EVENT PREVIEW
Folk Fest
5-10 p.m. Friday: Meet the Artists Party and show opening ($15, includes readmission all weekend and T-shirt); 10 a.m.-7 p.m. Saturday; 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Sunday. $7 (free for 16 and younger). North Atlanta Trade Center, 1700 Jeurgens Court, Norcross (exit 101 off I-85). 770-532-1115, www.slotinfolkart.com.
Funny, the two artists who will be among those presenting their wares at the 21st annual Folk Fest this weekend don't look related.
But Charlie Lucas, one of the undisputed folk masters manning one of the 90 booths that will show and sell mainly rustic-styled art at North Atlanta Trade Center starting Friday night, insists that fellow Alabama native Chris Beck is his son.
This despite the fact that Lucas, 62, is African-American, and Beck, 38, is, well, white.
There are other differences, too:
- Though he radiates smarts and is represented in museum collections across the U.S., Lucas completed only a fourth-grade education. He received early lessons from his blacksmith great-grandfather and basket-maker grandfather, but is largely self-taught, turning to art-making only after injuring his back in a timber-loading accident in the mid-1980s.
- Beck, by contrast, attended Hampden-Sydney College, a small Virginia liberal arts school where he signed up for every introductory art class that was offered. Yet it took nearly a decade after he graduated for him to figure out sculpture was his calling, and he taught himself how to weld through trial and error.
- Lucas, who lives in Selma, Ala., is best known for his found-object assemblages of spent car parts, rusty tools and the like, usually depicting people or animals, that he assembles in a most imaginative manner.
- Based out of Dalton, Beck mainly transforms reclaimed rusty metal sheets into sophisticated wall-hanging sculpture, depicting clothing such as nostalgia-evoking sundresses and three-piece suits. He paints these with a light hand to look realistically worn and to allow the material's rust and bends to peek through.
Still, Lucas tells everyone that Beck is his boy, and the younger artist readily acknowledges that the “Tin Man,” as Lucas is known, has been a fatherlike figure, especially in terms of helping him find his artistic voice.
“Chris is not a white person, not a black person,” Lucas said. “He’s a creative person.”
In turn, Beck considers Lucas “a mentor, a guide, who’s been encouraging, supportive, uplifting and reassuring.”
Despite their we-are-family back and forth, the two sculptors have not known each other that long. They met, in fact, at Folk Fest, in 2006. Lucas was exhibiting his wares that year, but Beck, then a carpenter and an increasingly enthusiastic collector of self-taught art who had read all about Lucas in the two-volume folk bible “Souls Grown Deep,” didn’t know that he would finally connect with the subject of his admiration.
“I walked down the aisle and there’s Charlie Lucas! It was kind of like seeing Elvis or John Lennon. I lost it,” recalled Beck, who, when he gets excited, talks with the fist-pumping enthusiasm of a kid rocking out on the front row at Bonnaroo Music Festival. “Then getting to talk to him, hearing about what he does, it was freaking awesome. I couldn’t leave.”
Before Beck did depart, Lucas asked him what kind of art he made.
Nothing, Beck responded sheepishly.
“Why not?” Lucas wondered, adding, “Well, you should.”
Beck had tried. He had painted with oils and watercolors, attempted to carve. Nothing turned out the way he wanted, nothing felt like him. He always had burned with the desire to create, but never experienced that spark turning to flame.
He compares his resulting long-term frustration to having a spur of wood caught in a finger that he couldn’t extract. “I couldn’t get any comfort, couldn’t get any peace,” Beck recalled. “Everything I tried just didn’t feel right.”
Beck felt “haunted” by not having an answer for Lucas. Eventually, he went from plagued to motivated. “It stirred my soul. It made me want to do something.”
At Thanksgiving, he got his brother-in-law, a fabricator, to give him a quick welding lesson. On New Year’s Day 2007, he bought an old welding machine for $50, and started burning metal to metal immediately.
He was pumped, but there was one problem: His work looked too imitative of his inspiration’s.
“It was very disappointing,” Beck said. “Charlie Lucas is Charlie Lucas, and I’m not Charlie Lucas.”
So he transitioned into making “very raw” birds, trees and crosses, and got accepted into his first festival, in Chattanooga, Tenn., that spring, where, to his delight, he sold several pieces.
That led him to apply for more shows, and he started running into Lucas, who monitored the younger artist’s progress.
Beck was always hungry for feedback. “He’d say, ‘Charlie, tell me what you’re looking for,’” Lucas recalled. “And I’d say, ‘I’m looking for you to show the discipline, because you have the skills.’
“I was telling him to take the discipline and to listen to his heart. He was a kid I admired to the highest. All he needed was for someone to tell him that it was OK to go out and be himself.”
But it was a customer who helped Beck settle on the subject matter for which he has become known. For an upcoming show, he felt he needed a large, focal-point work for his booth, and he thought he could create something out of a rusty aqua-colored ironing board his mother had scavenged for him. Pondering possibilities of things he could put atop the ironing board, he thought he might be able to create a shirt out of flat-as-fabric recycled roofing tin.
The realistic shirt stopped one customer in his tracks, and he offered to buy it at the asking price if Beck would cut away the ironing board.
“I’m thinking, you’ve got to be freaking kidding me,” Beck recalled. “You’re going to hang the shirt on the wall? What’s the point? It didn’t make sense to me at all.”
But when the customer later sent Beck a photo of his shirt hanging above a dresser, “a light bulb went off that I actually make art.”
It turns out that customers like his retro clothes, the pastel dresses that remind them of their grandmothers, the neat uniforms of gas station attendants who tucked ties under their coveralls.
Charlie Lucas likes the pieces, which Beck prices from $200-$2,000, too — a lot.
At the 2011 Kentuck Festival of the Arts, a prestigious show mixing folk art with fine art and craft near Tuscaloosa, Ala., Lucas strolled into Beck’s booth and gave his peer a hug.
“This is it! This is it!” Lucas said excitedly.
“I told him, ‘I’m over-pleased. I’m even a little jealous!’”
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