Jesus ‘Jesse’ Gardea has always been good with his hands, but it wasn’t until seven years ago that the 80-year-old decided to put his creativity towards crafting creatures out of scrap metal.
Gardea was born in Durango, Mexico, in 1943 where he lived for the first 11½ years of his life. In Durango, the scorpion is a symbol of state pride and Gardea took the Spanish word for scorpion, alacrán, as a nickname.
Scorpions are also a frequent subject of his art and are the trademark he leaves on all his sculptures.
“It’s always been fascinating to me that you can take two pieces of metal and twist them and bend them and create something unusual,” Gardea said. “I like to make something that you don’t always see. Something unusual.”
After his youth in Mexico, his family moved north to Green River, Wyoming, where he lived most of his life. He didn’t speak any English, so had to learn the language and work his way up, his wife Shirley Gardea said.
He and his wife stayed in Green River, where Gardea worked in a trona soda-ash mine for 35 years. He spent much of that time as a heavy equipment operator, but was always interested in welding.
“I got interested (in welding) and I used to ask (the welders) on my breaks I’d say, ‘Hey, can I get a hold of that stinger,’ we called them stingers, ‘and see if I can weld something?’ ‘Sure, sure, sure,’ ” Gardea said. “I used to mess around with a couple pieces of metal and try to weld them.”
In those days, before he tried his hand at sculpture, Shirley Gardea said he still had creative outlets. He used to hand chip arrowheads in his free time and if anything needed to be fixed, he was the man for the job.
He hasn’t stopped since, welding scorpions, dinosaurs, animals and a large American eagle on a cactus. The eagle is displayed prominently in front of his house in Fruita.
“He made this big American eagle and it’s sitting on a cactus, this big eagle, it’s beautiful and he’s got the flag with it,” Shirley Gardea said. “I think that’s everybody’s favorite — that eagle. For the adults. For the adults it’s the eagle. For the kids it’s the little dinosaurs and animals.”
Gardea’s art does draw attention from many younger people, Shirley Gardea said.
“He’s got little kids that he’s known from 3-, 2-years-old. They come up, ‘Jesse! Jesse! Can I see your dinosaurs?’ ” Shirley Gardea said.
When he first started making his sculptures he wasn’t sure how they were coming out, but his family and then neighbors were encouraging, Gardea said.
“(My family) told me that I was doing better than I thought. Pretty soon I started flipping other little creatures. They more or less looked like what I wanted them to,” Gardea said. “Other people started coming around and looking at them in the yard. I was getting little compliments here and there. That gave me confidence and I wanted to keep on doing what I was doing.”
Jesse Gardea, front, explains how he turns pieces of scrap metal into art like the eagle on a catcus behind him. The eagle scuplture is a favorite of adults who come around the Fruita man’s house to view his scrap metal art.
Christopher Tomlinson/The Daily Sentinel
The medium for all his sculptures is metal, but not what you might buy in a store. Gardea uses only recycled metal he’s given or finds, he said. He cuts it and welds it and bends it to shape by hand.
“I like to recycle metal,” Gardea said. “I volunteer at the second-hand store here in Fruita. We get quite a bit of metal and it goes into the metal dumpster. I have permission to dumpster dive. So I fish a lot of my metal from there and I bring it back to life.”
He has a good eye for what each piece of scrap could be turned into, Shirley Gardea said, recognizing shapes that could become legs or wings or bones.
“He can see a piece of metal and he can already imagine what he’s going to make out of it,” Shirley Gardea said. “He brings something home and I’m like, ‘What are you going to do with that?’ He goes, ‘You’ll see. You’ll see.’ He just has that creativity and imagination.”
Despite all the attention and acclaim he has gotten around the community, Gardea said he doesn’t plan on selling his work. What he doesn’t display or keep himself he gives away to his family.
“They really think they’re awesome,” Gardea said. “They all want one or two or three. I’ve had a few people ask me to sell them. ‘Sell me this one, sell me that one, sell me this one.’ I haven’t sold one because I don’t want to sell them. I want to just keep them in the family.”
