Jim Gary - Early Career

Early Career

Reassured of the caliber of his work by the compliments he received in the encounter with Lipchitz (who made a professional suggestion for a better method of preparing a stand for the life-sized torso Gary had on display), he established his gallery, Iron Butterfly, in Colts Neck featuring the works of other artists he selected as well as his own work, later moving the gallery to Red Bank. The multitalented Gerald Lubeck was one such artist featured at Gary's fledgling gallery. Classes were offered at the gallery by Jim Gary and Virginia Laudano (who later, would manage the gallery when Gary was on tour and currently is an instructor at an art center in Florida).

Gary's fine art—such as the life-sized Universal Woman—wall units, bronze portraits and busts, and abstracts consistently won top prizes when submitted in the professional show circuits of New York and the surrounding states. He featured stained glass in many of his formal sculptures. It was often used for accent, but some life-sized figurative studies such as Stained Glass Woman with Tattoo were constructed entirely of multi-colored glass sections welded together. He was commissioned to create entire suites of rooms, integrating his sculpture into furniture he built. Commissions included ornate metal doors made to order. He sometimes used the products of clients to create fine art for their offices. Brewers especially liked to give huge seasonal wreaths he constructed from their original cans. One of his works had brass fish swimming through copper seagrass. Some of his sculptures were kinetic. Commissions from clients often asked merely for his interpretation of their favorite subject.

Examples of his many architectural sculptures include his baptismal font for Saint Benedict's Catholic Church in nearby Holmdel, a holocaust memorial commissioned in Springfield, his life-sized nudes in metal and stained glass for the Monmouth County Opera Society, and the September 11 memorial at the Municipal Building in Colts Neck.

As he gathered parts for the unique automobiles he constructed when he was young, Jim Gary said he realized that these parts resembled anatomical structures of insects, large birds, reptiles, and especially the bones of dinosaurs. Early in his career, he began to construct sculptures of those animals by assembling the automobile parts into almost life-sized models. He used as many as eight to ten vehicles to create his large dinosaur sculptures and the unaltered parts are identifiable. Common tools became pivotal structures in some of his sculptures. Volkswagens metamorphosed into turtles and prehistoric dinosaurs.

Gary had to invent equipment to build and move the huge sculptures, creating the scaffolding, hoists, and even special vehicles that featured cranes to haul the sculptures around at his rural workshop and to place them onto trucks for transportation. He also relied upon blacksmith skills to fashion unique hand tools when no standard ones were useful for his needs.