Pursuing the perfect spiral Wind-form creator bases art on DNA helix
John Noyes stands among several of the wind forms that grace his backyard above Egan Slough east of Kalispell. For seven years, Noyes has been creating the spiraling copper shapes in his shop. Karen Nichols/Daily Inter Lake
By JOHN STANG
The Daily Inter Lake
Perfection can be elusive like the wind.
John Noyes can catch the wind, but he can't snare perfection with his "wind forms."
Noyes, 71, has created wind forms - copper creatures and doodads spiraling in the breeze around a steel pole - for seven years. He's been selling them for four years.
"I don't think I've [created] the perfect wind form yet. An artist can always find something wrong with his own work," said the quasi-retired family and emergency-room doctor who lives east of Kalispell.
Think of a helix, like you see in a model of a DNA strand.
Watching a DNA helix twirl around on a public television program is what inspired Noyes to try this art form.
Now when you mentally visualize a DNA helix, replace the strands with spiraling vertical rows of birds, fish, airplanes or geometric shapes that Noyes jigsaws out of sheets of copper and batters into curvy figures with a ballpeen hammer.
He then mounts them on thin brass rods to be inserted onto a main steel rod. Then everything gets bent to form a helix.
Noyes, who has moved about the West and Alaska with his wife, Hope, settled in rural Flathead County in 1986. He dabbles in several pastimes, including flying, scuba diving, ham radio operations and playing string bass.
For 15 years, one of those pastimes consisted of designing and making gold and bronze frames for pictures. He loved doing his own designing but chafed when painters told him how to design specific frames. After 15 years, he got bored making frames and quit.
Then seven years ago, he saw that DNA helix on television. Disconnected thoughts clicked together to create the idea of creating wind forms.
This is a fairly obscure segment of sculpting.
"There's no book on this," Noyes said.
An Internet check shows a few artists tackling this field - their works usually selling in the four- and five-figure price range. And a few craftspeople make tiny wind sculptures in the $50 to $100 range
But this same cursory check indicates that Noyes' 5-foot-tall works seem to be roughly the same sizes as the expensive works, but much cheaper - $395 each.
He sells his work locally at the Sassafras gallery in downtown Kalispell and at Artistic Touch in downtown Whitefish.
Noyes' first wind form consisted of 32 birds -four lines of eight, spiraling around each other.
His second pattern was fish - each fish slightly bigger than the one in front of it, like those pictures of a big fish eating a smaller fish, which in turn is eating a smaller fish, and so on.
Since then he has done spiral patterns of ribbons, circles, Navajo storm signs, airplanes and other objects.
The search for perfection comes with the actual execution of each individual wind form.
With some pieces, Noyes is still tinkering with what he believes should be the perfect distances between individual fish, birds or airplanes.
A more difficult task is to get each plane or each fish lined up perfectly nose to tail with all 32 figures in a wind form - a goal that Noyes is still trying to achieve.
That drives him to study and tweak pieces each time he creates a copy of a specific helix - seeking a perfection that probably only Noyes will see.
"The buyer won't know it but I will," he said.
Reporter John Stang may be reached at 758-4429 or by e-mail at jstang@dailyinterlake.com