SCRAP-YARD ARTIST A Girard man turns pieces of leftover metal into unique art

By Guy D’Astolfo

When Daniel Horne looks at scrap metal, he sees art.

Cast-off parts, punched-out shapes, odd utilitarian pieces — it all morphs into a vision in Horne’s mind.

The Girard man roams through scrap yards searching for misshapen lengths of scrap iron and steel. Back in his studio — an old garage behind his house — he bends, cuts and welds the pieces into modern sculptures, using an oxygen-acetylene torch.

Most of his pieces can fit on a tabletop or knickknack shelf. Many are two-piece, with a base and a decorative top delicately balanced on top of it.

A therapist by day at D&E Counseling in Youngstown, Horne began creating industrial art six years ago. He hasn’t had a day of formal training; instead, his avocation stems from his handyman tendencies.

Horne received the welding equipment about six years ago, a birthday gift from his wife, the former Mary Arens of Girard.

“I always wanted to learn how to weld,” he said in a recent interview at his dining room table. “I’ve always been handy — I do plumbing, electric, drywall ... but welding always escaped me.”

He taught himself to weld, but instead of finding practical uses for his new skill, he immediately, almost as if guided by his subconscious, began creating art.

Horne has completed about 250 pieces and has sold most of them. He regularly displays his work at area festivals, but also travels. He recently exhibited at the Sugarloaf Festival in Chantilly, Va.

For the past three years he has set up a booth at the Summer Festival of the Arts at Youngstown State University, and won prizes each year: Best in Show, Best 3-D Piece and Best Individual Piece, respectively.

Horne experimented with balance in his first attempts. Now, all of his pieces are kinetic, but at the same time, they are eclectic. “I never repeat a piece,” he said.

Sculptures resembling robots or abstract art adorn his front yard and his home, a 100-year-old mason-block structure that he restored himself.

He shies away from seeking commissioned work, preferring to create naturally rather than to fulfill someone else’s expectations. But one piece that he did do on commission from his employer — a work entitled “Look Within” — is on display at the D&E Counseling offices on Belmont Avenue in Youngstown.

“Look Within,” he explained, is open so that you can see inside it — an analogy to the mental counseling work done at D&E.

Horne said his creative process is organic, in that he uses the pieces he finds for inspiration.

“The process for me is more like a jazz musician who is engaging in improvisation, rather than like a painter who walks into the studio with a picture in his head that he then transfers to the canvas,” he said. “I have always been in awe of people with that kind of artistic talent, but I do not have it. I almost never know going in what I will come out with at the end of the day. I explore the shapes and textures of the metal pieces I have in piles in my studio the way a musician plays with notes and tempo, and combine them in ways that I find to be elegant or surprising and work with them until a final piece emerges that works and evokes some kind of mood or image for me.”

The only other genre of art Horne has ever done in the past is wood carving. “I don’t work well with two-dimensional art, like painting,” he said. “That’s why I focus on this one medium.”

Horne received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Montana, and a master’s degree in counseling from YSU.

Born in Colorado, his family moved to Arizona and then again to upstate New York, where Horne grew up.

He met his wife, Mary, when he boarded a Greyhound bus and sat next to her. Both were headed to the University of Montana in Missoula.

Although he spends about 30 hours a week on his sculpture, Horne has no interest in taking courses in art. “Being an outsider artist appeals to me,” he said.

He explained that his art is a natural byproduct of working with his hands. “Ever since I was a young boy, I worked with my father. We would buy old houses, fix them up and sell them. I started when I was maybe 5 years old, carrying a bucket of nails for him.”

In his frequent trips to scrap yards (usually Niles Iron and Metal), Horne examines pieces and thinks about how they might fit together. “I buy hundreds of pounds of metal at a time,” he said.

Last summer, the price of scrap metal soared to about 50 cents a pound, which made his costs go up. “They were shipping every bit of it to China,” he said. But prices have since been cut in half by the global recession.

In his studio, a radio hanging over his welding equipment constantly plays. Scraps sit in wooden boxes, sorted by shape. Many of his most interesting pieces — those that have patterns — are actually the leftover sheets from which shapes have been punched out.

Hanging from the rafters are evidence of his other hobby: kayaking.

Horne is currently working on two projects: a giant man, which will likely wind up at least 8 feet high; and taps for Rust Belt Brewing Co. The taps that will be used to pour beer at the B&O Station bar in Youngstown, where Rust Belt is located.