Meeting the Artist

Many of my conversations with strangers start, So, what do you do?  Answer: I work at the Corps of Engineers downtown.  On Clay Street?  Answer: no, the one downtown.  Oh.

Meeting the artist.  

And then, invariably, the conversation peters out.

Last Saturday, I had a very different experience.

Kathe and I were sitting down for a nice Saturday lunch at the Pig & Pint, a lovely little beer and bbq shop on the outskirts of Jackson, and there was a guy was crouched down on the ground off to the side of the building, hitting something.  With something else.

"What do you think he is doing?" I asked Kathe. Kathe looked over.

With anyone else, my question would elicit an eye roll.  I was essentially asking if I could go and play with the stranger in the side lot. Kathe, however, has dealt with me for a LONG time.

"I don't know.  Why don't you go over and ask him?"

"OK."  If a look ever rubbed its hands together with excitement, this was it.

Pig & Pint. 

I went over.  The guy was intently hammering a piece of glass with a rock.  "How's it going?"  Nonchalance, at my finest.

"Oh, hey!"  He stood up and met me with a grin.  Held out a hand, with a piece of glass in it, formed into a crude arrowhead.  "I am learning how to make arrowheads.  There is a bunch of material here that is good to use - I prefer to use glass, because there is no way for it to be confused with the old artifacts."

I needed no further invitation. I grabbed a small piece of glass and grabbed a hammerstone, and started knapping, too.

There was a time in the distant past where I spent quite a bit of time making stone tools, and could bang out an acceptable point in a matter of minutes.  Those days are long gone. The simple mechanics of the work, however, are still somewhere in the physical memory, and I even recall some of the lectures I used to give on the process.

So suddenly I am just sitting around with a new friend, looking at pieces of slag (what in the world did this spot used to be, that there is glass slag everywhere?) and grinding platforms and talking about conchoidal fracture... and listening to Scott's story.

It made for a great way to end a lunch.

Forged aluminum mold, with plastic gear.

"I have lived outside for the past twelve years," his story began.  He went on to tell me, in between strikes of stone on glass, that he was an artist, and his work has been featured in the Arts Center of Mississippi in downtown Jackson.  He started talking about powering electronic devices with art pieces he created.  He talked about the process, how he started out by carving out a wooden mold for the melted plastic, but he found that the wood started to char and deform after a few uses.  The clay mold he hand built and pitfired and tested out was too fragile.  So he went online and figured out how to make a forge, and he made an aluminum mold for gears.

For the next half hour Scott and I talked story about found items, and about creating gears out of melted shopping bags, about carving molds out of wood and building aluminum forges out of a lighter and a battery-powered pocket fan, and flintknapping, and archaeology, and carving wood and painting...

Kathe eventually walked up, and I introduced her to Scott, who showed her the gear mold he had forged and shaped and filed and.... dang it, he MADE something with his hands.

I was so impressed.

Scott even mentioned meeting me on his FB page.
Shout Out!

He invited me to meet him on Facebook.  And so as soon as I got home, I did.  I also looked up to see if there were any stories about his art online. Yeah, OK, so I cyberstalked him a little.  But very little of my day-to-day interactions even remotely resemble the delicious five-minute conversation I had with Scott.

I friended him on Facebook.  Scott has been going through some rough stuff, and he tells it straight.  But his work is amazing, and I love his creative process.  He is not just going into a studio and cranking out pieces in a factory-like setting.  He learns, builds, tinkers; he tests hypotheses, tries and fails, and experiments with new techniques.

Daily elevator speeches between me and the people I interact with have to do with budgets and authorizations.  But I have friends who build stuff, who do stuff, who make music and art and grow things.

Three thousand years ago, the Preacher said, It is good for one to eat and to drink..., and to enjoy the good of all his labour (Ecclesiastes 5:18).

And yet I look around and see people who are unhappy with their labor, at least partly because they cannot see the good in the work that they do (and, as my friend LeeAnn pointed out, that sentence applies particularly to ME).  When the distance between your work and the good that you do is far removed, it is much harder to get a sense of satisfaction from it.  There is immediate satisfaction to be had in doing work with your hands.

His second projectile point.  Dang.

Granted, in the same vein, frustration from doing direct work is also more immediate, because when you have a setback, it is a personal setback. Learning to play the fiddle or the piano, and struggling.... there is no template to deal with that.  There is no shortcut.  My banjo playing has not improved one iota, partly because I get so frustrated with it, and without the template, I put the instrument down. My lack of understanding about what makes bees work is a personal struggle, and there is no shortcut to getting it right.

Some of the FB entries from Scott reflect similar frustrations.

But they are different from the frustrations of beings bound by process and Procrustean bed solutions.

Scott makes his own processes.  Scott makes his own solutions.  And his art, is, like his story, just so beautiful.