Late Bloomer’s Art Is Raw and Direct : Art: Stuart Glennon’s new career is dominated by rusted metals, weathered wood and stone.

SAN DIEGO —  Worn Oriental rugs wind through Stuart Glennon’s Ocean Beach home, marking a single, definitive path. On each side, a melange of tools, ornaments, fetishes and furniture crowds the artist’s house and studio with a dense visual intensity.

These objects block passage by foot, but they leave wide open a visitor’s entry into the spirited realm of Glennon’s imagination.

“I wanted to be an artist for a long, long time, but I never had the opportunity to,” said Glennon, a youngish, slightly grizzled 50.

“I had other things to do,” he said simply. Those other things included traveling extensively during his service in the British military, living and working on boats in Baja California, getting married and divorced, owning a bar, acting in local theater and his current livelihood of buying and selling antique prints and other collectibles.

Only in the last few years has Glennon, who was born in a small town outside of Manchester, England, begun to make and exhibit art. A one-person show of his sculpture and paintings opened last week at the Oneiros Gallery downtown, an encouraging sign for an artist with such little time in the field.

“He’s an eccentric, genuine, odd guy,” said Bill Beck, co-owner of the Oneiros Gallery. “He lives on the fringes.”

Glennon himself seems to relish his identity as an outsider; but, at the same time, he clearly enjoys the launching of his new career.

“There’s a little yearning inside me to hear an agent say, ‘Will you turn out six more of these, they’re selling well in Denver,’ ” he quips. Nevertheless, Glennon makes a point of telling visitors that he removed the address plaque from his front gate, “so no one can find me.” And he scoffs at the self-salesmanship so rampant in today’s art world, which he sees as a “big game.”

He also laughs at the obscure terms in which other artists discuss their work (“Echoey distant parallelogram--what the hell is that?”) and has chosen to title

his Oneiros show simply “Markings.” The word conjures up a rawness and directness that corresponds well to Glennon’s work, which has been strongly influenced by the beliefs and artifacts of non-industrialized cultures.

Rusted metals, wire, weathered wood and stone are fundamental to Glennon’s visual vocabulary. He joins these elements in the same intuitive, cluttered but clean style in which he has furnished his house.

In one sculpture, a dried cattle bone stands like a frail martyr behind a cage of rusted wire fencing. In another, an eroded chunk of cast iron becomes a fakir’s staring visage, and in another, rusted pins stab the eyes of a painted, totemic god.

“I’m not very fond of slickness,” Glennon said. “I literally cannot do detailed, fine work. I don’t see the point of burying the art beneath a lot of craft. I want to do things in a raw way, elemental.”

In his travels to Africa and Asia, Glennon became aware of the potency that discordant objects or sensibilities could attain when brought together.

“I was fascinated by the joining of a Western type of material with a formally primitive way of doing things. Corrugated metals and bottle caps brought by colonists were used and incorporated, and it looked right.”

Glennon’s own work extends this cycle of borrowing and synthesizing, for he adopts the hybrid aesthetic of primitive art and incorporates it into his own, inescapably Western, urban, contemporary works.

He scavenges for materials at scrap yards and rural swap meets, excising parts from old farm equipment and cars that strike him with a spiritual or sensual presence. In his front yard, a grill from a 1939 Studebaker hangs unadorned against the wall of the house. Glennon sees it as an African shield.

“I can show you five art books with this shape in it,” he said. And of another rusted fragment from a car: “That’s something I would have attempted to make if I hadn’t found it.”

Though Glennon cultivates an image as an outsider and he is, indeed, self-taught, he seems quite well versed in the local art scene and he refers frequently to the art magazines from the 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s that lie in neat piles around his house. He says he works primarily from memories--of words, images, sensations--and those extend from a sense of deep cultural memory up to the present, about which Glennon has some misgivings.

“I do like primitive cultures. We’re getting further and further away from what we should be doing. We’re putting a plastic curtain up between us and the elements.”

Utopia, he says, is an inevitability for survival, and perhaps as a way of bringing that state of harmony closer, he has fashioned his environment and his art into a microcosm of peaceful coexistence of cultures, beliefs and modes of being. Through political activism as well, Glennon has worked toward repairing the flaws in humankind, the “experiment that didn’t come out right.”

It was politics, in fact, that landed the artist in San Diego from his native Droilsden, England. He first visited the United States in the late 1960s.

“I traveled through the South and went into restaurants where blacks were allowed only in certain areas and allowed to drink only from certain fountains. That made a big impression on me. I started to realize that America had the potential to be great, but there were some things that were really backward.”

He became involved in the United Farm Workers’ fight for fair labor conditions and, in 1970, he bought his home in Ocean Beach. He began living there continuously in 1975 and has since become involved in the town council. Despite his cool, good-humored manner, Glennon describes himself as highly opinionated, even bombastic.

“I’ve always been very socially conscious about things. I’ve made a lot of enemies from the way I’ve thought. I’m not going to pussy-foot around because I care too much about things, about the environment, about animals. And the work that I do is very much related to the way I think.”

Many of Glennon’s paintings reflect a sense of solemn awe for the natural landscape. Their flat masses of intense color, outlined in black, feel akin to the landscapes of Marsden Hartley, an early influence on him. The carved and painted “funk frames” that Glennon uses lend an even stronger sense of raw power to his direct and uncontrived visions.

Glennon’s self-conscious bluntness, his disdain for the polished, slick side of both art and life feels somewhat old-fashioned in today’s high-tech, corporate culture. His work has charm, but also wisdom and a profound sense of connection to fundamental spiritual truths.

“I was born too late,” Glennon admits. “I want to live in a garret. That idea of a struggle against the odds, that feeling of desperation--I can see where (artists of earlier eras) get their fervor from, how they feel about art.”

“Markings,” Paintings and Sculpture by Stuart Glennon, continues at the Oneiros Gallery (711 8th Ave.) through Nov. 2. Open Thursday through Saturday 11-5 and by appointment (696-0882).