Clark Ashton not only makes sculptures, he makes music with the BooHoo Ramblers. Hear the Ramblers at Blind Willie’s tonight at 9:30 p.m. at 824 N. Highland Ave. Atlanta. $5.
Which is best? Clark Ashton struggles with that question whenever he steps into his metal forest.
No. 49? It looks like an old-fashioned gas pump, thin and towering. What about good ol’ No. 54, a fiery mainstay on those afternoons when the temperature drops and the wind rises? And don’t forget No. 9; after all, it was the first to feature the man in hell.
He likes all his wood-burning stoves, and that is no small thing. Ashton has more than 50, each handmade, on a half-acre tract behind his home near Decatur. They are built from cast-off water heaters, old iron pipes, steel cabinets and anything else that he can weld into that most sublime of creations: something simultaneously useful and lovely. When he has them all burning, it is a vision of — well, we’ll get to that.
“Luckily,” he said, “my neighbors seem to like it.”
Some travelers may know Ashton by his front yard on North Druid Hills Road. He’s filled it with an array of fantastical metal sculptures. He calls it the Commuter Gallery, and the name is apt: Traffic backs up along that benighted stretch of blacktop every morning and evening.
For hapless motorists waiting, waiting, waiting for the lights to change, the gallery is a visual treat — the sky scratcher, a derricklike thing topped by metal tines; the sky saw, whose name precisely describes its appearance; and the sky stitcher, twin needles that look as if they could puncture a low-flying cloud. In their midst is a metal throne where Ashton, 55, can sit and contemplate what he hath wrought.
Ashton is a welder, artist, philosopher. A discussion with him may easily include the Arab-Israeli conflict, old horror movies, the eternal struggle of man to find his place in the universe, the impact of industrialization, our “cognizance of mortality.”
That brings us to his stoves.
Ashton, who’s been creating welded art since 1989, made his first stove in 2007. It was a serendipitous thing, the melding of motive and material. He was planning an outdoor party when the weather turned crummy. Small surprise; it was December. Ashton eyed an old water heater that he’d rescued from the curb, knowing he’d use it for something, someday. He had an epiphany: Inside that tubular design was a stove, waiting to be freed. Cut an opening with his torch, weld a grate inside for firewood, put on a chimney, add some legs: An erstwhile water heater could become a people heater. He got busy.
“It worked like a champ,” he said. “Everyone loved it. I said, ‘I’ve got to make another one.’ ”
Stove No. 2 was just as fine. No. 3 was a hit, too. Suddenly, standing in Ashton’s backyard on a cold winter’s night wasn’t such a bad thing. Ashton turned to his stockpile of metal, and one stove followed another.
Then came No. 9, and a hell of an inspiration.
‘Like genius’
“Folk art.” The term evokes images of portraits on plywood or whirligigs made of cast-off bicycle parts. The art form, generally used to describe artistic endeavors of people who lack formal training, encompasses an array of work — paintings, pottery, odd yard art and sculpture.
Buford resident Steve Slotin has been buying and selling folk art since discovering the Meadors family pottery in North Georgia nearly three decades ago. The jugs feature faces, some serene, others contorted, all memorable. “They were so ugly they were beautiful,” Slotin said.
He gave up his job as a traveling salesman for CliffsNotes, that handy companion of classroom slackers everywhere. For more than 20 years, Slotin Folk Art has been holding auctions twice yearly. One sculpture, created by a man living in the Mojave Desert, recently fetched more than $100,000.
Anyone who can create a wood stove from a water heater has a gift, Slotin said. “It sounds like genius,” he said.
Ashton, who’s sold a few stoves to friends, brushes off any suggestion that he’s a folk artist. For one thing, he got a master’s degree in fine arts from Georgia State in 1996. His art, he thinks, is “raw.”
“It’s certainly related to folk art,” Ashton said. “It’s somewhat different to categorize. It goes off in different directions.”
How else to explain the burning man, that hapless soul in stove No. 9?
That stove took shape like all the rest, on a big table outside a garage/welding shop in his backyard. As he assembled the stove, Ashton had another epiphany: The interiors of his stoves, fiery and red, conjured up thoughts of that heated hereafter, Hades.
For his ninth creation, Ashton created a metal man, maybe 18 inches tall and a half-inch thick. He welded it to a grid positioned above the stove’s wood-burning grate. As a last gesture, Ashton used his torch to cut out a curlicue shape from the figure’s flat little chest. A paisley?
No. A closer look shows that the little curlicue features the round head and wiggly tail of spermatozoa.
Sperm? On a figure in hell? Ashton smiled. Because the figure is carved out of the metal man, it signifies the absence of sperm. The man in the stove is dead, his sex drive reduced to cinders.
A philosophical point, sir? “He’s in hell,” Ashton said.
Thus was born a trait of nearly every stove that has come out of Ashton’s shop. His burners feature figures — most armless, spermless, and, yes, their situation hopeless. An Ashton stove makes heat and a statement.
It throws a lot of heat, too. Ashton recently hosted a party in his backyard and invited neighbors and friends. He burned through almost a cord of wood. The night was cold, damp, except in his yard, where flames of 50-plus stoves hissed and spat. It was a vision of …
A vision of Clark Ashton, welder, artist, philosopher. He’s making more stoves.
“I want to make 99,” he said. “One a year.”
