Even if you’ve just passed through Marfa briefly, you probably know about Cody Barber – you know his work, even if you don’t know his name. The neon red bread racks at the Get Go, the grass green chairs in the lobby of the Hotel Saint George, a horseshoe hanging above a door, a trash can here, a bicycle frame there – if there’s a striking flash of color in your peripheral vision, it’s likely due to Cody Barber.
All that punchy color, those smooth surfaces, are created by a process called powder coating, which Cody does in his Marfa studio. The studio space itself is a fitting reflection of the final products Cody creates – it is equal parts industrial and whimsical, austere in one way and psychedelic in another. The perimeter of the room is packed with horseshoes, cans, tools, bags and bags of colorful powder that look like secret Wonka formulas. There are also lots of non-powder coatable objects Cody loves – he collects vintage hair dryers and toy trucks, among other things.
One might assume, looking at these glossy surfaces, that powder coating is some kind of liquid paint, but the telltale veneer is actually applied in a completely dry form.
I asked Cody to walk me through how exactly this process works.
”Well, with powder coating, you are restricted to only painting metals,” Cody told me. “The surface you're painting has to be conductive to electricity, because the process itself is an electrostatic process.”
First, an object has to be suspended in mid-air in order to be properly coated on all sides. The object is then sprayed with powder (a mix of acrylic compounds, organic materials, and pigments) inside a booth outfitted with a huge vacuum at the back to safely contain the overspray. The fine powder adheres to the metal object purely by static electricity.
“Not only does the adhesion process rely on metal, but the finishing process relies on heat,” Cody explained. “So it has to be a material that can withstand up to 400 degrees in an oven.”
The oven looks like the kind of walk-in refrigerator you’d find in the back of a restaurant, with a big heavy door like a bank vault. Inside, that fuzzy, matte powder melts to become a new surface that encases the object.
“It’s kind of like a shrink wrap,” Cody says. The result is a completely uniform colored surface.
Paradoxically, a powder coated object, in having its surface completely covered, seems to reveal details of itself that you wouldn’t otherwise notice – the object snaps into focus. The fine points and odd angles that make up a crushed soda can, for example, or the litheness of a length of chain. The color itself is transformational too. The surface becomes so consistent that colors appear more themselves. Even neutral tones become more saturated, more thorough.
I asked Cody if he had a favorite color – it’s the one he calls ‘Marfa Red.’
“ When I first deemed it Marfa Red, [in 2013] I was very new to town. It was a marketing ploy, basically. And I feel like that's what so many people do. They say, ‘Oh, just put a Marfa on it.’ And so I did that, but then years later I realized I did that thing that everybody new to Marfa does. Put Marfa on your T-shirt or whatever. So I tried to rename the color.”
Cody laughed. “I tried The Red,” he said, emphasizing The. “I tried Barber Red. I tried The Color. Just – The Color. But to this day, people will come visit me and say, do you have any Marfa Red? So, it really stuck. And now it’s my signature.”
I looked around the studio and suddenly, all the large and small bits of Marfa Red – coffee cans, metal tool handles, a ladder – seemed to be buzzing, popping, and vibrating.
Creating work that requires this kind of extremely large, heavy duty industrial equipment made finding a studio space in Marfa quite a challenge.
“It was just dead end after dead end, trying to find a spot for a studio,” he told me. “And so I eventually resorted to Fort Davis for a year. Then one day I went to the bank in Fort Davis and met Elizabeth Villanueva, who said, ‘My husband has a shop in Marfa that he hasn't used in years.’ Sure enough, I came back to town that day and I met Richard Villanueva, and he said he’d rent it to me.”
After finding the space, and discovering that the neighborhood was luckily already outfitted with the industrial-level electricity Cody would need for his oven (due to the Lowe’s grocery store just up the street), the space became a second home thanks to the Villanuevas.
“And they've become basically – I mean, I consider them family,” Cody said.
Why was finding that home in Marfa so important? What’s so special about being an artist here, versus anywhere else, I asked.
“Living in Marfa has been the equivalent of going to art school, which I never did, because I'm surrounded by other artists. We're all talking about our process, our materials, our ideas. And so for me, the experience of becoming an artist in Marfa has been the equivalent of that opportunity I never had.”
I asked Cody about how he thinks about the art side of his art business. Although he came to powder coating through furniture, and still works with furniture often, he’s also now just as known for art objects: pony shoes, crushed cans, and railroad ties. He’s also recently started making paintings from aluminum sheets that have been “damaged” – hit with an axe, for example, or a sledgehammer, and then powder coated. Last year he debuted these ‘impact works’ in an exhibition at the Marfa Clinic.
“That was a weird thing,” he said. “I kept making objects or powder coating objects that could not be used for any purpose. And people would say, dude, I love your art. And I thought, am I making art? The more I made, the more I got comfortable with the fact that oh, I am producing art.”
You can see more of Cody's work on his website.
Endnotes
- From last week's Nature Notes: A hawk’s scream, a coyote’s yipping cries – these are the familiar animal sounds of West Texas. But there’s another animal sound that belongs on the list: the cry of the grasshopper mouse. PS: this edition of Nature Notes has maybe our favorite photo ever.
- Voters in the Big Bend and Permian Basin on Saturday rejected proposed school bonds and picked new city council and school board representatives in multiple municipal elections. Travis Bubenik has all the notable local election results.
- Yes, there's been some news in the world of public media. An executive order from the White House seeks to threaten funding for NPR, PBS, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. You probably already know what to do: donate, contact your representatives, and spread the word that public media needs support. We'll keep you updated on what we learn about how this order may affect Marfa Public Radio.
- Marfa Live Arts will be hosting a Bob Dylan Birthday Jam on Saturday, May 24th from 6-9pm at Coyote Coffee in Marfa. If you would like to play a Dylan tune at the event, email info@marfalivearts.org
- The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department is adding 671 acres of land near Big Bend National Park, to be incorporated into the Black Gap Wildlife Management Area. Read more from our friends at the Houston Chronicle.
