While traveling the arts festival circuit throughout Georgia and the Southeast, Eddie King has come to be known variously as "Bottle Eddie" along with "Bottle Art Eddie" and "Eddie, King of Bottle Art."

Which essentially means that nobody redefines and refines a recycled whiskey or wine bottle the way Brookhaven's Bottle Eddie does.

Jessica McGowan/jmcgowan@ajc.com (ENLARGE)

King and his bottle art are booked into shows from late August through mid-December.

Jessica McGowan/jmcgowan@ajc.com (ENLARGE)

A survivor of the Warsaw ghetto and a Siberian labor camp as a child, King was 10 when he and his family came to America. \uFEFF

• See more photos Recent headlines: Councilwoman shifts $140,000 to help with budget crisis  Connector work will close some lanes this weekend  Tolls coming to metro Atlanta HOV lanes?     • Atlanta and Fulton County news

Using his fingers, he applies thick, bubbling liquid textures of acrylics, concentrating mostly on bright and highly contrasting colors. These wildly swirling patterns create constant motion or, as King said, "I like to think each bottle tells a story."

On almost all his bottles these murmuring, sometimes tumultuous color combinations surround a photograph or a print of a famous painting. Some of his favorite subjects include Marilyn Monroe, Elvis, Louis Armstrong, Picasso and Van Gogh. He applies a gel to these pictures, which, when dry, brings out a grainy, glossy quality.

"I've been doing these bottles for about seven years," said King, who turned 77 in June. "I don't know where this comes from because I didn't exactly grow up with art in the home. But for a long time I've been interested in these great swatches of color.

"Maybe," he said, laughing, "this is my inner child coming out."

More than anyone, of course, King knows the profound irony behind that statement, for the truth is he basically had no childhood.

'I was never caught'

He was born Adek Kozierow in a Jewish ghetto east of Warsaw, Poland. He was 8 when the Germans began bombing Poland. After the Nazis began immediately rounding up all Jewish men for the so-called "labor camps," his father was forced to leave Poland.

Nearly 70 years later, King remembers his father walking out the door, and he shrugs. "We never saw him again. In fact, we never knew what happened to him."

King, his mother and younger brother and some of his father's relatives were shipped off for a time to the densely overpopulated Jewish ghetto in Warsaw. Food was scarce, and King became expert at slipping from the ghetto at nights, into the city, to steal bread, onions and potatoes.

"If you were caught, you were shot," he said. "I was never caught."

After a year the family escaped Warsaw, only to be recaptured and delivered to a brutal Siberian work camp, where they stayed for nearly two years. King said, "They separated us out, the men, the women and children. My mother cut lumber in the summer and worked the coal mines in the winter. Meantime, my brother and I picked onions and potatoes."

The family's escape from Russia and eventual landing in New York was long and dramatic. They got out partly because King's mother was American-born and partly through behind-the-scenes manipulations of his aunt — an actress on New York's Yiddish stage — and a Brooklyn congressman.

When King reached Brooklyn in September 1941, he was all of 10 years old, a Holocaust survivor and, in his own words, "a pretty good street hustler."

He spent his remaining schoolboy years hustling stockings, newspapers, Bibles, earrings and anything else he could get his hands on.

It's no surprise that as an adult, he became a successful salesman, first with a kitchen remodeling business, where he eventually became a vice president of sales, and then for 22 years with a company he describes as "a home food service." He's been married three times; he and his current wife, Adria, have been wed 25 years.

King plunged headlong into his artwork after he retired at 70. "At first," he said, "it was just a release, something that was soothing. Now I understand why kids play in the mud. Painting with your fingers is the same thing."

On the suggestion of an acquaintance who owned a Virginia-Highland gallery, he took 24 of his original bottles to the Inman Park Art Festival and sold out in two hours. In the years since, the "Bottle Man's" reputation has only grown. During three festivals earlier this summer, he averaged 200 sales per weekend.

He and his bottles are already booked into shows from late August through mid-December, including appearances at Grant Park, Sandy Springs, Rome, Dahlonega, Brookhaven and the Marist School.

King admits it's difficult reconciling these explosive colors of old age with his bleak black-and-white childhood that persevered in a handful of photos that have somehow survived the years and thousands of miles.

"A shrink would have a field day with me," King said. "Personally, I've never been to one. But what I would tell them is this — I have never been more contented in my life than I am now. I'm not in want of anything. I have given away all my dress shirts, all my suits, all my shoes, and I wear T-shirts and sneakers. If Adria and I go out to a restaurant, then I wear an extra nice T-shirt. Then I come home and paint. Then I go to the art shows and get a little notoriety, a little ego boosting.

"What more could you want?"