It’s a cliche old saying: One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.
In the case of artists and longtime friends Wally Warren and Joe Kennedy, however, it’s a slogan to live by. It’s more than an adage; it’s a calling.
“People throw a lot of stuff away,” said Kennedy, who along with Warren has for decades picked dumps around Maine for pieces to use in their art. “We just take it and repurpose it.”
Warren, now 70, owns 5 acres in the Somerset County town of Ripley that he bought for $550 in 1970. He has made art in his studio there — paintings, metal percussive instruments, model boats, totems, whirligigs, outdoor sculptures and the huge, assemblage-style cityscapes for which he’s best known — for more than 40 years.
A half-mile down the road from Warren, Kennedy, 64, also makes art in his home studio, fusing together metal, glass, old toys and mechanical parts to create compelling sculptures that — unintentionally, on Kennedy’s part — evoke the steampunk aesthetic.
The art they make couldn’t end up looking more different — Warren’s is riotously colorful and brimming with lively, humorous energy, while Kennedy’s is slightly more abstract, with a metallic, industrial palette. But as friends, they find lots of commonality.
“We share a liberal viewpoint, a creative viewpoint and a musical viewpoint,” Warren said. “It goes beyond the visual. We rely on each other a lot. We really lucked out as neighbors.”
Kennedy grew up just outside of Hartford, Connecticut. By his early 20s, he was eager to move to Maine in search of “the good life.” In the early 1970s he left Connecticut for Crawford, in Washington County, where he lived for about a decade.
“I’d call myself a back-to-the-lander,” Kennedy said. “I was definitely part of that wave. I wanted to come up here and get a piece of land.”
In the 1980s, Kennedy met Nellie, his future wife, at a bluegrass festival, and moved to Ripley to be with her. For more than 20 years they played in the roots band Evergreen, amassing over the years countless creative and musical friendships throughout central Maine — including their friendship with Warren.
Warren was born in Lincoln, though his family later moved to Bangor. As a teenager, Warren poked around rail yards and junkyards around Bangor, examining the guts of mechanical objects, creating things out of scrap. He was also drawn to model railroads and drafting. He loved the idea of city planning. When he enrolled in the University of Maine in 1964, he decided to study engineering.
“I just wanted to make stuff and design cities. I wanted to be a city planner when I was a kid,” Warren said. “I could not wrap my brain around calculus. I’m not a math guy. I hated it. I flunked engineering. I was in the wrong place.”
He switched majors from engineering to art, joining the then-fledgling art department at UMaine, chaired by founder Vincent Hartgen, and staffed by acclaimed artists such as Harry Greaver and Michael Lewis, all of whom taught Warren. Though Warren dropped out for a few years, he returned in the early 1970s and finished his degree in 1973.
A few years after that, he left for Seattle, where he lived for 17 years, immersing himself in the city’s art scene and exhibiting and selling in large urban galleries — though he visited his brother in New Orleans many times and came home to Maine most summers to unplug and work out of his tiny, hand-built cabin in Ripley.
In 1994, priced out of increasingly trendy Seattle, Warren moved back to Maine permanently.
“I live pretty frugally,” Warren said. “It’s just me and the art and a couple of tomcats.”
Warren counts the folk art movement, and Maine sculptor Bernard Langlais, as major inspirations. Warren’s sculptures and installations placed throughout his Ripley property were influenced by Langlais’ similar work at his farmhouse in Cushing.
It’s in Ripley where Warren and Kennedy met. They live a half-mile from one another on the Stream Road, which they jokingly refer to as a “gated community.” Over the years, they’ve had countless dinners together at Kennedy’s house, sharing wine and conversation with friends while watching the sunset from the hilltop clearing on Warren’s property, surrounded by whirligigs and totems.
They also share a proclivity for the fine art of dump picking. Endorsed by sympathetic sanitation workers in nearby communities, Warren and Kennedy can be found rummaging through the trash at the dump, in search of odds and ends that could be put to an artistic purpose.
“They know we’re not trying to resell anything. We’re just looking for it for our work. They’ve been really cool about it,” Warren said. “I always bring a drumstick so I can pound on things to see if they sound good.”
“You know what you’re looking for, but you don’t know what it is until you see it,” said Kennedy, who actually worked at a transfer station in Dexter for two years, before becoming a full-time plumber, a job he still has.
The stuff both artists collect comes back home with them to Warren’s cozy art-strewn studio-cum-cabin and to Kennedy’s basement studio. It’s torn apart, sorted through and re-arranged in countless iterations before each piece finally finds a place in an artwork.
Warren has been making his intricate, wildly imaginative cityscapes in some capacity for more than 50 years — first as a teenager, out of balsa wood and scrap lumber. Today, anything is fair game when it comes to materials. Keyboards, guitar pegs, toothbrushes, old satellite dishes, circuit boards, tiny pieces of metal, wood or plastic and so on. It’s all nailed down on scrap wood and painted in brilliant colors with a mixture of oil and enamel.
It’s become the work he’s best known for — cityscapes are displayed in public places all over Maine, including the Cross Building at the State House in Augusta, and elementary schools in Deer Isle, Glenburn, Princeton, Embden and other towns.
“Kids really respond to them,” Warren said. “It’s bright and colorful. It’s got a lot of detail. It’s tactile and visceral. There’s a lot to look at.”
Kennedy came to visual art later in life. Through his work as a plumber, he’s always had large amounts of fixtures and bits of metal miscellania laying around the house. About 10 years ago Kennedy made his first sculpture — out of old plumbing parts. Within a few months, he’d made hundreds of sculptures. He hasn’t stopped since.
“I had been in New Orleans all winter when he started making art … and when I came back and saw all the stuff he’d made, I was pretty flabbergasted,” Warren said.
“I’m lucky that my stuff ends up looking kind of steampunk-y. I didn’t know I was doing steampunk until I brought it to the Common Ground Fair and people said, ‘Oh, look at the steampunk art,’” Kennedy, referring to the neo-Victorian science fiction subgenre, said.
In addition to being a friend, Warren has acted as a sort of mentor to Kennedy in his nascent art career. He offers encouragement, a few tips and, more recently, collaboration in the case of their joint art show, “Assemblage Works,” on display at the Sohns Gallery at The Rock & Art Shop in Bangor.
The artistic relationship has gone both ways. In the past few years, Kennedy has helped Warren — who does not own a computer or smartphone, preferring to write letters each morning — get his work into more galleries, after Warren’s schedule began to slow down once digital submissions became the preferred method of communication.
“Wally’s been doing this for decades. I didn’t start until I was in my mid-50s. So I don’t have much time,” Kennedy said. “I want to make stuff and get it out there as much as I can.”
“Assemblage Works” is on display through April 2 at The Rock & Art Shop at 36 Central St. in Bangor.
