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Atomic Tom:
Rugged art the mark of PV artist By Nancy McCurry Staff Writer
What do you get when you take 155 pounds of scrap steel, an ice cream scoop of Albert Einstein's brain and a sweaty six-pack of Budweiser and toss lightly with an M-80? You get Tom Hall, that's what you get. The Paradise Valley artist has distinguished himself in the Valley as a local character, a man of imagination and an artist determined to leave his mark on his community. It is no secret that this soon-to-be PVCC student has never cared for convention. The wiry man of 40 has an unmatched, savant-like intensity focused primarily on steel. At home in a big welding glove and spark-burned jeans, Hall submits the steel to the flame. He cuts and hammers and swears his way to another unprecedented masterpiece, this time a 14-foot facsimile of a warhead mounted on an adjustable boom and hoisted to a height of 25 feet, angled high over his roofline. Emblazoned on the missile are the words "Look out Bin Laden." Hall looks up at the missile, shoving his hair out of his face and beaming as he takes a long tug off his Marlboro. This man is a welder, fabricator and inventor of strange things. He has found a way to incorporate his specialized learning style with art and vision. This strangeness started early. His parents, Pat and Bill Hall, recall how he could read exploded diagrams and glue together plastic car models when he was four. In kindergarten he built an airplane from the inside out, constructing all the seats and cabin first. He was diagnosed as dyslexic early on in school and remained fitful and frustrated throughout. His dad relates that in third grade Tom's teacher would write notes on his hand, so they'd make it home. Everything else would end up in the wind or floating down a creek. He was always dragging stuff home from dumpsters behind stores and constructing things out of the parts. Hall says when he was a kid, he was always taking things apart and putting them back together again. He hung out with his buddies' dads, one was an engineer and another was a mechanic, and that's where learning started making sense.
Concerning his school years, his father remembers, "If it weren't for shop class, there wouldn't have been much incentive to keep him there." "I loved shop and figure I'd have gotten straight A's if it was the only class I had to take," Hall says with a laugh, brushing the dirt from his jeans. The man's hair, more sweat than dry, is thinning and avoids any sense of order. It cords in his face or stands defiantly on end depending on its humor. His clothes hang on him, exhausted. His face is perpetually red, burned from the aura of the torch he tends. "I did my time in high school," he recalls, "and left to work at a gold mine over in Congress as soon as I could. We built a lot of really burly equipment and played with a lot of explosives and big ass tractors. We lived in the desert out there—no showers you know—and a putrid water supply, but it was fun, man. The dysentery sucked but the beer was cold." Since then, Hall has remained employed in the field of welding and steel fabrication. Currently, he works at Southwest Fabrication and has had a three-year volley with his boss, in often-heated debate, as to when the work day begins—the boss says 8 a.m. Hall says 10. "Mornings aren't my thing," he says. He stays out late in the shop working with undivided attention on his projects to the exclusion of everything else. There are times when in mid conversation, he'll scratch out an idea on paper, in the dirt or on the concrete floor while explaining his vision. His hand strangles the pencil, and he can't seem to draw ideas fast enough. His hands shake when he draws. He spells phonetically, all in caps. He speaks with great amplitude due to a hearing loss suffered at the gold mine. "A little too much dynamite, I figure," he says. Back in his shop he shows off a game he invented, tenderly referred to as Hall's Balls. It is a 2-square-foot roller coaster, moving steel marble instead of cars down a twisting track made of wire coat hangers, all made possible through the power of electromagnetic energy. The player is in control of the magnetic pulses and must be skillful with his well-timed applications to propel the balls through loops and rolls. Another invention is a standing floor fan that Hall has designed to track an infrared light worn by the target, in this case, Hall. The fan watches him adoringly, like a love-sick school girl, as he moves around his shop. Out front there's an enormous aluminum inverted icosahedron that looks like a silver spore of pollen magnified 100 jillion times. Next to that, the stern of the Titanic sinks in the dirt, a rusted 5-foot replica of bulkhead and smoke stacks. " I just built stuff I thought looked neat. I never thought any of this was art," Hall says, "'til an artist told me I was an artist." A few years ago, a spider sculpture was stolen from Hall's yard and deposited at the doorstep of Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpio. The bomb squad and various teams were immediately dispatched to the scene and the press was soon to follow. By remote control, Sheriff Joe's robotic officer blew up the fearsome arachnid. The newspaper gave Hall his long awaited 15 minutes of fame, and Arizona Republic cartoonist Steve Benson also captured the incident in a cartoon three days later. But not all of Hall's life has made it into the funny pages. He lost the end of his pinky finger not long ago in a hydraulic vice used to hold huge pieces of steel. When speaking of the ill-pared digit, Hall responds with a smirk, "That vice just mooshed it into puddin'." As he talks he leans against the wide tire of a strange three-wheeled contraption. He absent-mindedly smooths his hand along its chrome exhaust pipe much like a hunter strokes his dog. This recent project is a rail type buggy with two wheels in the front and one in the back with a beefy engine situated behind the driver. The test drives would often involve the use of unopened stretches of the 101 loop. "I got pulled over 15 times by the cops but they never gave me a ticket," he says. "They didn't know what to call it—it wasn't a bike and it wasn't a car—but they thought it was cool. One time, one cop wanted to search me and his partner wanted a ride." Police interaction has punctuated Hall's life, but in the last few years he says things are settling down. "My girlfriend Cindy has helped clean up my act." He looks down at his roughened, muscled hands and says quietly, "She's put beauty in my life and my projects, too." In front of their house, a giant pterodactyl made of truck parts and scrap, with a wingspan of over eight feet, sits perched on a boulder. The yellow mechanized pterosaur stands watch over the other metal yardmates, the likes of which few neighborhoods ever bear witness. "When I put a new thing out here, the neighbors either hate it or love it, but the missile has 'em slamming on the brakes," says Hall. Beside Cindy, rolls his other long-term love affair, a squatty, rubenesque 1959 International pickup truck, the Blue Ox. The truck sits at the foot of his bombastic message to Bin Laden. Hall jabs the air with his smoke pointing up at his latest side yard bombshell. "Only problem is," he says, "nobody knows where to point the damn thing." Hall will be enrolled at PVCC for the Spring semester to further his interest in math. He hopes that one of his sculptures can find a place at PVCC. |
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Last
updated: April 12, 2002 |
