student council. At UCI--where he financed his own education, living on $400 a month, without a car, and for three years without a phone--he initially thought he would concentrate on environmental science.

But the field ecology curriculum hadn’t been developed yet, so for about four years he worked his way through the college catalog, taking whatever sounded appealing.

Proficient in drawing from early childhood, he nonetheless was “very afraid of art because it didn’t make any money,” he said.

By his fifth year in college, his attitude had changed. “I thought, ‘I don’t care if I make money or not; this is what I want to do,’ ” O’Leary said. “It was the first time I felt a sense of purpose.”

He had balked at first when sculpture instructor Tom Jenkins suggested he try a medium besides drawing. “I was totally afraid of all those [carving] tools because I hadn’t used them,” O’Leary said. “I hadn’t grown up with wood shop.”

At the same time, however, he had been turning himself into a precision tool while slaving away at a library job.

“I could push the [book] cart with my knee, look at the call number [on the book] and throw it into the air all sort of at the same time,” O’Leary said, demonstrating a mad, Rube Goldberg-like pantomime.

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“In the meantime, this other hand was opening the space up [on the shelf] and sticking the book in, and then with my other foot I’d be straightening the bottom rows and, with the back of my knuckles, pulling [the books] out and straightening them.

“That’s how all my jobs have gone,” he said. “There’s fear at the beginning, and then you start getting comfortable, and then you become the expert at it, and then it’s speed, and then you have to move on and learn a new one.”

After a while he began viewing college in much the same way and decided to drop out.

“I realized I was really a laborer. I wanted to work with my hands a lot--I didn’t want to sit at a desk; I wanted to be outside.”

After a few years of toiling for an interior design firm specializing in tract homes, he broke free. Living mostly on wages from sporadic handyman jobs, he spends his days ricocheting from one art medium to another.

There are the dense, calligraphic drawings he does with his eyes shut (“I don’t think I’ve ever had the same level of concentration”); the series of turtles made from such objects as rolled socks or garden posts or cigarette butts; the curiously anthropological-looking headdress fashioned from wire and apple cores; the quasi-figurative collages; the new photography projects.

“Willie [the nickname his friends use] is an alchemist in a way,” says Daniel Arvizu, owner of the Santa Ana gallery that bears his name. Arvizu likens O’Leary to wittily inventive Los Angeles sculptor Tim Hawkinson: “He takes the multiples of nothingness that people discard and turns them into something. . . . In his studio, you get sucked into the vortex that everything you’re looking at is an art object.”

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A key aspect of his work, O’Leary says, is “the element of slowing down. The whole idea of collecting means that you have to stop and look at something.”

His all-embracing attitude toward objects and ideas also extends to collaborations with other artists. A red pincushion covered in glittery “hair” and dangling from a fishing pole came from an idea by Arvizu: sculptural versions of the red dots dealers use to indicate a work has been sold.

With sewing by artist Lynn Kubasek and a title (“I Am the Measure of Your Success”) copped from Laurie Hassold, another Orange County artist, the piece is an amusing riff on the ego involved in the gallery system.

It seems fitting, somehow, that 16 collaborative works--including a ridiculously “pathetic” version of Constantin Brancusi’s stone carving “The Kiss,” made with two socks and novelty trimmings donated by Jasper Dixon, the young daughter of painter Frank Dixon--were the subject of his sole one-man show, at the Caged Chameleon Gallery in Santa Ana last summer.

Even though he never pursued formal studies in ecology, O’Leary remains an outdoor person at heart, fretting about how difficult it was to orient himself without sunlight during a recent trip to the steel-and-concrete forest of Manhattan.

“When I get outside, I’m totally isolated with the materials, but I have to be more resourceful too,” he said. “It’s bliss.”

Last May, he worked 13 hours a day for five consecutive days at the 1,800-foot artists’ mural surrounding the federal courthouse construction site in downtown Santa Ana, nailing carefully pieced-together scraps of carpet and linoleum to make a funky, Japanese-flavored version of a moonlit landscape by Symbolist painter Gustav Klimt.

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O’Leary fondly recalls the summer he spent a week camping on a lake in Michigan, working from dawn to dusk on a piece involving pyramids of colored rocks. It was one of the rare times that he paid homage to another artist unwittingly; four years later, he encountered the work of environmental sculptor Andy Goldsworthy, who had made an almost identical piece. But O’Leary wasn’t troubled.

“There seem to be two takes on [artistic] influences,” he mused. “There are people who isolate themselves and won’t go to shows. I want to see as much as possible. By admitting [everything] as an influence, we take away control from anyone being able to say, ‘This comes from that [specific] source.’ ”

Ambling outside again to sit in the tiny alfresco living room he rigged up in back of his studio, O’Leary pointed out the TV with a plant growing in it.

“I was thinking about people, when they zone out and watch television--how it’s almost a meditative thing,” he said. “So if you slow down enough to watch a tree grow. . .” He left the thought and its impossible potential floating in the clear winter air.