No one would ever mistake Stone Mountain Village for Greenwich Village. Its kicked-back attitude is summed up in the hours posted on one granite-fronted Main Street shop: “noonish” to “5 or so.”
Yet it was in this timeworn burg that a lightning bolt from the highly charged New York art scene of the 1960s and 1970s made a direct strike several years ago on an unlikely target, Mike’s Body Shop. It turned proprietor Mike Lusk into something even more unlikely: an exhibiting fine artist.
The lightning bolt was in the form of a customer, John McMahon, a painter and former studio assistant for famed abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning. In his early 70s and down on his luck, McMahon had moved back to his boyhood home of Atlanta, settling in Stone Mountain.
The headstrong artist roared into Mike’s Body Shop one day and met the equally headstrong Mike Lusk. From a rocky introduction – Lusk sent McMahon packing after they jawed about an estimate on his Camaro – bloomed a remarkable friendship. Over a four-year period, McMahon gained a much-needed patron out of a guy more experienced at repairing beaten-up bumpers than resurrecting beaten-down people, and Lusk gleaned inspiration to try his own hand at making art.
Alas, McMahon died in 2007, too soon to see his compadre open his first show, “Body Shop Mike,” up the street at ART Station, the DeKalb County visual and performing arts center.
Lusk’s vibrant abstract paintings on car parts such as hoods and brush guards share little in common with the canvases that McMahon feverishly turned out in his makeshift studio inside Luck’s body shop. The 38 pieces on view at ART Station appear far more inspired by abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock, albeit considerably more shiny since Lusk uses leftover car paints that he finishes with clear coat and sometimes even buffs.
A 51-year-old native of Scottsdale who’s never visited the Big Apple, Lusk, of course, never met de Kooning or Pollock or any of the other New York art stars of the go-go '60s. But through the osmosis of having McMahon hang around his shop every day for more than three years and from studying art books, he certainly talks as if he did.
“A lot of times people thought that Bill de Kooning was a real ornery, grumpy person. He wasn’t!” Lusk exclaims, his excitement zooming from 0 to 60 in a flash. “Bill de Kooning was like me, he was very passionate and he believed in what he was doing. He didn’t like people asking stupid little questions that irritated him. So he’d fly off the handle a little bit because you were messing with his flow. I’m sort of the same way.”
Lusk's self-described kinship with de Kooning aside, the famous painter he most recalls is the late Howard Finster, the fire-and-brimstone-spouting Northwest Georgia preacher turned folk artist. Like Finster, Lusk is a wiry, quirky, handy motor mouth who can start talking and forget to draw a breath for, oh, two hours. But while Finster proselytized about Jesus, Lusk preaches about the transformational power of art.
To use one of Lusk’s favorite Southern-fried expressions, the Grayson resident is “Jazzercised” about art making, which he credits with giving him respite from the drudgery of 32 years in the body business.
“I kept a log on it. I've fixed 22,000 cars, man!” he exclaims. “I mean, I still enjoy it and can still paint a beautiful paint job, but this art’s gave me a new outlet. It’s gave me a new lease on life.”
One thing that pleases him is that the creative process is so often beyond his control.
“I tried to do delicate paintings where you draw mountain sceneries and all that, and it was too nerve-wracking to me,” Lusk says. “That’s what I like about [his Pollock-styled, flung-paint paintings], it’s so fresh. It’s so madcap to where, [heck], I don’t even know what’s going to come out. And when it comes out, and I finally see it, I get so excited.”
He’s not the only one upbeat about the works, some of which have an outer-space feel, a notion encouraged by titles such as “Outer Galaxy” and “Starship.” In fact Stone Mountain mayor Pat Wheeler has her eye on the later, a triangular-shaped creation painted on a 2007 Jeep Cherokee hood. “My husband really likes that piece, so Mike and I are negotiating,” she says of the $1,250 painting.
“What I like is that they’re very whimsical, but it wasn’t just that he picked up something and started spraying [paint] in a whimsical way,” ART Station executive director David Thomas adds. “He’d thought out everything; there was technique involved. Mike would talk about what was going on in his life when he did this. A lot of it, I’m sure, was the healing process.”
Not only had Lusk lost McMahon to lung cancer in 2007, but then Lusk’s wife of 25 years, Jennifer, died of liver cancer at age 46 in January.
Somehow, barely a week later, Lusk made it to his show’s opening reception. More than 150 attended, and “I talked to every one of them.”
Since then, Lusk hasn’t painted much, concentrating instead on his body shop and a promise he made to McMahon, to publish his memoir and solidify his legacy. In addition to more than 100 works of art, McMahon left his friend nearly 2,000 papers and hundreds of photographs, most from his New York years working with de Kooning.
Smyrna writer Nancy Knight, whom Lusk hired to help edit the papers, says she’s convinced that the book will be published ultimately, whether commercially or by Lusk himself, because he pledged to his friend on his death bed that it would be.
“Mike Lusk is a really good man down inside, and I’m a great believer in karma,” Knight says. “I believe somewhere in the universe, whoever or whatever is out there brought Mike and John together, because each of them got something from the other.”
On view
“Body Shop Mike”
Through March 26. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Friday, 10 a.m.-3 p.m. Saturday. ART Station, 5384 Manor Drive, Stone Mountain.770-469-1105, www.artstation.org
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