Landscape with Spinocerebellar Degenerations

My maternal grandfather, Arthur Franklin Clark, died of Parkinson's disease in November of 1990. He kept to himself, was frugal, and self-sufficient. A self-taught carpenter, He worked for the CB&Q railroad doing carpentry and maintenance.Even though he was uneducated, and largely uncultured in a modern intellectual sense, he made things that mattered. By example, he taught me how to work and how to be resourceful, to gather and build.

In the late 1940’s he purchased a piece of property at Lake Bracken in Illinois. Lake Bracken is a man made lake that was built by the railroad in the 19th Century to supply the steam engines. Nearby Galesburg was once a major railroad hub with an extensive switching yard and the largest coupling hump in the country. It was on this heavily timbered hilltop that my Grandfather built his house.

The core of this house was one of two boxcars that my Grandfather had hauled up to the property. The other boxcar was transformed into a work shed and storage facility. At the bottom of the hill was a valley, through which ran Brush Creek. Here, throughout the mid to late sixties and early seventies, was where I spent a lot of my childhood.

My Grandfather was very quiet, short tempered and worked from dawn to dark, adding on to the house, tending the property and the large vegetable garden.
My Grandfather made bird houses, and toys for us kids with scrap wood from the railroad yard; stilts, Chinese Checkers, and other games. He had a black WWII Jeep that he used to maintain the property. We would gather in the back for wild rides through paths in the timber. He kept the jeep in a carport he built that was connected to the garage some 400 yards from the house. This was his workshop and sanctuary. Tools, vices, drab green paint, and Playboy centerfolds stuck between the window and the carport wall.

The house had a large screened-in porch that faced north. During the summer, my cousins, and friends from town would visit with me and we would sleep there. There was a large picnic shelter under a massive oak tree. There was a canvas shade on the east side that was lowered on summer mornings so that the rising sun would not shine in our eyes. My Grandmother would fix breakfast there at dawn with her electric skillet and toaster. She would make scrambled eggs with the morel mushrooms we would gather in the timber. When the sun was full up, the shade glowed a deep yellow.

In the mid seventies, they sold the house and property and moved to a retirement community in northern Arkansas. A new house, garden, carport and woodshed were built on a wooded lot much smaller than the one in Lake Bracken. At Thanksgiving in 1989, I moved into their house to help my Grandmother. Being alone, my Grandmother could no longer care for him as his disease progressed. At times he was sentient, and I tried to get in touch with him to let him know how much his work and life had empowered my own. I set up in his small storage shed and made the seminal models that, a few years later, would bloom into my current work.

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