Tin Man - Hardcover

Charlie Lucas

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0817316817 ISBN 13: 9780817316815

Publisher: The University of Alabama Press, 2009

Synopsis

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.

About this title

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

About the Author:

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: The University of Alabama Press
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0817316817
• ISBN 13: 9780817316815
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 192