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10/5/2011 10:24:00 AM Front yard sculptures stop traffic in Prescott Valley neighborhood

Artist Joe DiBuduo stands next to the “serpent of prejudice” he placed in Warrior Woman’s grasp after staining her “skin” brown as an answer to the public’s response to the Miller Valley School mural in Prescott this past school year. Trib Photo/Sue Tone + view more photos Joe DiBuduo's active imagination gives his quiet neighborhood in Prescott Valley, Ariz., an unexpected panorama of very tall, very skinny, people and pets in August 2011. DiBuduo creates stories and poetry from words, and sculptures and statues from metal, clay, cement and rebar. Photos by Sue Tone. Sue Tone Reporter It seems anything is possible for Prescott Valley resident Joe DiBuduo. He creates stories and poems from words, and sculptures and statues from metal, clay, cement and rebar. The artist's active imagination gives his quiet neighborhood an unexpected panorama of very tall, very skinny, people and pets. DiBuduo's conspicuous metal yard sculptures stop traffic at 6130 N. Tower Lane. Inspired by Swiss artist Giacometti's Walking Man - which sold at auction in 2010 for $104 million, the artist is quick to point out - DiBuduo's Strangling Man began as a benign father, part of an intended family. "The father was going to have his hands on the kid's shoulder. Then I read a book about Jon Scott Dunkle, the mass murderer," DiBuduo, 71, said, and the hands moved to the child's neck. Dunkle is on California's Death Row for killing two 12-year-old boys and a 15-year-old boy in the 1980s. Nearby stands Warrior Queen grasping a serpent in one hand and spear in the other. The helmeted woman is based on the British queen Boadicea who fought the Romans around 60 A.D. DiBuduo said she was a gray-white color until the public uproar about the color of a child's face on a mural at a Prescott school this past school year. So he stained her brown, added the snake, and wrote a poem. "...this is no color to be, she lamented ... make me a proper color please like the child painted on Miller Valley School / don't you know, I said, a color like that will stop those who pass ... they will call you names a goddess doesn't deserve ... I'll have you strangle the serpent of senseless bias ..." DiBuduo said he has a ceramic head inside the house that could fit on the spear; he's still considering it. Neighbors James and Marty Bailey moved in across the street a year ago, and they are delighted with DiBuduo's sculptures, especially Lady Warrior. "I've always admired artwork, and this is a lot of fun," Marty Bailey said, gesturing towards the yard. Art Thrower lives next door since before DiBuduo moved in two years ago. He calls the artwork "awesome." "People jam on their brakes and back up. I hear them talking," he said. "Some people don't understand it, but most of it is positive." Thrower laughed when he heard DiBuduo describe Wardog, which holds a solar garden light between its jaws of sharp teeth, as a failed device to scare Thrower's cat out of the yard. The artist said kids ride past on their bikes at night to see the lit-up teeth. Giacometti's Cat, a scrawny thing with a crook at the end of its tail, gallops across the rock landscape under a 6-foot wide mobile. Solar lights wired at both ends of the mobile cast weird shadows with the nighttime breezes. "There's so much to do in art. I'm torn between art and writing," DiBuduo said. "But I think I'm more addicted to writing." The obsession with creating stories came late in life to the Boston-born and Chicago-raised retiree who dropped out of school after the eighth -grade. He took his first writing class at Yavapai Community College in 2006 and wrote 30 stories based on 30 masterpieces by famous artists. Then he signed up for another class, and was surprised to find out it was a poetry class. He challenged himself to write a poem a day and has completed more than 300. He also has self-published a book of poems called The Power. Now he's taking each poem and rewriting it into a short piece of flash fiction, and submitting them to online journals. He also is working on his memoir with Kate Robinson, and two novels. In September, DiBuduo had at least eight pieces published in anthologies and online fiction sites, including his story Thirteen with Kate Robinson in 31 Nights of Halloween, an anthology for middle school students; Lost Memories for The Memory Eater anthology; two stories in September's A Long Story Short e-zine, and the poem of the month, A Minister For All Faiths, in the same online publication. "Any time I write a story, I research it. I learn so much," he said. Somewhere in his investigation of the gay culture for a short story, he found himself becoming more tolerant of this segment of the population, he said. The same thing happened when his nephew said, "You get back what you give out." In other words, the animosity he felt from different races was just his own returning to him. He let go of his "suspicions" of minorities and has nurtured several new friendships. "Ignorance really does breed contempt. I got educated," he said. DiBuduo started training for the Chicago Marathon in February and finished the Whiskey Row half marathon in May. An injured leg in July took two months to heal and he lost a lot of the endurance he had built up. "I don't think I'll start training again as it takes too much time away from writing and art," he said with a laugh.