Living His Art

The first time I met acclaimed artisan Barney Bellinger, he was walking in my sister’s house with a school kid’s grin and a big basket of mushrooms.

 

“I just found these oysters on the tree behind your shed,” he asked causally.  “There are tons of them. How about if I cook them up for the dinner?”  Lightly sautéed with herbs from the garden, they were the most delicious mushrooms we had ever tasted.  It was only later he shared the story of four friends, one an expert “forager” who had all been poisoned by one errant wild woods mushroom at a dinner party.

 

As I came to know Barney and his wife Susan, I grew to admire not only his artistic talents with paint and furniture, but also the way they live.  Untethered to “things,” they are in constant motion, retreating comfortably into nature’s wombs to recharge and discover elements for his furniture and artwork. Barney is considered by many to be the preeminent living rustic artist, and he only accepts limited commissions, preferring instead to follow his own creative process.


Like many artisans, Barney chooses to make his pieces one at a time. His upstate New York studio is full of found and foraged items and he makes a point of always working with apprentices, to teach others the finer points of his craft.  And while industry executives have tried to convince him to replicate his designs on a more mass level, he has always politely declined, despite the financial opportunity. More than anyone else I have ever met, Barney knows how to live in the moment.

 

The seasons are his guide for where he will go and how long he will stay.  Summer and late autumn find him in his beloved Adirondack Mountains gathering knobby root burls, twigs, salvage metal and flea market finds, moving from camp to camp and to art shows.  He heads to Montana in September, for fly-fishing when the already-quiet state gets even quieter.  Then it’s the Florida Keys in March, which were the inspiration for a line of furniture related to cigar boxes.  In the winter he takes all of the objects and natural elements he has collected back to his studio in Mayfield, N.Y. and spends those cold months creating.

 

“If I like it, I figure other people will like it,” is his philosophy.  And he has a very keenly honed sense of form with function.

Wood fish by Barney Bellinger

Painting by Barney Bellinger

Because his furniture and paintings will always be on my list of desired objects, I wanted to interview Barney to understand how he approaches his craft and ends up doing exactly what he wants to do.

 

Q- You’ve had an interesting journey to become an artist, can you describe it?

 

A -  I started detailing motorcycles and building custom bikes.  I’d go down to Daytona Beach in the 70s for bike week and I’d pinstripe bikes all day.  A fire ravaged my business and I lost all my equipment and 23 bikes.   That put an end to my company.

 

Q -  Fire places a significant role in your life.  How do you explain that? 

 

A- There have been eight fires in my family.  I can’t figure it out.  My father was burned severely, my business, I lost the use of an arm for an extended period in a fire two years ago.  It must mean something but I haven’t figured it out yet.

 

Q – So what happened after your business fire?

 

A- I started a hand-painted sign business in the Saratoga Springs area.  And that just evolved into creating paintings and then creating my furniture.  When you are an artist, the only limitations you have are the ones you put on yourself.

 

Q –So, you’ve never been tempted to “go Starbucks,” never wanted to turn your work in to mass production or take on tons of apprentices?

 

A – No way.  No interest.  I can think of a number of times I’ve turned a check back to a client who had gotten too overbearing about the creative process and tried to give me too much direction.   I respect the integrity of my pieces and the people who are going to possess them.  I want them all to go to good homes.  I like people’s input, but it’s hard to work when someone is trying to control my output.

 

Q- You have some pretty heady clients?

 

A- I never name names but yes, my pieces are in the homes of some of America’s most well known families, heads of businesses and in many great lodges in Montana and camps in the Adirondacks.  But you never forget where you come from.  I think of all of my clients the same way, even the person who paid me for a piece in $20 dollar installments for years.

 

Q- Where are you most at home?

 

A –On a remote Adirondack pond, like the West Canada Wilderness Area or on a backcountry stream in Gallatin National Forest in Montana.

 

Q- What do you see in buying patterns now as a reflection of the economy?

 

A- I‘m fortunate that people still want to buy my work but what I’m seeing is “purposeful purchasing.” Before the economic downturn, people would buy any piece I had finished, regardless of whether or not they had a place to put them.  Now they are buying specific pieces or paintings they have an exact place for in mind.



I hope you get a chance to see a Barney Bellinger piece in person sometime.  Like most great works of art, the photos can’t do them justice.  Here is a quote from Barney about the philosophy of his work:

 

“I do not paint to please critics but rather to record my travels.  Information and inspiration is derived through my lifestyle of exploring backwoods ponds, lakes and mountain trails.  Lean-to’s and tent camps provide shelter.  Foraging for raw materials is always an opportunity to study natural forms and color. Painting for me is a privilege.”

www.leewoodruff.com   facebook.com/leemwoodruff   twitter@LeeMWoodruff 

FEVER BLISTERS AND EX BOYFRIENDS

Picture this:  I’m about to see my college boyfriend for the first time in 15 years.  I’m flying into his town for a book talk and will be staying at his house.  That’s right.  With his wife and kids.  He’s picking me up at the airport now and we’re triangulating where to meet via cell phone. 

 

Background:   This isn’t some prom date kind of boyfriend.  This was my first serious college relationship, my first adult love, the kind of solid, healthy relationship I’d wish for all of my daughters.

 

Disclosure:  We’ve remained in touch for years, and my husband loves him.  I love his wife.  The four of us lived in Northern California back when they first met and before we had kids.  So, if you imagined me starving myself for two months to get down to some kind of skinny jeans fighting weight, it’s not like that. This is a guy who lovingly cleaned my meatloaf splattered vomit off his record collection (and my face) after my 20th birthday celebration.   This is a good guy, the kind of guy that has prompted my husband to regularly remark “You had good taste.”  I’d like to think I still do.

 

Regardless, 15 years without seeing someone and you might be hankering to put your best foot--- or face—forward.   But here was the thing.  A few days earlier I had booked a facial laser treatment, to scrub off all those pre-cancerous sun spots and hope for some new collagen and a more youthful visage. Clearly, I had not thought through the timing of the recovery.

 

So, sit back for a moment and imagine meeting your old love.  Now imagine your face, red and puffy like a broiled tomato, two small, hard, raisin eyes.  If the swelling and the irritation weren’t bad enough, somewhere on the flight across the country my immune system had begun to respond to the procedure the way it does to an extreme sun burn, by forming a fever blister. Except that my face thought this was Armageddon.


This was no one little boo boo.  This was a blooming beard of blisters, a veritable Fu Manchu of herpes tattooed around my lips like a ring of fire.  Have I traumatized you enough yet?  Because let me just lay on the last visual.  The top layer of my skin had begun to peel, which was the desired result of the treatment. But don’t picture tiny little flakes off the bridge of a nose.  I want you to imagine a full Komodo dragon molting, big patches of dry skin hitting the ground with leper colony speed.  Yes, you are probably thinking, these are not optimal conditions under which to see your old boyfriend?  All that was missing was a dowager’s hump and a black tooth.

 

Naturally, I was quick to explain.  Luckily, he is a doctor.  So he was somewhat sympathetic to my plight. At the very least he understood the human body.  I did tell him that I’d been considering an eyelid lift for some time and if he knew anyone in Denver maybe we could book it right now and I could get all the ugly healing drama over with at once.  Adding insult to injury, envision how desperate you have to be to ask your old boyfriend to write you a prescription for cold sore meds.  Did I mention the swollen, burned face and oozing blisters were uncomfortable?  Did I mention it was actually his wife who kindly called it in and drove me to the pharmacy to pick it up?  Did I also mention how much I like her?

  

All of the above either takes a giant pair of stones or a total lack of vanity, neither of which are particularly desirable qualities in a woman.  So I’m not quite sure what this story really says about me. The visual alone is unsettling.

 

If it seems odd to be in that kind of touch with an old boyfriend, I’m in the camp who believes it’s a gift to know people from your past.  Yes, yes, if your ex turned out to be a serial rapist or an Internet porn king, you might want to cut ties.  But I’ve actually kept up with a number of old boyfriends.  There was a solid reason I was attracted to them in the first place and in most cases those reasons are still valid.

 

Listen, I get it.  I understand why people don’t keep in touch.  I know there are sickos and stalkers and people who change dramatically or never get past high school.  I’ve seen those movies.  Lord knows I dated a few ratfinks.  But for the most part, I’m happy to have kept in contact with the good eggs.


We move on, we grow up; we begin to define ourselves and figure out what we want and need in a partner. And all of the people we meet along the way are part of that process of discovery.  There is a sweet nostalgia in connecting with the people we used to be, that freer, younger, less encumbered version of our present selves.  People from our past help us to do that, in admittedly both positive and sometimes negative ways.  Old loves helped to bring us to the place we are now.  My sister calls past boyfriends “the first pancake” – the one you cook and then throw out, the one you use to temper the skillet for the real breakfast.

 

Still, I have a hard time understanding people who are jealous of their spouse’s past relationships, especially the people who predated them.  I am grateful for my husband’s former experiences, his old loves.   He got some great practice time in the field.  The way I think of it is – I won the prize.  I got the ring.  Relax; I want to say to the haters.   But I guess I’m not a very jealous person by nature and neither is he.

 

Recently, I was reminded that my kumbaya approach to the past is not shared by all.  I agreed to meet an old high school and family friend (note= not a boyfriend) for a quick drink during his business trip to New York.   My husband knew where I was, but it was obvious the next morning that he and his wife didn’t share the same level of open communication.

 

I woke up to a series of psycho emails, the Internet equivalent of a jealous woman scrawling lipstick threats on your mirror.  She had clearly been reading his email and monitoring our back and forth as we chose a restaurant location and bantered around some stupid inside jokes from high school.   As I opened each email I read with growing dread the comments she had edited into our correspondence, phrases like “don’t you know he’s married?”  or “isn’t this cute that you are meeting.”  Cue the Hitchcock soundtrack.

 

The level of crazy was so preposterous for a harmless 45-minute beer that at first I was convinced my friend was playing a joke on me.  And then I realized this was dead serious.  Radio silence from my friend.  He may still be tied up in a basement bomb shelter somewhere with a pillowcase over his head. Suffice it to say that kind of behavior was a good reason to cut ties with the past.

 

After I returned from the Denver trip, still slightly swollen but with the fever blisters medicated down to milk moustache size, my friend’s wife sent a copy of what their youngest daughter had written as an exercise in school that next day. “…then I swimmed at the pools and ate S’mores and then we had to go home and see my Dad’s girlfriend Lee.”

 

I can still picture it now, the look of astonishment on his daughters’ sweet faces as I walked in their house, hot sauce-red face, squinting like Popeye minus the corn cob pipe.  I could see their young brains processing how in the world their beloved father had ever given this raggedy assed woman a second look, let alone dated her for two years.  Perhaps it was an act of grace, his eldest daughter must have concluded.  Like a “Make a Wish” foundation experience.

 

And as three sets of eyes flicked between their mother, and me I could almost see the cartoon bubbles above their beautiful heads…. “Thank Heavens Dad picked Mom.”


www.leewoodruff.com   facebook.com/leemwoodruff   twitter@LeeMWoodruff 

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