gives contractor four seasons of work

SCULPTURE
gives contractor
Photos courtesy Will Hyde
four seasons of work
By Barbralu Cohen
Adding sculpture to his repertoire
keeps Will Hyde—and his brain—
always working.
hree years ago, Will Hyde, owner of Mile High Landscaping in
Denver, found himself completing a six-figure project and waiting
for $8,000 worth of metal sculpture—gates, trellises, railings and
water feature ornaments to arrive.
“I’d been wanting to go to a metal sculpting classes,” he recalls. “I
proposed to the clients that they pay for me to take the class and I’d
mimic the artist’s style and finish the metalwork.” They agreed—and
“they loved my pieces even more than the work he had completed.”
Now he has placed his sculptures in landscapes—his own and
other contractors’—from Fort Collins to Larkspur, and they are
on display at Creative Living, the interior and exterior décor
gallery he owns with his wife Gita, and at four other galleries in
Denver.
Photo courtesy Jon Paciaroni
T
Will Hyde at work
on his welding table
Colorado Green • January/February 2013
27
The steel panel, cut out and coated with a patina, screens the landscape from
neighbors, while enhancing the plants and the water feature in front of it.
Steel cables create a window for the clematis, which, in turn, frames the
interior sculpture and its patina leaves.
Hyde didn’t start out thinking of himself as an artist. “I always wanted to understand how
to make things, and I was good with my hands,” he says. When he was 14 he built a motor for
a 1969 Camaro. After graduating in philosophy from Colorado State University, he opened a
snowboard apparel company. It went down after 9/11, so he went to work selling Budweiser for
a year. Then, admiring the lifestyle of some friends who worked in the landscape—three months
off to snowboard and nine months of hard work—he opened Mile High Landscaping.
“I started out with an old battered pickup and a couple of buddies,” he says. Now with 12
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January/February 2013 • Colorado Green
year-round employees in its 10th year, the
company designs and installs high-end residential projects up and down the Front Range.
Is the work creative? Hyde says he’s
“always trying to do something new and different, to push the client.” His welding adds
a dimension of creativity to the landscapes.
For example, recently he designed a cleanlooking, modernistic dog run using a welded
wire framed with square steel tubing.
Large steel panels with cutout foliage
shapes or chrysanthemums make stunning
screens in the landscape, to hide an ugly wall
or a neighboring house. Welded arbors gracefully add a place for plants to grow above a
wall. Chunks of reclaimed wood combine
with metal in a bench. Recently, Hyde began
working with Gabions, essentially welded
metal cages filled with stones, which act as the
supports for a wall or bench. “Anytime I see
anything that intrigues me, whenever the chatter goes away in the back of my head, it’s always stockpiling in my brain,” or on the back
of his clipboard or a bar napkin or a scrap of
paper.
The creative process happens in different
ways. After he gets that initial idea, he files it
away. Or the client or another landscape contractor may approach him with an idea or a
need. “I may go online and poke around on
Google Images with whatever this concept
might be,” botanical leaves, for example, or
wrought iron gates. Or he may do a scale design for the client’s approval. He may draw
some more or just let it flow at the welding
table. It changes as he welds. Welding is a
process of bending and “playing with space
and the relationship between the pieces until I
get it the right way,” he says.
Hyde began his work in metal after that
first class with round and square rods and
stick-type metals, which he bent and twisted.
Then he began plasma-cutting shapes out of
the flat panels. Berthoud artist James Vilona
is a recent influence, and Hyde is now experimenting with various types of patina.
“I have far more ideas in my head than I
have time to make,” says Hyde. “But when I
have time and energy and some strength still
in my back. I go and make stuff.” Sometimes
it’s his idea, and sometimes the client sends
him a link to something interesting. One
client’s paisley pants inspired the screens hiding his garage wall, with foliage-like bent metal
rods painted white.
His art elevates what and how he thinks
about landscapes, he says, although it hasn’t
changed them horticulturally. “We already integrate so many water features, kitchens,
benches, fire features. The welded metal and
Gabion add a dimension of creativity, but they
don’t effect the plants I’m designing to go into
an area,” he says. Instead, the art complements
the landscape — or makes it even more
interesting.
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January 15-18, 2013
COLORADO CONVENTION CENTER, DENVER, CO
Build your success at ProGreen 2013
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ProGreen is going mobile with a QR code and
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www.progreenexpo.com
—Barbralu Cohen is editor
of Colorado Green.
Colorado Green • January/February 2013
29