From junk to art

Social worker, toymaker, newspaper writer, carpenter, massage therapist, dishwasher, grant writer, musician. Name a job, Todd Samusson probably has done it before.

I just cant do the same thing for a long time, says the 62-year-old, from the shaded patio of his front lawn in the Mount Tabor neighborhood of Southeast Portland.

The son of an army engineer, Samusson grew up tinkering with his fathers tools and lived in Morocco, Virginia and Texas before settling in Portland with his wife, Paula Manley, in 1988.

Since moving to Portland, Samusson has added a new occupation to his rsum: garbage collector. And then he turns it into art.

I probably went to a hundred garage sales in the course of a five-year period. I just like the look of old things and rust, Samusson says.

It all started 15 years ago, when a piece of garbage caught Samussons eye one day while he was remodeling a nearby house. There was a piece of junk, a metal flange like the type that comes out of vents, he recounts. I kept looking at it in the pile of debris every day and thinking Im going to take that home and do something with it.

And then came Bob

After some hammering, flattening, bending and sewing, that metal flange became the mouth of Bob, a metal mask made of an oven pan, a tin can, a few copper pipes and two beaten-down pennies. And after Bob, the deluge.

It opened up a whole new world, Samusson says. You cut something at an angle and all of a sudden you look at it differently.

Samusson started looking at a lot of things differently.

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From junk to art