Frames (361 hits)
Category: NoneRating: 1.75 on 13 reviews (Rate this item) (V)
Submitted by Hornet (View user info) at 2008-07-01 18:28:41 EDT
Some people call me an artist. When I was younger I thought of myself as one. I would paint and sculpt metal, stone and clay. Ten years ago I made a dozen picture frames out of old fencing and cut down boards I'd collected from the ruins of a farmhouse outside of town. The weathered, sun-bleached wood was a perfect match for a series of pastels I was doing of rural scenes, works I destroyed when I realized I was doing what Monet had done one hundred and twenty five years before. I kept the frames, and when one of the local gallery owners stopped by to enquire if I had anything new, he saw the frames and demanded I sell them to him. It started there, and now my artist's studio is a woodworking shop. I am only thirty two years old and I have already secured my retirement by selling my old wood picture frames for outrageous prices to people who can afford to pay outrageous prices. I get a lot of relaxation from working the wood, cutting and sanding, smelling sawdust and the rare vein of sap that has not become desiccated and releases sharp or sugary scents. My only difficulty is finding wood for my frames. Others have begun to copy my work, raiding old farms and fences and driving me further and further away from the city in search of raw materials.
If I see an old barn on one of my drives I pull up to the farmhouse or the nearest home and ask about salvaging the wood. I describe it as saving the wood. Some people think I'm nuts and want to charge for the old wood, but most let me help myself and I go into the dusty dark with my saw in one hand, tools jingling on my work belt. I wear thick gloves, boots with steel soles, and heavy denim. Some of those old structures are like the jaws of an animal, splinters and nails waiting for a chance to pierce my flesh and draw blood. I also wear a hardhat. Many old barns are a breath away from collapse.
I find forgotten things in the barns and lofts I am given access to. Boxes of old tools or cloths or books, shoeboxes full of photos, the accumulated debris of lives ended long ago. Some of these things make me sad, such as opening a box and finding stuffed animals that once belonged to a child and have been shut away and forgotten. Some make me laugh. I once found a small box full of vintage Playboy magazines. If they hadn't been discolored with mildew I would have sold them on eBay. The magazines were from the late fifties and early sixties. Someone had gone through every magazine, at least four dozen of them, and scrawled FLESH IS SIN in large block letters across every single page. That was only outdone by the wooden case I found that I suspect was originally intended to hold a candlestick. It was held shut with twists of wire and when I shook it I heard a rattle, so I cut the wire and found an object wrapped in burlap. There was a piece of notepaper in the folds of burlap. The paper was yellowed with age and written on it in a fine feminine hand was The Devil's Instrument. Inside the burlap was an old dildo, the plastic yellowed and crazed with age. Some of the things make me wonder, like the stack of fading photographs that showed a boy growing into a man in a military uniform and ended with a shot of a headstone or the ones that showed a winsome young girl sitting alone, growing older, dating, marrying, becoming a mother and then a grandmother, the number of people around her growing and then dwindling to the point where she was once again sitting alone at the end of her life after her children had moved away and her husband had died. I wonder what became of those people and why the records of their lives were left to rot.
I take the wood, some of it cut and milled by hand generations ago to create a shelter for animals and a framework for a life of wrenching sustenance from the land, and I turn that wood into picture frames that will hang on walls that will crumble one day just like the barns the frame came from, and those picture frames hold snippets of lives that will one day be just so many memories tucked in a box and forgotten.
User Reviews
Submitted by simple_catalyst (user info) at 2008-07-22 23:32:34 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by X54 (user info) at 2008-07-02 17:46:47 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
FLESH IS SIN!
This was excellent.
A friend of mine spent a fortune on kitchen cabinets made from old wood like you describe ("country primitive" was what he called them). I thought he was an idiot. Now I'm not so sure...
Submitted by F.J.Bell (user info) at 2008-07-02 07:35:51 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Well this was like a lollipop. A pleasant little piece of confection.
Or 'confiction'.
Submitted by Berty (user info) at 2008-07-02 07:27:14 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
heh "the devils instrument"
Submitted by EmissionImpossible (user info) at 2008-07-02 03:17:37 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Well arent these boring comments.
Submitted by coley (user info) at 2008-07-01 22:26:00 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by monkeyswithguns (user info) at 2008-07-01 20:13:25 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by Ballare (user info) at 2008-07-01 19:48:02 EDT (#)
Ranking: 1
Oh.
Submitted by experima (user info) at 2008-07-01 19:34:02 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
No Comment
Submitted by earth_collapse (user info) at 2008-07-01 18:40:48 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
I like.
Submitted by Yozz (user info) at 2008-07-01 18:33:58 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Cool-ass muthafucka below
Submitted by Yozz (user info) at 2008-07-01 18:33:20 EDT (#)
Ranking: 2
Wow
Submitted by apollo88 (user info) at 2008-07-01 18:31:35 EDT (#)
Ranking: 0
well, aren't you Mr. Pompous?