FIXATIONS : Keeping Tabs on His Art : Clare Graham spends 4 hours a day, some 300 days a year, turning 1.5 million bits of aluminum into sculptures.

ANAHEIM — It was just the sort of tidbit that fills the holes in a newspaper, but when Clare Graham read a news item recently about Garden Grove’s Earl Warren Elementary School amassing a million aluminum can pull tabs, “I felt the way Michelangelo must have when he found a quarry of great marble,” Graham said.

It’s a far cry from the pure stone of Carrara: Graham’s chosen medium, basically, is trash. His first project a few years back involved 53,000 dominoes, picked up cheap at swap meets. Then he escalated to works using 800,000 recycled bottle caps, and now he is devoting himself--four hours a day, some 300 days a year--to painstakingly turning a galaxy of 1.5 million little pull tabs into hulking, surprisingly affecting sculptures.

Graham, 42, is senior managing art director at Disneyland, something that keeps him busy weekdays from 5 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Managing a staff of 80, he said, makes him miss the physical involvement of creating art. But when he arrives at his Los Angeles home, things get perhaps a little more hands-on than some artists would enjoy.

“I’ve noticed that I’ve developed calluses that are particularly attuned to the tasks of making these things,” Graham said, “With the pull tabs I work with my forefinger and thumb almost exclusively, feeding nylon tie-wraps through a grid and cinching them. So on the end of these two fingers now I have these huge calluses.”

As is the case with much pre-industrial art, the painstaking labor and intent of Graham’s effort somehow comes through in his works, with some of his trash constructs inspiring the sort of immersion one feels from Oriental devotional art. But then, part of the gravity they express may result from simply pondering what it would be like to have a seven-foot, 700-pound scrap metal vase topple over on you.

Graham said it has required five men and a dolly to move some of his works. Usually when they travel the destination is the Modernism show held yearly at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium during the Memorial Day weekend.

“I’ve found there that most people looked at the bottle cap things and thought they were something else entirely. They didn’t realize they were made out of bottle caps, because the forms were sort of contained and elegant and the surface texture is so uniform that a lot of people looked at them and thought they were either Southeast Asian or Siamese metalworks, that they were somehow chased out of big copper or brass forms.

“A percentage of people are perceptive enough to touch them and realize what they’re made of. Then they stand back and have these quizzical looks and start asking why someone would do these things, what they’re supposed to mean. There is no answer for that--it’s just bottle caps made into shapes,” Graham said with a laugh.

Graham moved to Southern California from Canada when he was in his teens, and like many young locals wound up working at Disneyland. His first job was as the Yellow Rabbit in the Easter parade in 1968, and he went on to play the gamut of the taller character figures. “Then I decided I didn’t like to sweat for a living,” Graham said, and he eventually worked his way up, from being a sign painter to his present position, meanwhile gaining a master of fine arts in sculpture from Cal State Long Beach.

When Graham was in his teens his parents took him to see Simon Rodia’s massive piece of folk art, the bottle-glass and broken pottery festooned Watts Towers, which made a lasting impression on him. Another large influence has been Southland swap meets.

“What I do on weekends is go to swap meets, find junk and think of ways to use it (other things he collects include glass eyes, old carnival game knockdowns and swizzle sticks). I collected my dominoes there, and it’s also where I first saw primitive art objects made out of bottle caps. In the Depression, there was this tramp art, where they used to go around and collect cigar boxes, orange crates and bottle caps, make itinerant art out of it and try to sell it door to door.”

Graham proffered one crown-shaped egg basket he’d purchased, which proved surprisingly solid. The structural integrity of the objects led him to experiment with making larger works of his own design. The results include human-height hive-like urns and conga drum shapes, fanciful towers and kiosks.

He has found he has to wash his raw materials. Minute though they are, hundreds of thousands of beer bottle caps add up to one woozy stench. And the Coke syrup and other sugary goo on unwashed pull tabs makes them stick to his fingers.

His current batch of pop top creations each starts with a doodled drawing, which a shop connection then welds into a metal frame, and Graham then covers in wire mesh “hardware cloth.” To that he affixes the pop tops with nylon ties which he painstakingly crimps, threads through the mesh and tightens, some 50,000 times over on the oblong object he’s presently working on. It is the third of nine pieces he plans to have completed by late May for the Modernism show.

“I don’t even think about the labor anymore. It’s such a habit that it’s almost like getting up in the morning. It’s almost a meditation. Like many possessive or obsessive things, it’s an excellent way to zone out and think about other things entirely. While I’m doing this I’m often solving work problems.”

Working for Disney has proved an invaluable aid to him, he said, as co-workers there have proved more than willing to help further an absurd quest. Those in his department collect pull tabs from bars. One well-connected Disney rep was able to get several bottlers to send Graham boxes of unused caps. Disneyland recycles its aluminum to aid a guide dog program, and volunteers first wiggle the tab rings off for him. Disney’s Japanese park sent him 100,000 tabs for $7.

By the time Graham learned of the Garden Grove school’s 1 million pull tabs, they’d already been sold, but he tracked them down at a Santa Ana metals recycler and was able to save two-thirds of them from the heap.

“It’s very attractive to me that I’m using refuse and castoffs,” he said. “A block of Carrara marble would cost a gizillion dollars at this point, but I’m getting 400 pounds of aluminum for a few hundred dollars. And I like the idea that what once was trash now is this object that, because it’s metal, hard and heavy, is going to be around for a lot longer than I am. I’d like if it got some recognition someday, not as capital A art, but just as this sort of obsessive thing that somebody did from an inner need rather than to make money.”

He is partners in a property in Highland Park, a 7,000-square-foot roller rink, that is being converted into an art studio. He has thoughts of someday erecting his own Watts-like towers on the site. He seems not to be daunted by the scope of such a project.

“The thing I like about this work is the accumulated sort of Gestalt of it. Each day I set a goal of doing X-amount, and then when you’ve completed X-number of days it’s such a large amount of work that people look at it and say, ‘My God why would anybody do that?’ That’s why I do it.”