Tin Man
192 pages, 10 x 11
200 color figures
Hardcover
Release Date:23 Aug 2009
ISBN:9780817316815
Tin Man
By Charlie Lucas and Ben Windham; Foreword by Robert Farris Thompson and Robert Farris Thomps; By (photographer) Chip Cooper; Introduction by Georgine Clarke
University of Alabama Press
Showcases the extraordinary life and work of an internationally significant Alabama folk artist
Charlie Lucas is a self-taught artist. Although he has made art since childhood, only since a debilitating accident in 1984 did Lucas turn to art seriously as a form of personal expression. He has since become recognized nationally and internationally as a great innovator in the field of American folk art.
From his workshop in Pink Lily, Alabama--a rural wonderland of objects, sculptures, paintings, buildings, and installations--Charlie Lucas makes his art from materials that others have discarded (as he himself believes he was once discarded): old tin, bicycle wheels, shovels, car mufflers, tractor seats, metal banding, wire, and gears. His work is visionary, in every sense of the word, each creation the result of an intense communion with his heritage, ancestors, race, family, and his own choices in life. Every work is imbued with a story.
With more than 200 vivid color photographs--of the artist at work, his studio environments, and his finished creations--Tin Man presents Lucas through his own words and stories--his troubled and impoverished childhood, his self-awakening to the depths of his own artistic vision, his perseverance through years of derision and misapprehension, and the salvation that has come through international acclaim and recognition, love of family, and his role as a teacher of children.
Charlie Lucas is a self-taught artist. Although he has made art since childhood, only since a debilitating accident in 1984 did Lucas turn to art seriously as a form of personal expression. He has since become recognized nationally and internationally as a great innovator in the field of American folk art.
From his workshop in Pink Lily, Alabama--a rural wonderland of objects, sculptures, paintings, buildings, and installations--Charlie Lucas makes his art from materials that others have discarded (as he himself believes he was once discarded): old tin, bicycle wheels, shovels, car mufflers, tractor seats, metal banding, wire, and gears. His work is visionary, in every sense of the word, each creation the result of an intense communion with his heritage, ancestors, race, family, and his own choices in life. Every work is imbued with a story.
With more than 200 vivid color photographs--of the artist at work, his studio environments, and his finished creations--Tin Man presents Lucas through his own words and stories--his troubled and impoverished childhood, his self-awakening to the depths of his own artistic vision, his perseverance through years of derision and misapprehension, and the salvation that has come through international acclaim and recognition, love of family, and his role as a teacher of children.
[Tin Man is] a highly readable and gloriously beautiful book that provides the next best experience to seeing the works at Lucas's home in Pink Lily. Tin Man will be treasured by fans of folk art, but anyone with an interest in Alabama culture and the social and economic conditions that have produced numerous nationally known self-taught artists will find it rewarding.’
—The Alabama Review
'Charlie Lucas's sculptures are like kudzu: they remold the silhouette of an object, casting it in a different light. His subjects are the African mask, the slave, chains from the past, and the industrial future. His totem-like figures trace Alabama's Native American culture though the blood-baths and bloodstreams, wrought and welded in iron and steel. His junkyard complex comprising acres of rusting machine bits, sculptures, and the occasional grazing cow, is as terrifying as it is beautiful, and it reminds us what happens to man and his inventions when nature has 'had enough.''
—NALL
This Art-with-a-capital-A book is an astutely synchronized compilation of as-told-to autobiography that often reads like music sounds, and brilliant images that look as if they might leap off the pages. In fifteen triumphant chapters, Ben Windham has corralled the essence of wit and wisdom, creative energy, and life-experience of internationally known folk artist Charlie Lucas.’
—Julia Oliver for Alabama Writers Forum
Chip Cooper is Artist-in-Residence in the Honors College at The University of Alabama and coauthor of Silent in the Land and Common Threads: Photographs and Stories from the South.
Ben Windham is the former editorial page editor ofThe Tuscaloosa News.
Robert Farris Thompson is the Colonel John Trumball Professor of the History of Art at YaleUniversity and the author of Flash of the Spirit.
Georgine Clarke is Visual Arts Program Manager at the Alabama State Council on the Arts and founding Director of the Kentuck Arts Festival in Northport, Alabama.
Related Titles
Headwaters
A Journey on Alabama Rivers
By Beth Maynor Young and John C. Hall; Foreword by Rick Middleton
Visions of the Black Belt
A Cultural Survey of the Heart of Alabama
By Robin McDonald and Valerie Pope Burnes; By (photographer) Robin McDonald
