Sun Valley Home and Design / Fall 2006 / Garage Workshops

Garage Workshops

What These Crafstmen Produce is Homemade, but not Humble.

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Mark Sheehan:

Metal Fabricator Extraordinaire

Approaching Mark Sheehan’s house on Fourth Street in Bellevue, the only thing that catches the eye is a nondescript, six-foot high, cedar plank fence. But unlatching the gate is like cracking open a crystal-studded geode.

His front yard is crowded with an assortment of toys, sports equipment, lawn tools, furniture, plants, flowers—and several large and imposing metal sculptures.

Beyond is the rambling ranch house where Sheehan, his wife Lisa Phillips and their six-year-old son Sean live in eclectic comfort. And tucked away on the south side of the house is the garage.

However, this isn’t your father’s garage. First, as Sheehan points out, the space is 35-feet long by 25-feet wide with a ceiling that’s 12-feet high. He says it’s what you’d expect in a rural setting: “It’s a garage, it just happens to be a generous one.”

And Sheehan happens to need a generous garage since the capacious space is positively crammed with just about everything—except motor vehicles. That’s because he’s turned the garage into an elaborate and well-appointed metal fabrication workshop complete with gas-fired forge, power hammers, anvils, electric saws, grinders, cutters, welders, torches, tongs, an overhead boom, spacious workbench, many homemade dies and other tools of a trade he has practiced in the Wood River Valley for three decades.

It was thanks to California College of Arts and Crafts classmate Gordon Williams, a Wood River native, that Sheehan, as well as glass artist Jacques Bordeleau, arrived in the Valley in 1972 with plans to open an art gallery.

That idea fizzled out but soon Sheehan found himself creating, as he puts it, “functional art” for “the great big black hole in the center of your living room.” It was the early '70s and he says, “Darcy DuPont was my first fire screen and it was my first collaboration with Jacques Bordeleau.”

Although he’s moved about the Valley, from Triumph to McCanville to Northridge, before settling in Bellevue five years ago, he says he’s moved his shop, called Cherry Glow Forge & Fabrication, every time, “usually by myself,” he adds.

But wherever he’s lived, he has designed, cut, heated, hammered, welded, polished and painted metal tubing, angle iron and sheeting into an impressive array of products—often with his signature bas relief trim. These include, besides the fire screens, chandeliers, fire tools, gateways, railings, signs, fountains, headboards, tables, door hardware, weathervanes—even a kitchen sink for Rosemarie Bogner!

His client list reads like a Who’s Who of Sun Valley and beyond: the Jansses, Michael Engel, Bill Hewlett, the family of Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, David Stoecklein, billionaire banker Herbert A. Allen (whose decorator tracked him down), and Carlyn Ring all have environments enhanced by Sheehan’s architectural metalwork. He was even commissioned to do andirons and a fire grate for Teeter’s Knoll, the only Frank Lloyd Wright home in southern Idaho.

Ring’s hearth features an iris-embellished fire screen with curvilinear forms echoed in a metal and glass table, also fabricated by Sheehan, as well as a handrail for her stairs—the synergy of the whole combining alchemically to exceed the sum of the parts.

Ring calls the effect “absolutely fantastic. I’ve always had many compliments on them.” She says she considers Sheehan “one of the great creative geniuses in the area.”

Sheehan forges with iron and steel, but his finished works often look like brass, copper or bronze (metals too soft to withstand the several hundred degree temperatures required to stand up to fireplace duty) thanks to heat-resistant paints. He says he does “a lot of faux paint jobs—they’re an easy throwback to my art school days.”

What’s amazing about Sheehan is that his artistic endeavors are only half of his life. There’s a whole other side to this wiry 57-year-old, who seems very vibrant and young despite his spectacles and white beard.

First, he’s a founding member of Galena Back Country Ski Patrol, and subsequently, a member of Blaine County Search and Rescue—an interest compatible with his ice climbing and skiing hobbies. Then, an antique gun inherited from his father (a German “bring back” from WW II) led to another hobby of tinkering with gunsmithing and target practicing. It was Blaine County’s firearms instructor, Pat Pidgeon, who suggested, years ago, that Sheehan join the Blaine County Sheriff’s Reserve.

“Artists don’t normally do this stuff,” he says, but adds “I was learning about what I was interested in learning about: humanity.”

He was proud to be the first and only reservist to make the SWAT team until a policy change required SWAT members “to have three years patrol experience.” The reserves then led to a nine-year stint as a county jailer. Luckily, his four-day shift there enabled him to concurrently do his metalworking.

But now he says, “I’ve gone through some changes this year and I’m reinventing myself,” he explains. “I was not really suited to law enforcement.”

Although he feels “people in jail are not necessarily criminals, some people routinely make bad decisions and some of those decisions lead to serious consequences,” he says “I got to see how bad it can get, I’ve seen people die. That was one of the things that led to my getting out.”
Ironically, for someone who bends steel to his will, he explains, “It all came crashing down on me. I couldn’t emotionally toughen up for that job.”

Now, he’s hoping to continue with his architectural metalwork while returning to the non-representational metal sculptures that he created, but was unable to market, in the early '90s—only in a smaller, more collectible format. But, he notes, “This can be a very conservative community in many things . . . People aren’t willing to take a risk on their own, they’ve got to do the research.”

Except for his sculptures, Sheehan says he doesn’t have any inventory since “all the work I do is site-specific and specifically designed as one of a kind.”

Sheehan’s life has taken as many twists and turns as his popular pine bough fabrications—some of which can be seen at the Sun Valley Company’s River Run Ski Lodge at the base of Baldy. But in a very real way, Sheehan’s most fascinating fabrication may be his own life.