Fred Eversley

The genesis of my work is energy, energy being the sole contributor for all life on Earth. Without energy, none of this exists. Especially living here in Venice Beach all these years, where you're surrounded by the ocean and the sun and the wind, you became even more aware of how the natural energy around makes people very, very happy. There are very few fights on the beach. You know, people are too busy absorbing energy to fight.

I’m a sculptor. Most of my sculpture is done in polyester. The reason I use polyester is that it is the only clear liquid material that I can shape into parabolic shapes, the parabola being the perfect concentrator of all forms of energy.

I went to Brooklyn Technical High School in electrical engineering, and then on to Carnegie Mellon. And during the summers, I worked as a radar systems technology repairman. All radar reflectors are parabolic, so I was surrounded literally by parabolas.

And then I graduated from Carnegie Mellon. I joined Wiley Laboratories in El Segundo. Wiley brought me out here to basically handle special projects. We became very much part of the Venice community. All the artists were just starting to move into Venice.

We had to get up every morning at 8 o’clock, put on a tie and jacket and go to El Segundo, but in the evening, we came back to Venice and hung out with the local crowd. And that’s where I got really introduced to my generation of artists, De Wain Valentine, Larry Bell, John McCracken, Peter Alexander. They all had studios within three blocks of here.

While I was an engineer, I became the first artist to sign up to be a technology advisor to Charles Maddox three doors down the street. He had just formed an organization called the Aesthetic Research Center, AER, and that was sort of the situation when I had my accident and almost died after I hit the telephone pole with my car.

And I took that opportunity to retire from engineering and become an artist. I used Charlie’s lathe to cast basically three-color, three-layer pipes that I polished the inside and outside, and then truncated them into interesting shapes.

The parabola is a geometric shape. It’s a very special geometric shape. It’s the only geometric shape that concentrates all forms of energy to a single focal point. Unfortunately, the only easy way to create a parabola is by rotating a liquid about the vertical axis.

That means the slope of the piece as you go around the shape constantly changes, which means it's impossible to machine hand-polish, because you can’t make a tool to machine-polish it the way you can a spherical shape or a flat shape.

Perfect parabolic shapes like my pieces or telescope mirrors are hand-polished. The pieces start out with clear polyester, which is a viscous, clear material that smells a lot, and the fumes are noxious, so you have to wear a respirator. I mix in a certain number of drops of each color, whatever the color to be, and then I put them into the machine that is a modified potter's wheel so you can control the speed of it.

And I set the speed for the shape I want, pour the plastic in. If I'm going to do multiple-layer pieces, I pour the plastic in and wait until the first piece gets to a certain state of hardness but not totally hard, and then put in the second batch of colored plastic, and so forth and so on. And then you let it rotate until it gets hard.

You take it out of the mold, and then begins the majority of the work, about 16 or 17 steps of sanding and polishing, starting with incredibly rough, generally 36-grit sandpaper, and then going down to the very finest you can buy, which is about 36,000-grit sandpaper. And then two or three roughnesses of polishing compound to get the very finest polishing compound, and then put a good coat of wax on top of the whole thing.

95% of the work is in the sanding and polishing. It’s an incredible amount of dog work. There's nothing very satisfying about it. It’s necessary dog work to get to the end result, which is a highly transparent, optically perfect surface. Then it’s done, and it’s either great, good, or bad.

Sometimes, you have an accident where the colors are poured in too fast and the colors start blending into each other. Sometimes, you have some air bubbles. Sometimes, they’re close to the surface and you can sand them out, and sometimes, they’re too far in. And if it inteferes with the overall effect of the piece, then you throw that piece away.

But the advantage is, no one else that I know in the art world does it because it's too damn much work. I'm unique in that way. At least, I think I am, because I developed techniques that are very labor-intensive, perfectly hand-polishing parabolas without altering its shape.

I do most of the work myself. I’ve done some pieces in bronze, where I had a foundry in Spain that was crazy enough to try centrifugally casting in bronze. It works, but most of my work has been done in this studio, virtually all of it in this studio, in polyester.

My first color that I used was really arbitrary. The first set of colors were colors that Charles Maddox had in the studio. And then when I started consciously using colors, I used the same three colors for all of my three-color pieces, basically violet, amber and blue. They’re totally arbitrary colors, but I like the effect they created, and so I continued using them for as long as I was doing three-color pieces.

And in 1972, I went next door to McCracken’s studio, and he gave me his can of black pigment. And that’s how I ended up starting making opaque black pieces as opposed to transparent three-color pieces. And I made a series of white pieces, each one different from each other, because white’s a funny color. In polyester, in a parabolic shape, actually, in thin sections, it turns pink. It's not so much the pigment but the refraction of the light affecting the pigment.

Hastings Plastics sold two kinds of casting resins in those days. One was made by Sylmar Chemical, which is a small company in Gardena, and that ended up being named Fred Eversley resin. The other one was made by 3M Corporation, and it was called mass-cast resin for casting large pieces.

I use a particular plastic that is the most stable that I know of. It’s more difficult to cast it without cracking, but it has much more superior qualities of not changing. I’ve used that plastic for virtually all of my work.

The only conservation issue you have is if somehow, they get scratched or chipped or something like that. If you have a big chip, rather than alter the shape of the whole piece, it’s better to cast in very carefully. You have to match the color very carefully, because the final color can change during hardening. So you have to actually do these experiments, figure out exactly the formula.

My earliest pieces haven’t changed one iota since they were made. The color’s stable. The plastic’s stable. 99% of my pieces have never been conserved. Most contemporary paintings certainly will not last thousands of years. That much of an engineer, I am, right. I watch a lot of my friends’ paintings being conserved after 20 years. So in terms of comparables, I feel I’m operating with as secure a material as can be.

Most of my pieces that have been bought by collectors stay in the same collection forever. People move from around the house and look at them from different angles and perspectives, day, night, artificial light, natural light. And the kids grew up looking at the pieces, and several of their kids come back and buy pieces when they get rich enough, so I have several multigenerational collections. and so as far as I'm concerned, I’ve achieved more than I set out to do.