Original subtitles

LANCE LETSCHER: Lately, the work has gotten so complicated and so dense

that the big question that it engenders upon first appraisal

is why would somebody do something like this?

So, it's a different catalog and they're all at 8:20.

Isn't that strange?

LETSCHER: When I was little, I mean really little,

I was preoccupied with patterns that were nature-based.

My grandparents had a gigantic fireplace made with these rough cut stones.

That was when my parents were still married

and everybody smoked cigarettes.

I kind of remember this smoke in the room

creating a hazy kind of ceiling.

And I remember just looking at this stone fireplace,

and sometimes I would imagine, like, an army tank,

you know, like, a big base, a small turret,

and if there's another stone coming off, that would be the gun, you know?

So, there's certain ones that you can make a really good tank.

There's a meditative quality to that kind of looking

that's kind of stuck with me.

One of my nicknames in high school was Trance.

Like... (LAUGHING)

Yeah, so it's kind of hard-wired.

I zone out, look at things.

LOUIS GRACHOS: There are so few people that have advanced collage the way he has,

and also remained really true to the material that he uses,

and I think that really makes him stand apart from many artists.

The careful synthesis that he goes through,

the very thought-provoking combination of imagery,

the narratives that he creates

is very much his personal stamp.

PAVEL ZOUBOK: I think for Lance, a big part of his process as an artist

is about taking things that are, you know, sometimes deeply painful

and making them not only necessarily beautiful

but even sometimes joyful or funny.

And because he's also incredibly playful,

even at its most dead serious,

it's sort of joyful in its way.

NANCY WHITENACK: He doesn't mind going to the dark place, ever.

Which, I think, adds some richness

to how he thinks and what his concerns are as an artist.

How would you know how to put things together that have shadow feelings,

unless you were willing to really go deep?

And he does.

Lance used to come to the store that I worked at,

which is the Half Price Books on the Drag in Austin.

It was the '80s and early '90s.

Lance would come pretty regularly and dive in our dumpster,

because most of what he used was old books.

LETSCHER: That was when one of my sons was about seven,

but he was a small guy and he was real stout,

so he was about this big,

and I would lift him up and drop him in the dumpster.

And then he would start, like, going through it,

and I'd point or he'd point,

or he'd say, "Oh, my gosh, look at this,"

and then he'd pull out this gigantic, you know, one of those dictionaries

that's, like, this big, you know, weighs 35 or 40 pounds.

And so he was like my accomplice,

and we got yelled at by people at Half Price Books.

I think I would catch him once in a while in there

and even say, "Hey, look at this."

I started to develop an idea of what he was looking for.

TORNATORE: There's such a beauty in the aging of books,

and he really gets it and loves it.

A really old book that's torn and tattered.

ROBERT JESSUP: You find your attention always being moved around

in such a delightful way,

and then you come upon, you bump upon an image,

you bump upon another image, you bump another place.

And he's always moving you around,

and there's this sense of wonder, of delight, of discovery.

His images work like little memories.

LETSCHER: Nice box.

Oh, yeah.

PATTI HOWELL: Some of these books are pretty trashed.

There was an estate sale when I went to Warrington,

and some has stuff all through it,

others, you know, just have a couple things, like that one.

LETSCHER: Yeah, these are good.

PATTI: And then there's a lot of scribble stuff.

Um, a friend of mine was moving,

and this is all her childhood notebooks and she's in her fifties.

LETSCHER: Yeah, these are great.

LETSCHER: Thank you very much. This is really good. PATTI: Okay, good.

LETSCHER: Really, really good.

-(LETSCHER EXCLAIMS) -PATTI: Isn't that good?

LETSCHER: Ah, thanks for doing this.

You've really scored big.

PATTI: Oh, good. LETSCHER: These weapons...

LETSCHER: Wow, these are so good.

This is how they're organized.

So, this is stuff that's been cut through,

um, at some point or another.

I started out a long time ago with the idea

that if I didn't organize the boxes,

that I'd have to go through the boxes

and I would find stuff that I didn't know was in them,

and it actually has been somewhat beneficial having that idea,

but lately I've gotten so much stuff.

That whole back room is full of boxes of paper.

I buy a lot of albums.

There's no real rhyme or reason to it.

Like, that was a good one.

There's a really good leg, look at that.

Oh, I could use that.

Look at that color.

A lot of times I'll be looking for something

and I'll find five things I didn't know I was looking for,

but they're exactly what I need.

They're more what I need than what I started out the quest for.

It's not a premeditated decision to pursue the work

in a certain emotional tone or psychological tone or thematic direction.

It's more guided by intuition and availability of materials.

I'll just start out cold without an idea

and the materials will start to dictate the direction of the piece,

and as I see something becoming realized, then I push it.

LETSCHER: I wanted a play-off of kind of a structural assembly,

like she is a mechanical woman,

or else have the items function graphically as if they were tattoos.

WHITENACK: I am not sure what drives Lance,

but he is absolutely driven.

He has shown with five to seven or eight galleries at a time.

We always have a very large body of work for show,

and every gallery that he works with would say the same.

He's incredibly responsible,

but behind that is this man

who may take six weeks to cut material with an X-ACTO knife.

Tiny, tiny little pieces, for six weeks!

LETSCHER: My most conscious time is when I'm cutting.

If my mind wanders, the blade continues to move

and sometimes it doesn't move in the direction that I want it to move.

Like, it's almost like I black out,

because I'm thinking about something

and not concentrating on what my hand and my eye are doing.

It takes 3% of the time to make the piece

and 97% of the time to cut all of the parts.

(METAL CLATTERING)

(GRUNTS SOFTLY)

LETSCHER: Almost all the cutting that I do is hard.

One way or the other, it's either very detailed or physically demanding.

The path of greater resistance is the one that I usually end up taking.

This is no exception. The metal is very difficult to cut.

(METAL CLANKS)

Wow, this is hard.

(GRUNTING)

So right now, I'm just kind of cutting through the metal that I have

in these pie-shaped wedges,

so that I can reassemble them into kind of circular shapes like that.

It's a theme that I've used,

and it's one that I've been doing a lot of commissions for,

and so that's what they wanted.

We wanted something to be bright and colorful and weather resistant,

so we thought metal, painted metal of some kind,

and Patti started shopping.

I started looking around for old signage.

Well, I didn't see anything,

and I thought, "This is going to be difficult."

LETSCHER: The project is to do an exterior piece outside of South Congress Books.

HOWELL: We bought the shop in 1997,

prior to South Congress just taking off like a rocket.

EVAN VOYLES: I think there's something magical lucky about South Congress,

and I think the reason it's popular

is it reflects both an America of the past

and the idea that it can be funky and different

and not all malled up and Starbuck-ed out

is intriguing to people.

To me, what's interesting about Lance's project

is that it's sort of the next step.

It's art for art's sake, but it's outdoor art.

LETSCHER: I got a letter from Serbia.

Wow.

This is a 500 million dinar banknote.

The banknote represents one of the biggest denominations

for paper money ever printed in the territory of Europe.

This guy just sent it to me.

(CHUCKLES)

LETSCHER: What I love about the work is what you can do with perspective

and what you can do with an optical illusion.

What you can do with a movement of color or a graphic shape.

Some kind of shape that implies something

without actually being something.

My parents were distracted, conceptually absent.

I think I just gravitated towards being by myself when I had a choice.

Lance grew up here in Austin, born and raised,

not many people can say that anymore.

His mother was from Paris, Texas.

His father was from Port Arthur, Texas.

FRASHER: They met here in Austin, going to school at UT.

His mother was in art school.

She kind of was a frustrated artist, I guess.

She... She got discouraged.

She was very nurturing until I was about five or six,

and then I think that things started to go bad.

She just kind of shut down.

My dad was kind of a narcissistic person.

He was very self-centered,

and he was just somebody that would pop up and disappear.

Didn't have much connection with him.

He was pretty well abandoned by age... Probably about by age 14.

Yeah. They were there a little bit for holidays,

for Thanksgiving and Christmas, and that was about it.

LETSCHER: One of the advantages that I had in my childhood

was that I didn't have a lot of stimulation.

I was bored frequently and I made things to kind of compensate for that.

I remember being on the floor drawing when I was younger,

I had a big set of gold headphones. I'd listen to music,

I'd look at catalogs, I liked to look at books, just doing stuff.

Doing things to keep from being bored.

I had an uncle, Johnny,

that I kind of pattern myself after in a lot of ways.

He had guns and he had a boat and rode motorcycles

and, um, just was wild, a little bit wild.

FRASHER: When Lance was 16, that's when he started getting into motorcycles.

And he got into a lot of trouble with motorcycles.

He wrecked them one right after another.

It was a lot of fun, you know, it's fun. (CHUCKLES)

It's really fun.

I had friends that rode,

and, you know, we just rode a lot.

Rode all the time, skip school and ride.

When I was a teenager, hormones created a lot of havoc and misery.

You know, I think that's when I started to become more unhappy

is just as a teenager.

I think before that I was okay.

I lived with my mom some, and then when I was a senior in high school,

I was getting in trouble, and she didn't know how to handle it,

and so she told me to go live with my dad.

I went and lived with my dad in Nebraska for six months.

My dad had some psychological problems,

and I think that he suffered from depression,

but I think he was probably undiagnosed.

He exaggerated and he embellished stories,

and he told stories that were just false.

About the time I was in high school,

he kind of just didn't want to work anymore.

So, he figured out different strategies

to kind of keep from working for the rest of his life.

LETSCHER: I was 21 when I got married to my first wife.

We started dating and she got pregnant.

Jonathan was born and she graduated.

I finished the semester and then we got married.

At that particular time, I was really involved in art school.

I had kind of been through a protracted period of crisis

from about age 13 to about age 19.

I was insecure and self-conscious

and just miserable, generally miserable.

And when he was born, I just kind of focused on

making him into a strong enough person

not to have those problems when he got to that age.

JONATHAN VON LETSCHER: I kind of always just remember, like, doing art with him.

Feels like my whole upbringing was kind of centered around that.

I remember going to the UT art school in the art department

and hanging out with his friends.

STEVE WIMAN: We were two of the only guys

in that group of young artists who had kids.

He was reserved, quiet, soft-spoken,

but very focused and very dedicated

to the work that he was doing at that time.

I think it was 1986.

He did a show at a small gallery in Dallas

that just was one of the most remarkable

moving pieces of work that I've seen.

JOHN REOCH: There was something literary about it.

There was something haunting.

It was work that was very unusual because...

There was this lead-based chair.

There was this lead-based tricycle.

All these things that were very unusual and somewhat dark.

REOCH: They were beautiful works of art,

but dark in a mysterious way.

He also had a dissecting cadaver table covered in lead,

which was very, very mysterious, and...

And I was drawn to it, but, I mean,

you needed to be an institution

to have something like that in your house.

LETSCHER: The table had a connotation of a landscape,

like a river straight down the center,

you know, these two banked sides.

I wouldn't do those pieces now,

but, I mean, I was 20 years old,

and very depressed

and very absorbed with depressing subjects.

I did several paintings that were based on the book

The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski.

I was reading a lot about the Holocaust,

and I was very involved in the history of the Second World War,

particularly in the Holocaust,

and I was thinking a lot about that

and about the effect on survivors.

Sometimes you find meaning in reading about other people's suffering.

You identify with it

and it makes your own suffering more meaningful

and not as isolated.

You feel less alone, I guess.

She gets so pissed off.

It was in a show in 1992,

so it was after I'd been out of graduate school for about three years.

I was doing a lot of pieces based on furniture

and then doing things to them or, you know, carving parts of them

or breaking up parts of them and reassembling them,

so that you could see that they'd been broken and fixed.

I made this piano that was, you know, 5 feet by 4 1/2 feet.

It had real short, stubby legs, so it was deformed, almost like a dwarf,

and it was sealed closed

and had little brass fittings on the bottom,

brass casters and brass pedals for the actuation,

but it didn't have the actual mechanism of the piano.

CHARLES DEE MITCHELL: So much of the very early work was about childhood.

Everything was child-sized, and, I mean, it was... It was traumatic.

MITCHELL: The ballet slippers were definitely for a child.

A pillow made out of marble that looked like someone had slept on.

The first exhibition which was so predominantly sculpture,

the one piece that I remember being framed and on the wall

was a really tender image that was an angel.

When you looked again, you could also see

that it was a little boy standing

with very bright lights shining on his face,

and I think his hand was up like this.

The light was both invasive,

but it was also radiant, transcendent light.

JONATHAN: I just remember him kind of brooding, thinking a lot.

He seemed kind of distant.

My parents weren't really getting along at all.

It was kind of a... A rocky household, I would say.

LETSCHER: You know, by the time my second son was born,

my first wife was pretty much gone all the time.

It was pretty bad. It was terrible.

It was a terrible relationship and we fought a lot,

and so it was not healthy for the boys, and...

So, I told her I wanted to get a divorce

and told her I wanted custody of the kids,

and she didn't dispute that.

LETSCHER: I don't really have any kind of preconception

about how this piece is going to go,

but it seems similar enough to the paper pieces that I make

to where it's mostly going to be about balancing color

and creating a composition that's active and interesting.

One of the kind of classical theories about color

is the simultaneous contrast of complementary colors.

It's like you put red next to green,

they're complementary colors,

and they both make each other look more vibrant.

Working with color, it's a process of, like,

putting things down next to each other

and seeing if it makes it better or worse,

and taking it away and seeing if it's better or worse.

Just a visual trial and error.

So, laying them all out like this on the floor,

there's no commitment there to any of those things

being in the place that they're in now.

All that cutting and this is all I got.

Like, this isn't even a third of it.

It's a real insecure feeling to be making something and it doesn't look good.

You know, like, letting it not look good.

Right now, there's no cohesion. It's just real rough.

When I first met Lance, he was working for an artist,

southwestern artist, Amado Pena,

who was very big and famous at the time,

and Lance was doing all of his printing for him,

his etching, his mono-printing, lithography, he did it all.

I was with him for 11 years total.

Towards the end, we were doing 9-plate, 64-color etchings

that took three guys eight hours to wipe for one print.

He was coming to work for Amado at about 7:00 every morning,

after he'd gotten his kids fed for breakfast, came to work,

and he would work until about 3:00 in the afternoon,

go pick them up at different schools every day, and then take them home.

Then, he would hang signs for his ex-wife.

Hang banners until about 8:00 at night.

Then he'd go home, cook dinner for the boys,

and then he'd do his artwork.

That's when he had time to do his art.

The first exhibition that we had of Lance's work

were graphite drawings,

and they were very small, intimate drawings of fragile branches,

and he would cut every bit of it out

and apply the drawing to an old piece of paper,

and they were exquisite.

There was no color.

Always quiet.

There are always bodies of work, you know, and he'll...

He would always find a motif or a theme and pursue it.

The, um...

There are some very, I would say, straightforward landscapes,

although, of course, they're totally abstract.

REOCH: It looks like a faint drawing made with tea.

There's faint pencil marks on it.

They're quiet, quiet gestures of the human hand.

The work became lighter and airier and more poetic.

I have hundreds of works of art,

but this is one of my favorite pieces

because of how quietly it speaks of love.

It's just a very romantic piece to me,

and it's these two cards that are two of hearts

and they mirror each other.

The two of them together for eternity.

One thing Lance's father always said when I met him,

he said, "Lance did not do anything with color until he met you."

You know, she's a complex person

and intelligent and creative and attractive,

and, you know, I just started to let down my guard.

It was after we'd been together for a while

that both of our lives started improving together,

you know, we were helping each other, um,

that it started showing in his work.

WHITENACK: One day I got in the mail a small collage,

and it was very abstract

with just small slits of colored paper,

and it was just this total break from anything we'd had.

This was Lance's signal that he was moving a very different direction.

MITCHELL: Very quickly, though, the elaboration of the abstract work

had reached a level of complexity and sophistication.

Even if it was nothing but stacks of color

that appear unbalanced on the paper

or maybe shifting to one side.

WHITENACK: Color, once he started getting involved with it,

became something that is a very important element

and something that he understands,

maybe intuitively.

JESSUP: Lance's collages always hold the wall from 40 feet away.

There's always an overriding sense of form and rhythm,

that kind of formal play, the syncopation of all those parts together.

All these different levels of pictorial organization work.

They work in a big way, they work in a medium way,

and they work in a teeny, teeny way.

And like all of the really great works of art,

you will never get tired of looking at them.

LETSCHER: I started to think about creativity

several years after I got out of graduate school.

I started thinking about my dream life,

which is so rich and so populated with people I don't know,

landscapes that I've never seen before,

detailed to an infinite degree

in a way that I couldn't consciously conceive of when I was awake.

I started to develop strategies to trick myself

into having access to those parts of my mind

that aren't normally available during waking hours.

I kind of stopped trying to preconceive pieces

and stopped trying to plan pieces.

Instead, I'd get a fragment of an idea from a piece

and that will become the next piece.

And when I'm in a groove like that,

I think about it all the time and I dream about it at night.

My favorite kind of dream is I'll have a piece of paper like this,

and I'll be going like this, and that's the whole dream.

It's just like, see the pattern, see the color, you know,

and this feeling comes over you, like, "Oh! Oh, that feels so good."

You know, I'm just looking at color.

(LAUGHING)

One time I had a dream that there was a secret piece of fabric

on the back of our armoire in our bedroom,

and you couldn't see it and nobody knew it was there,

but in the dream I knew it was there

and it was a striped piece of fabric.

I did 20 pieces based on that dream.

JESSUP: He depends upon that chaos of stuff, of things laying around,

which is almost a physical manifestation

of the untamed mind, the untamed unconscious,

that as you survey it, as you scan it,

as you live through it, things come up.

Things present themselves.

In fact, things can only present themselves

if they exist within that kind of chaotic, uh, noise, as it were.

You know in that process of selecting, selecting,

trying this, trying that, trying this,

one thing leads to another, one thing leads to another, things are open,

you make discoveries, you find things.

Like, when do you decide to commit to the cutting out of this thing?

LETSCHER: There's like a pattern of the same color

and it moves throughout the piece.

This kind of yellowish orange,

like those two colors put together make this color.

And...

So, if you think of that as one level

um, and there is another level with...

Or another kind of interlocking matrix of this blue...

This blue-gray.

I knew that I wanted more blue-gray,

but then I... I saw this piece.

Like this.

It made sense to put another tree in,

but also, you can see through it,

so I don't lose a lot of detail.

There's a certain wow factor to the cutting

and the light transition.

I was hoping for the color and I got those other things as a benefit.

I don't understand, really, the symbolic significance of putting this tree in,

but it gives it a more kind, gentle, loving feel.

You know, it's not as harsh. Like, before I put the tree in,

he looks crazier, they look crazier.

The tree kind of stabilized it a little bit.

It's a mysterious process. It's a complex and mysterious process.

And I don't fully understand it,

but I'm aware of it and I can coax it along

or I can get out of the way and let it happen.

I think this piece is kind of about an oblivious denial, you know?

It's like they're all about dysfunctionality and mental illness.

You know, the cat's got this devious and excited look

that it's actually probably going to eat these mice.

The rabbit is painting this picture of this horse,

but he's looking at a fire,

so that's a weird symbolic thing that I don't understand.

So, it's kind of an expressionistic quality to me,

like, you know, manic,

and just kind of spin out.

I don't know.

It's what the work is doing right now

and I don't feel that way, I don't feel manic,

and I don't think in terms of cartoons

and weird Freudian symbology,

but it comes out in the work.

I heard a quote one time, this guy said, about music,

"Music is not written, it's given."

You know, so, it's almost like...

I think that your subconscious may be a conduit

for something that's beyond your capacity,

and it's beyond your experience, and it's beyond...

You know, it's something that you can't easily access,

but when you do access it, it's much more powerful than your conscious mind,

so, you know, it can give you something.

(BARKING)

Pearl, come here.

Yeah, he's a little... He's special needs. He's a little slow.

Hey, hey.

(BARKING)

All right, come on.

That's going to look great and really be eye-catching

and mind-boggling to look at, I think.

LETSCHER: Yeah, I'm working on it more now.

I had a lot of time to think about it.

Thinking through the steps takes away anxiety and stress.

I think I'm gonna use some kind of really heavy-bodied Liquid Nails-type adhesive

to glue them onto disks, wooden disks.

I want to make this hanging as quick and easy and fool-proof as possible.

I want the weight of it to be hanging from that parapet with no screws.

Basically, I want to make some brackets to go over-top...

-Yeah. -...and then just hang it on there.

We could have those things that go over the parapet

fasten on the back of two-by-fours,

and you could just put your boards up on the two-by-fours and...

-Screw them in. Yeah. -Yeah.

It doesn't have to be too elaborate or too...

It doesn't even need to be too strong.

I like the idea of moving it up over the top of the roof a little bit,

just to get it high enough to where people won't be touching it.

We don't want anybody to get cut because it is going to be an attractive...

What the lawyers call an attractive nuisance, if it's within reach.

(BOTH LAUGHING)

That's an actual term.

They use that to prosecute people that have swimming pools that aren't fenced

that a kid could drown in or something.

LETSCHER: Wow, attractive nuisance.

-Yeah. -Yeah.

I know people like that.

(BOTH LAUGHING)

Yeah, right.

Oh, wow. God, these are great!

HOWELL: Oh, good.

-Really fantastic color. -Oh, good.

LETSCHER: Isn't that gorgeous?

HOWELL: Yeah. Okay, good.

LETSCHER: Yeah, even if I just get, like,

one or two, you know, of those wedge-shaped

-pieces out of that. -Oh, okay.

This is amazing.

HOWELL: That's on both sides. LETSCHER: That's fantastic.

-HOWELL: Yeah. -Yeah, okay.

HOWELL: That is paper, and I didn't know if you could use that or not.

LETSCHER: Oh, yeah, these are great.

A painter takes a kind of formless thing

and gives it a form and makes a language with it.

A collage artist takes things that already exist in the world

that already have stories, context, et cetera,

and they use it in an associative way to create a new reality.

LETSCHER: So, this three or four-month period,

I think I've made probably between 40 and 50 pieces.

I've been thinking about doing pieces that have to do with sound.

All these kind of jokey things about noise-making devices,

but also the sound of just all the stuff kind of cascading down

and maybe over the hull of the submarine.

(IMMITATES CASCADE)

Really, where it came from is a friend of mine showed me this video

of this sound that has supposedly been recorded all over the world.

Um, it was on YouTube and it was just a shot of the sky

with kind of a cropped building on one side and maybe a power-line,

and then you hear this tone that's like... (IMITATING TONE)

It's like the horn at the end of the world.

(LOW-PITCH DRONING)

It's about the rapture.

Most of the boats and the planes, they're all without people.

FRASHER: He watched me go through a difficult divorce and was a good friend.

He was the kindest, most gentle man I'd ever met,

and I thought, "My God, I can't not love this man."

LETSCHER: I think we're real similar.

It's just that she's more actualized than I am.

She's more realized as a person.

She kind of made certain decisions at crucial junctures in her life

that have benefited her.

Like, be happy instead of being miserable,

and be kind, you know, instead of...

Instead of miserable.

(LAUGHS)

(CLEARS THROAT)

FRASHER: When we came together as a family,

I think Gabe was 6 and Jonathan was 12.

I'll never forget it. Lance said,

"Mary, if we buy this house, I promise you,

"if you'll let me, I will transform this place."

I said, "Okay, if you think so, go for it.

"I think it's what we can afford and we'll do it."

And so we bought it, lived in his rent house,

and every day after work we'd come over here taking things apart.

Basically, right when we moved in,

my dad just started tearing through it, like, ripping down walls.

We mixed a lot of concrete, like, for the foundation.

This house doesn't at all mirror what we bought.

He wasn't exaggerating.

But for him, it's doing it by hand himself.

GABE VON LETSCHER: When I was growing up, I didn't have a room,

so he built this chicken coop type thing that I had.

It was like a little fort with windows

and it had a screen door with a little spring on it.

And then Mary helped make it look cool.

And on top of it, there was a mattress.

So, I basically had no privacy for, like, the first fourteen years of my life.

LETSCHER: I was real invested in my kids and spent a lot of time with them.

You know, I just had an insight based on my own kind of dysfunctionality

of what it takes to be a functional human being

and somebody that's strong and grounded.

At one point, he looked at me and he said,

"Mary, do you think I should go to medical school?"

And I said, "Why would you do that?"

And he said, "Because I'm not making it financially,"

and I just said, "No, no. Don't give up.

"You... You're doing somebody else's art all day

"and you're not doing your own.

"You don't have time for your own.

"Keep at it."

And then it was just kind of like almost a miracle that happened.

He got a call from a gallery in New York,

Howard Scott, and he said, "Lance, I'd like you to send me some of your artwork.

"I heard about you through a collector."

LETSCHER: The work was based on design and craft

and, specifically, quilt patterns.

He probably sold 90% of the work before the opening.

We walked into the show and it was, like, almost all red dots.

It was totally, uh...

I just couldn't believe it myself.

JESSUP: They're not pure, they're not clean, because they're collage.

That's one of the things that made them so painterly.

They had natural abrasions

that would come from the history of,

you know, the paper, wherever they came from.

LETSCHER: I was just thinking about color wheels,

the gradation of color from yellow to orange to red to purple to blue.

All the primary colors joined together with all the tertiary colors

that involve the blending of the primary colors.

I was doing pieces like that, but I was doing them with the idea

that they were done by a chaotic thinker.

FRASHER: A year after he had his first show there,

everybody wanted Lance Letscher.

And he no longer had to work for anyone else again.

LETSCHER: I mean, in the scheme of things in the world,

it's not that big a deal,

but to get picked up by a gallery in New York, that's a big step up,

and he changed my pricing structure.

Instead of making $1,000 or $1,200 a year,

I was making $6,000 or $9,000 a year.

And then, pretty quickly after that, he was selling a lot of work,

and so I was making a decent living for the first time.

The other thing that Howard did was he had connections overseas,

and so he arranged a show in Munich and a show in Barcelona,

so I started to be visible in Europe.

Consequently, a gallery in Paris started showing my work.

I'm like, "Lance, do you realize, of all the artists you went to art school with,

"or more importantly, all the artists you know,

"how many of them show all over the world?

"How many of them have been seen, you know,

"and are still actually doing their art?

"It's tough."

He's just... He stuck with it.

He has stuck with it.

And at all costs.

WHITENACK: You can stand back from a piece

and enjoy a certain aspect of it,

but then you get up on the piece

and there's an infinite field of things to see.

You never come to the end of his work.

That's one of the things I love about what he does.

ZOUBOK: It immediately demands a kind of closer look.

It demands a deeper engagement,

because you really have to look at this stuff.

It's not sort of art-as-entertainment or art-as-spectacle,

it's really art as an object of contemplation, as a physical space,

as a metaphorical garden of ideas and experiences.

An artist like Lance helps to reconnect us

to our kind of physical sense of ourselves

in relation to the things around us.

Oh, hello, how are you?

This is Lance, who I've been buying for for all these years.

Hi, Lance, how wonderful.

I knew you were selling to somebody that needed all this good stuff...

-Yeah. -...that I've... That I've loved, too.

-(LAUGHING) -Yeah!

LETSCHER: How did you get involved in buying paper like this?

LILLIE MAE WILLIAMS: Well, one reason, I've always loved paper stuff.

I grew up in the Depression,

and I'd keep every little piece of paper that we could get.

We didn't have any money.

I mean, we didn't have ten cents to go to the picture show.

We didn't throw anything away because we didn't get much,

and I still do to the day.

I mean, I need to throw stuff away.

I've got a houseful, a garage full.

LETSCHER: Yep. I'm the same way, I've got big piles.

-LETSCHER: I mean, it's a fire hazard. -(LAUGHS)

Well, I hope to make your pile a little bit bigger.

-(ALL LAUGHING) -TORNATORE: Well, let's see what you've got.

TORNATORE: I'm gonna let Lance do what I normally do.

And she'll tell you how much it is.

LETSCHER: Okay.

TORNATORE: Lance, you aren't gonna get this. I'm getting this.

LETSCHER: What is it?

TORNATORE: It's a complete guide to modern knitting and crocheting.

-That's gonna go like crazy in my store. -LETSCHER: Really?

-TORNATORE: You can't have it. -LETSCHER: Are you sure?

I think she got this stuff for me.

(LAUGHING)

That was the first thing I would have picked up,

and that's the first thing he put on.

LETSCHER: Yeah, this is a beautiful book.

That's a golden nugget for me. That is, like, really beautiful.

WILLIAMS: That's wonderful. Somebody's trying to sell it for $6,

but it sure ain't me, honey, about a dollar.

Sheri pays me better sometimes, but I'm glad to meet you, so we will...

LETSCHER: Yeah, we'll cut out the middleman.

Well, no, I can't do without her. She's my goody.

See that? This is good.

This is good. This is gold.

WILLIAMS: There's gonna be a lot of that stuff in all those old things, yeah.

-Yeah. -That's awesome.

LETSCHER: Yeah, these are really beautiful.

Like, that word, "Pop."

TORNATORE: As you're speaking, I'm seeing some of your collages in my head.

LETSCHER: That I'm going to cut out when I get home.

I know what I can use that for.

I use pictures like this a lot.

WILLIAMS: Well, that's good.

LETSCHER: I'm gonna buy all of this.

I think you could use all of this, probably.

-It's just gonna be $5 for the whole box over there. -LETSCHER: Okay.

-Is that cheap enough? -LETSCHER: Oh, my gosh, thanks.

I would have probably charged her $10, but I'll charge you $5.

(LAUGHING)

LETSCHER: I'm learning a lot today.

WILLIAMS: It's been wonderful, I appreciate it so much.

-LETSCHER: Thank you. -You better believe it.

-MAN: All done? -TORNATORE: Yeah, we're done.

We'll see you next time.

LETSCHER: One of the professors that I had when I was in art school

did me a really big favor in that he complimented me on my work ethic.

He said that I didn't mind a little hard work.

At that time, I did mind hard work,

but I realized when he said that,

there was like this gleam of virtue in what he said

that made me want to acquire that skill or that discipline.

So, yeah, I have a work ethic.

I just happen to worry about failure a lot

and negative outcomes to possible or imaginary scenarios.

I'm worried about not doing enough

or I'm worried about the state of something that's in flux

that I need to have some kind of resolution,

and a lot of times, when it's not resolved,

it almost manifests itself as a form of anger.

When it does kind of come together,

if it comes together in a way that I don't really anticipate

or better than I expect, then I feel relief.

You gotta lay it down somehow

and then I can shift stuff around.

So that's that.

I've done a lot of these pieces,

and also I've been working on this piece so long

that I've been kind of, like, thinking and thinking and thinking,

and kind of gradually, things come into focus or go out of focus,

and, you know, then I get kind of basic guidelines in my head about how to do it.

If I lay it out again, then maybe it'll be better, it'll probably be better.

If I make a mistake and it gets better, then that's better.

I've got about a 30- or 45-minute open time, like it starts to dry up.

So I've got to kind of do this fast.

(GROANS SOFTLY)

(SIGHS)

I had a friend in graduate school that,

I went over to his house one time at like, 9:00 in the morning

and I knocked on the door and he didn't answer,

so I open the door and he was laying on the floor.

He was holding a tube of paint and a brush.

I kid you not. And he was asleep.

I woke him up and he was like,

"Oh," and he went over to his painting and started painting again.

That was so inspirational for me.

Okay. (SIGHS)

LETSCHER: Lately, I've been talking to people about adhesives.

I've been using the same adhesive for paper for a long time.

Seven or eight years or something

and so I haven't really had to do any kind of research or experimentation,

but with the metal, I need to find some kind of adhesive

that's not gonna come unglued when the metal gets hot,

that's the problem.

I've been procrastinating because it's unfamiliar and it's more difficult.

I was talking to my son about it

and he said, "Lots of people are gonna see that,

"you're gonna have to really knock it out of the park with this."

And that was like the first time that I thought,

"Wow, I have to make this as good as I can make it,

"I have to make this really good."

I realized that I was procrastinating because I didn't have that insight,

you know, I didn't have that motivation or inspiration

to make it as strong as I can make it.

FRASHER: He was kind of fighting with himself about,

"What am I gonna do? How am I gonna do this?"

He wouldn't talk about it, and it froze him for a while.

He was doing a lot of art upstairs

and I thought, "What are you doing,

"when are you gonna get to the metal?" (LAUGHING)

(METAL SLICING)

LETSCHER: Last weekend, I started having really bad anxiety attacks,

I needed to be working on this piece no matter what,

and so this week I've put in a lot of hours.

With the paper, you put it in a press

and so it pushes the paper so hard that,

if there's a circle underneath that's covered by another circle on top,

you can clearly see the definition of the circle below.

I want that quality to be in this metal if possible.

As I've worked on it, I've solved certain technical problems

and I've realized certain things that'll work,

and I've seen what the color looks like, and the colors kind of...

The color's gonna be strong.

And I got more excited about it and I realized

I can do certain things to invest more quality

into the piece because I have the energy to do it, I know how to do it now.

So it's... I turned a corner on it, definitely.

It used to be that I would think about a certain person

and I would imagine their personality traits

and their thinking characteristics,

and then I would make a piece based on that dynamic

or that paradigm or that kind of structure.

I would think about somebody who was highly dysfunctional

and would make these pieces to communicate

because they were such a poor communicator,

and then when the work started becoming autobiographical,

I realized that, you know, basically, I'm that person.

You know, so I just made pieces the way I wanted to make pieces.

JONATHAN: I think It's impossible to do what you want to do

without that fire and drive.

I've done, like, push-yourself-to-the-limit kind of sports

and I think I was attracted to those because of my upbringing.

His father, Larry, he started kind of coming

to my competitions when I was running track at UT.

He was really into it, so he started coming around

and coming to dinner and stuff.

LETSCHER: Gabe started wrestling in high school and he was really gifted.

He was state champion in Greco his second or third year.

He went to Nationals twice.

For somebody to come out of Texas

and wrestle that well, it's highly unusual, it's very, very unusual.

So my dad got really interested in that because he was so good.

He started going to wrestling matches.

So we'd sit there all day Saturday and all day Sunday together and talk.

He wanted to be around his father, um...

So...

I think he probably just kind of suppressed a lot.

MITCHELL: All of a sudden there were pictures there.

There were landscape-type settings,

there were some things that seem to be based on children's stories,

there were factories, and I was supposed to write about this,

and I really didn't know what to say. (LAUGHS)

And I did just end up saying, like,

"Well, you never know what's going to come next."

FRASHER: They've got train tracks going into these buildings

and no one knows what that's about

and I do know what that's about.

That's about the concentration camps.

TORNATORE: We're all fascinated by fairy tales like Grimm's,

and things like that, these dark fairy tales.

This was like, this true fairy tale

that was the darkest of all.

LETSCHER: I was seeped in that stuff when I was growing up.

I read books, I read air combat magazines,

and they were always about World War II airplanes.

(STAMMERING) I didn't really understand the horror of it and the tragedy.

TORNATORE: He's really fascinated by people

and what moves them and how things can happen

and what in the world would go on in the mind of children of this time

and I think he's a deeply caring and deeply, um, thoughtful person.

LETSCHER: I love beautiful design and I love mechanical and industrial design.

I love things that are utilitarian primarily

because the decision-making process that goes into them

is to support their ability to function.

FRASHER: When he took up motorcycles again,

I was so absolutely livid with him,

I could have wrung his neck.

Well, I'll never forget, I came home from work and he said,

"I have to tell you something," and I thought, "Oh God, what?"

(LAUGHING)

He said, "I bought a motorcycle," and I was...

I dropped the F-bomb. I was like, "What are you doing?"

I thought, "Are you trying to kill yourself?"

(OBJECTS CLATTERING)

LETSCHER: I really wanted to buy a motorcycle,

I just wanted to buy a motorcycle so bad.

I couldn't justify it with my wife

and I expected to be a serious point of contention.

I decided one way to get a motorcycle would be

to do a motorcycle as a sculptural project.

My whole life he's been like,

saying that I shouldn't ride motorcycles

and I never have because of that.

Then all of a sudden, he gets a motorcycle

and I'm like, "What are you doing?"

He's like, "Oh, I'm not gonna ride it,

"You know, it's, uh, it's just for art."

LETSCHER: I wanted to highlight the design,

not necessarily the engineering

but rather the design of the bikes, and how minimalist

and beautifully mechanical and elegantly engineered they were,

so that those aspects of the bikes supported the art.

It's real small and it's very light,

it's a Yamaha 125 from 1972

and it was a Grand Prix motorcycle, so it was raced at the very highest level.

They go 150 miles an hour.

RICK ROME: It's not just a surface beauty thing for him,

it's about doing everything right

and making everything perfect,

and so, you know, we had the perfect machine

and our motorcycle in the other room,

and I just think Lance, everything Lance does, it's done with a purpose.

NANCY ROME: After you kind of get past that it's a motorcycle

that's been collaged, you start seeing it as an entire story.

That's the mystery and the miracle

of the Lance Letscher work.

You're immediately engaged by his technique.

References to childhood, to adulthood, to family history,

to, you know, the Industrial Revolution.

It's that same deep appreciation of structure.

The machines are, um, perfect.

LETSCHER: It's a Cagiva Alazzurra.

Ducati went bankrupt in 1982 or 1983

and they were bought out by these three brothers,

and they used the first two initials of each of their names to spell Cagiva.

I stripped it completely, took the engine apart,

rebuilt everything and then collaged discreetly.

It's an incredibly interesting two-faceted mind to me.

The engineering ability and the creative artistic ability.

It doesn't happen very often and I think it's...

I think that's what makes him amazing.

LETSCHER: At that time, I was really interested in

the juxtaposition of childhood

and the presenting of certain ideas to children as entertaining somehow.

And how people make things attractive to children

that shouldn't be attractive to children, like guns shouldn't be toys, you know?

And motorcycles shouldn't be toys.

That was kind of the... The genesis for the idea

for the perfect machine, was having these pieces around

and, like, starting to think about the fact that I was doing

things that had to do with my childhood.

FRASHER: He tells difficult stories in a way that you don't understand it,

but he's always telling a story.

That's the very, uh, essence of Lance.

At first I was going to make an exhibition catalog.

I had a show in March of 2010 that I was preparing for

and this was going to be in the show.

This is an actual gun. It's a Condor Legion Astro, and the Condor Legion...

Uh, these German airman were the ones that bombed Guernica

and that's what Pablo Picasso's painting,

Guernica, is about, was the bombing of Guernica.

My uncle had a Condor Legion Astro

when I was growing up, and he let me shoot his guns.

He would take me out in the country

and me and my cousins would shoot his guns

and I shot the Condor Legion Astro

when I was about 10 or 11 years old

and it was like, "boom," you know?

I mean, it was this powerful gun and powerful experience for a little kid.

When I started to think about the gun in particular,

I realized that I could make a story.

That was it, The Perfect Machine.

LETSCHER: Up to that point, I'd always been

pretty strict about making the work non-autobiographical,

but at that time it was like,

penetratingly autobiographical,

it was terrifyingly autobiographical.

Baby, Baby, Baby. Quit!

That's Baby.

Ready?

The real first page of the text,

there's a fan-shaped structure of electrical devices

and letters and different textures,

and they're all kind of projected out of a pair of legs that are running.

It's like the thoughts of this really excited kid.

The next one is the same idea of thoughts

projecting and expanding out and becoming more full.

There's a hut and it's in the background,

just a little cube that's got a little fenced area,

and in the back there's kind of these circles joined together with lines

that imply a scientific background,

like a chemical structure somehow.

There's railroad tracks in front of it

and a glass of chocolate milk.

FRASHER: He made a little walking machine one time.

When it was done, he thought, "It needs a pair of shoes to make it perfect."

So he made some shoes which ended up looking kind of ridiculous. (CHUCKLES)

(FRASHER READING)

LETSCHER: I kind of think of these as diagrams of thought,

and these pieces are kind of split, right brain, left brain,

one side is kind of imagistic and that's the right brain,

and the left brain is like, chaotic

and filled with letters and lines connecting different letters,

you know, trying to get connections and associations.

(FRASHER READING)

(LETSCHER READING)

I'd never really done any guns before,

I did all the guns at the same time.

And I did this gun, it's a Colt 45.

It's a specific gun.

And, um...

That's the gun, um, that my father used to kill himself.

He saw... He saw the gun, I don't think it influenced him,

but, um, very ironic.

FRASHER: He started thinking harder.

He thought of every kind of airplane.

LETSCHER: One of the things I'm interested in

is the German development of rocket flight.

And this particular rocket's a V2,

it's the rocket that Wernher von Braun developed

at the end of the War to bomb England,

but after the war, he kind of had a moment

when he could go with Russia or with the United States,

and he went with the United States,

and he founded the space program NASA, he worked for NASA.

TORNATORE: What he thinks a lot about is

how good and evil exist in the same person,

and when does that evil get control of you

and when does the good come out?

LETSCHER: He thought of a city on wheels.

It doesn't exactly illustrate it

but it's with very thin, short, segmented strips

that are laid out in kind of a chaotic pattern

and supported by very tenuous, unsteady legs.

(FRASHER READING)

He had so many ideas that he had to arrange them into categories to avoid confusion.

LETSCHER: This one's buildings and train tracks

and, you know, maybe it's like the very edge of consciousness

when you start to dream, you start to see images

of what are going to coalesce into a dream.

The separation of reality and dream life.

FRASHER: Then he had a dream about a little building

that good ideas flowed out of.

Next, he dreamed about a machine that made beautiful works of art.

Finally, he dreamed of a device

that could write all kinds of books.

(LETSCHER READING)

Then he knew the answer.

Can you think of what it might be?

Can you think of what it might be?

Just a second.

(DOG BARKS)

(DOOR OPENS)

(DOG BARKING)

He never saw the book.

He saw the galleys for it

and then, you know, when it was published he was no longer with us.

Everybody in the family is absolutely devastated.

Lance is the one that stands up and is like,

"No, we're gonna handle this, it's gonna be okay."

He still did the show,

focused, did the opening for them and kept it all at bay.

LETSCHER: He had these kind of rages, and the thing that he ranted

about a lot was the people that lived above him.

They had a little kid and he said it was like living under a bowling alley

because the little kid would run back and forth.

So, what he did was...

He had inherited a gun from my aunt,

and he took the gun and he went upstairs

and he sat outside of the apartment

of his neighbors upstairs,

and that's where he shot himself.

And, so the young man came home with his child and found my dad.

I mean, it's terrible. It's terrible.

But I went and talked to the guy

and he was 27 years old and he had a four-year-old boy,

you know, and he didn't want to even open the door,

he thought I was gonna do something to him or something.

It's angry, hateful, vindictive.

There was a lot of really negative connotations to what he did.

He had letters that he had written out,

like a letter to the police, a list of things that needed to be done,

where all of his accounts were, his passwords,

all this paperwork, and he had crossed out dates

and put new dates, like, sometimes two or three times on it,

so he had been planning it for a really long time.

At first I was very task-oriented,

care-taking, explaining, rationalizing,

and then it kind of tapered down

and then I started working in the studio

and then I kind of went back into my normal habits and isolation,

and that's when I started to kind of really think, I guess.

It really spun out pretty quick after that.

JONATHAN: I've never seen him like that.

He really went down for a long time.

LETSCHER: About three or four months into the experience,

I started getting hit with profound emotional shock waves.

Terrible insomnia was kind of the first thing.

I started having problems with panic.

Painful, wracking physical symptoms,

and it just kind of snowballed like that.

Really radically dysfunctional.

Near psychotic, probably, for maybe six months or eight months or a year.

He was so down that it kind of...

He put a wall around himself and it was kind of hard

to, like, be in his life for a few years,

I think for all of us in a way.

(DOG BARKING)

LETSCHER: After my dad's death, I felt like,

you know, probably in the back of my mind

I thought it's therapeutic to work through it with my work.

I mean, there's only really one path

and the work's gonna change, and it's gonna change again.

I want it to be out of control,

I want it to be beyond my control,

but to function out of your control

or beyond your control, or beyond your understanding

is an uncomfortable position to be in.

He started staying home a lot,

um, and the boys were gone.

Yeah. They grew up and left.

And so he, um, had to be careful.

Yeah, and stay on top of himself

and not completely pull back from society.

And then an odd thing happened.

My stepmother died unexpectedly of breast cancer and we had to move my dad in.

So he was no longer alone, and that was huge.

Lance didn't bat an eye. He was getting ready for a show,

and he stopped everything and built,

added a room onto our house for my father,

and we had him moved in with us in about three months' time.

My dad was a pilot in World War II.

He flew corsairs, he was in the Marines.

So, one night we're sitting in this TV room

and Lance is going through the Internet looking at things,

which he does every night on eBay,

he's curious about what people are selling, and he sees this glider.

He's fearless in what he's willing to do.

If he decides to do a project, he just simply goes for it.

I mean, the plane, I don't know

how many thousand dollars the plane cost to buy off the Internet,

but he made a decision to do it, and it was gonna happen.

It was delivered to the studio.

It was longer than the studio, really, there wasn't room for it.

And the wings weren't on it.

But we went back there and Dad knew exactly what it was,

and him and Lance just talked nonstop about it.

LETSCHER: It was a Laister Kaufman,

and the one that I bought was built in 1941

and all wood construction covered with fabric,

but it also had a steel sub frame.

The wingspan of the glider was 50 feet

and the plane that I ended up building,

the wingspan is 25 feet.

What the plane eventually became is based on

this airplane that was in World War II.

The Me163 was a rocket-powered plane,

very short, single-seater,

and these two highly volatile chemicals were mixed

at the plane at the point of take-off.

And most of the people that got killed

in relation to this plane weren't pilots that got shot down,

they were actually people that were pouring the two chemicals together

because they were so highly volatile that they would explode.

It had 60 seconds of thrust.

Four seconds of thrust to take off,

and then 56 seconds of thrust to go straight up

and fly into a... A squadron of B-17s

that were going to Berlin, and then the plane with level off

and shoot its missiles out of the back of the plane

into the flight of the B-17s,

and then it would run out of gas and it would coast back down.

Very radical, life-or-death, kind of Kamikaze airplane.

FRASHER: He changed the shape of everything, every aspect of it.

Cut the wings down to a manageable size.

LETSCHER: Also, the wings are swept so they're angled back

for higher speed stability,

so I had to change the root of the wing

so that that angle would be achieved.

Then I cut out a section of the tail in back of the cockpit

and moved the tail forward.

I ended up kind of cutting this part down

as well and reshaping the nose,

reshaping the lower section,

and then built a wooden lattice over it

to create the structure of the outside of the airplane,

and covered that with eighth-inch birch plywood.

People would say, "Why are you doing that?"

and I went, "'Cause he can and he wants to."

ZOUBOK: I was very keen to have him really do

whatever was going to make this first show back in New York

as auspicious a beginning to our working relationship as possible.

So when he came to me and asked

how I felt about showing the glider which is, you know,

it's a whole airplane, a small airplane, but it's an airplane.

We had to crane the piece, in sections of course,

through the gallery window. And we're on the second floor.

GABE: That was an amazing show.

He filled the whole gallery space.

It was like 40 or 50 pieces and a sculpture.

ZOUBOK: People were kind of delighted by it.

It's a beautiful object first and foremost,

but it's also almost as if this kind of magical

collaged bird had landed in the gallery.

LETSCHER: I think a lot of humor is about insanity

and a lot of art is about insanity

and a lot of your life is about insanity

in trying to stay balanced and to not be hurtful

and to be lucid and cognizant and present.

You know, it's like you're fighting all the chaos inside of you

in order to present yourself as a sane person all the time.

And in art you don't really have to do that.

Doing a collage, you can be as crazy as you want to be.

This one really does have a strong narrative to me,

it's autobiographical, it's about somebody I know.

And this person was a very exaggerating person.

He made up stories, he made up lies.

Now, are you making this all up?

-No, this is true. -This is true?

This is somebody you know?

Yeah. Yeah, my dad, actually. It's about my dad.

Um and there's two main stories going on about this boat.

Maybe he was shipwrecked.

Um, and one story is a very romantic story

about this beautiful three-masted schooner

and there's all these ladies' hands kind of framing that aspect.

So it's very romantic, it's very beautiful.

And maybe the true story, or the truer story, is based on this boat.

It's kind of a rundown tramp steamer

and the only hand is floating in the water.

-WHITENACK: A sinking ship. -Yeah.

And the truth of the matter is that he probably wasn't ever shipwrecked,

he probably wasn't even ever on a ship,

um, but that's the story.

And the movement of the shoes is...

I was thinking of dancing around,

you know, dancing manically to get somebody's attention

and to keep somebody's attention.

And the title of this piece is The Greatest Dancer in the World.

Yeah, The Greatest Dancer in the World.

I thought about naming it Mr. BB.

But, um, yeah, The Greatest Dancer is pretty good.

-Yeah. -Wow.

LETSCHER: We're mutually supportive.

You know, her job is really hard,

her job is a lot harder than my job.

She deals with kids with cancer and I deal with myself.

FRASHER: I believe in love at first sight because of Lance.

It just happened.

To this day, we'll look at each other and go,

"Do you know how many miracles it took for us to get together

"and to stay where we are?"

LETSCHER: It's been five years, coming up on the sixth year

since he committed suicide.

And I'm in a different space mentally about it,

I mean, I can talk about it,

I couldn't even have talked about it two years ago or three years ago.

But I think that it's... It's important to talk about

because of the relevance to the work

and the relevance to just about every aspect of my life.

It's one of those things that comes along and changes everything.

LETSCHER: Sorry, I didn't have my phone. I'm in the back. Is everything okay?

Yeah, I'm cool.

Doing good.

All right, love you. Bye.

FRASHER: His background has really enabled him to do the art that he does.

He makes it very, very difficult,

but that's what makes his collages interesting.

Sheri came over and was asking about how are you gonna do it?

They're close enough where he's like, "I'm having a hard time with it."

And she said, "Remember those pieces you did

"where you stapled them together?

"You know, the paper. Those are really, really thick."

And I just saw that light bulb go off above his head.

Finally he said, I know what I'm doing.

Everything was laid out on the floor,

and Mary said, "Why don't you staple it or something?"

And I was like, "Oh!" It would be less work

to individually staple every single piece one-by-one

than have all that glue and the potential for it to change when it gets hot.

He had spent months collecting metals

and colors and cutting out shapes.

They were laid out on a pallet in that wood shop.

From then on he was a madman.

(SHUSHING)

Go sit down.

FRASHER: It really started changing and getting much more complicated.

I'd call every day. "How's it going?" "I'm done."

Well, that went on for about a week and a half before he finally was done.

LETSCHER: Mary leaves at 9:00,

I come out here, turn on the compressor, find my sheers,

look at it for a second,

and then I cut one piece and then staple.

And the next thing I know, it's like 3:00 in the afternoon.

It's that kind of work.

FRASHER: Then he calls me at work one day and says,

"Okay, you've got some tins in the kitchen that I really want."

And I said, "They're yours, you can do it.

"I love them but it's for your art. Yeah. Go for it."

LETSCHER: She's completely supportive.

I've never had anybody in my life,

anybody in my life that's done that before.

She wants me to succeed, to thrive and excel.

FRASHER: He'd get up at night, walk out and look at it

and come back in and say, "Okay, I know what I'm gonna do tomorrow."

(CHUCKLES)

LETSCHER: It's really so pleasurable to look at it and tack something up.

You're moving it in tiny little increments every time.

And if it's worse, then you get the pliers and you...

(MIMICKING USING PLIERS) You know, pull the staple out.

So this is a box of staples,

and what does it say? "Quantity 10,000 Staples."

This is the fourth box of staples I've gone through.

Feel how heavy that is.

It drew in his interest and curiosity

and satisfied a lot of anxiety, you know,

about doing something he'd never done before, to the point of,

"When am I gonna let myself stop?"

LETSCHER: I had a dream that I was painting this huge painting of the ocean.

You know, kind of, like, loading the brush up

and making these big marks and stepping back and looking at it

and studying it, and it was huge. It was big.

And I woke up and I was like, "Man, I would love to do a big painting like that."

In a way this is the fulfillment of that because it feels like that.

It's starting to get a texture like a painting would get texture,

you build it up real slow.

You know, what Mary told me was,

you know when you really feel affection for somebody

and you're talking to them, your pupil dilates really big.

I don't know, it's about love.

When you love somebody, you feel the love,

and when you're talking to them your pupil gets really big.

I got there at 6:45 and he was already there

pacing around and we both had the same idea, that we wanted

to put the first panel up before anybody got there

because we weren't sure that it was gonna work.

Yeah, it doesn't look too good down there.

Uh, but I think we'll be able to fix it.

BRENT HOWELL: My original idea was that Lance and I sneak down there

early in the morning and put it up like guerrilla art, like graffiti.

If anything goes wrong it can't go too wrong.

This is about 500 pounds,

the wall's not gonna fall over, hopefully.

When you make stuff at home

expecting it to work somewhere else

that's not exactly plumb and level,

it doesn't really work most of the time.

This is one of those instances.

Now they won't fall off on us when we're messing around down there.

(DRILLING)

Yeah.

Now we're talking.

-Success! -You got it.

(GROANS)

All right. Let's bring the top out and the bottom in.

Let's bring the top out.

(GRUNTING)

(DRILLING)

-(LAUGHS) Whoo, it worked! -It worked!

-Your design worked. -(LAUGHS)

Do you want to do it in stages, lift it up,

-set it on the ladder... -Right.

...and then go the rest of the way?

LETSCHER: Right.

Up.

BRENT: We knocked the ladder over.

(LETSCHER GROANS)

-It's still not easy, is it? How's your back? -It's okay.

Let's try to get it up here in one swell foop.

There we go.

-LETSCHER: Right. -I'm going to get another grip.

All right, I'm on.

LETSCHER: Fuck.

We're going to try a different way.

-That was better. -It was better.

BRENT: All right, top out, bottom in. Are you okay?

LETSCHER: Yeah.

All right. To me about an inch.

That's perfect.

BRENT: Let's flip it over kind of this way.

FRASHER: I knew when I got there, I saw the stress on his face.

Oh, my God. I was just like, "Don't get hurt and don't drop it!" (CHUCKLES)

LETSCHER: Okay, that was the best one yet.

Oh, wait, look. Look how off we are.

How about there?

You're a little bit out but it's not that much, that's good.

What do you think, Lance?

LETSCHER: I think it, uh, looks all right.

BRENT: (GRUNTS) I'll stick my corner.

-Oh, that's good. -Okay, good.

It's beautiful.

LETSCHER: It's amazing how much detail you can see from this far back.

FRASHER: I saw Lance do something I haven't seen him do in a lot of years,

is to do a different medium of work

and get completely, passionately in love with it.

That turned out to be a gift he didn't understand

when it first came to him, and it changed a lot of him.

LETSCHER: I think that that piece has a different trajectory

than anything that I've done before.

I didn't feel irritated or angry or insecure about it,

I got it to where it felt like everywhere was kind of working.

I think it's going to have an impact on people.

And I like that. I like the idea that people that are walking down the street

that I don't know and I'll probably never talk to,

are gonna have an experience with it somehow.

It's always been really, really important to me to be an artist.

Once I kind of realized that I could be an artist

then that was the main goal in my life.

I couldn't imagine anything better than that.