The interior of Brett Stager’s house is always under construction.
And you’ve never seen such an artistic construction site.
Stager, 48, a Pickerington resident, has been in the construction business for 30 years. He is the owner of Stager Roofing Co., which started out as a roofing company before evolving into a general construction company.
Over the course of his career in construction, Stager had innumerable opportunities to explore different metals and other construction materials, and he soon began experimenting with leftover materials that might otherwise be thrown away. An art lover to begin with – in particular, a fan of abstract sculptures and paintings and a big Picasso buff – Stager began making art out of metal, soon branching out to other materials such as wood, granite, glass, paint and acrylics.
“I don’t think that there’s one (material) I haven’t used,” he says.
When he gets an idea or sees materials at a job site that he thinks he can reuse, Stager, who has no formal training as an artist, lets the inspiration carry him and gets to work on a new piece as soon as he can.
“I have to do it, or else it drives me crazy,” he says.
His work is constantly evolving; after a piece has hung in the house for some time, Stager may be inspired to make alterations to it and move it elsewhere.
“He’ll hang a piece of art and then take it down and do more, and it’s completely different,” says Lisa Kessler, Stager’s girlfriend.
Stager’s other endeavors have contributed to his artwork as well. He doesn’t have any machines for bending pieces of metal, so he does the bending himself – an area where his background in powerlifting comes in handy.
“It is absolutely as old-style as you can get,” says Stager. “I just find ways to bend stuff.”
The scope of Stager’s artistic endeavors is obvious as soon as one sets foot in his house – pieces of multimedia art are visible in every direction, taking up prominent places on the walls without ever making them appear cluttered. And the pieces hanging on the walls aren’t the only fruits of Stager’s labor – he also designed some of the furniture, accessories and décor. He even installed a huge, glass-bottomed balcony that hangs over the living room.
“Anything you see in the house, I built,” he says.
Stager can point to any item in the house and explain what materials it contains and how he got it to look the way it does.
Pieces of red granite are arranged in triangles on metal poles protruding from a stone base. A plaster of Paris face was painted red and black, broken into pieces, and mounted on an aluminum rack. A huge slab of wood was burned with a torch, then scraped off to different extents in different places to create multiple colors without paint. A huge sheet of leather was painted with a picture of an otherworldly creature.
The basement is designed with an industrial look. For a piece with two concentric rings, Stager used poured concrete and fiberglass mesh to reinforce the rings so they can move around. One wall hosts a long piece of ground and painted aluminum; another has what looks from a distance to be an abstract painting, but on closer inspection is recycled aluminum and steel rebar in an aluminum frame from commercial building windows. The basement is also where Stager keeps his exercise equipment, and it’s rounded out by a slot machine, a pinball machine, a foosball table, an air hockey table and a 60-inch flat-screen TV.
Midway up the stairs to the second floor is a piece of concrete backer board that was colored with glass, solder, paint and even crayons. In a room at the top of the stairs, near the glass balcony, is a long, two-inch-thick slab of Styrofoam laced with stainless steel cable.
A walkway connects the second floor to the balcony, which is reinforced with beams. The surface of the balcony itself is ¾-inch polycarbonate, the kind of glass used in bulletproof windows, and three of its four corners host sculptures. On one of the walls around the balcony is a huge painting of a woman colored in blue, painted on wood from a coffee table that was going to be thrown out.
“I just turned it over and used it for something to paint on,” Stager says.
Though his artwork is only visible these days to people who visit his house or Facebook page, Stager is looking for more exposure – and, he hopes, opportunities to parlay his work into support for charities, particularly those related to multiple sclerosis.
It’s a cause close to Stager’s heart. After struggling with the disease for years, his mother, Susan Wolfe, lost her battle with MS earlier this year.
Kessler recalls a time when Wolfe was confined to a wheelchair but wanted to see her son’s artwork, so Stager physically lifted her wheelchair and carried it around the house, including up and down stairs, so she could get a look at everything.
Stager has also used his abilities to help the Pickerington Local School District. A piece he donated to Diley Middle School – the school’s principal, Heather Hedgepeth, is a neighbor of Stager’s – fetched $2,500 at an auction, with all the proceeds going to the schools.
Garth Bishop is editor of Pickerington Magazine. Feedback welcome at gbishop@cityscenemediagroup.com.
