Charlie Lucas | Artist of the Alabama Public Television Art Auction

Artists « Charlie Lucas

Charlie Lucas (Folk Mixed-Media)

Charlie Lucas, popularly known as “Tin Man,” has attracted a large following, and his work has been included in numerous exhibitions and museum collections. In recent years, he has traveled widely, lecturing at Yale University at the invitation of an African-American studies scholar and spending time as an artist-in-residence in France. But Lucas still lives and works in a remote community in Autauga County, Alabama, where he and his wife Annie raised their six children in a house built by Charlie himself.

A job-related accident in 1984 resulted in back injuries that forced Lucas to give up his employment as a building maintenance man at a healthcare facility. While recovering from back surgery, he asked God to help him find something to do that no one else could do. That is when he began working in metal. As an adolescent, he had worked as a farm machinery operator and had learned repair and welding skills on that heavy equipment. When he became tired of receiving misdirected mail at his address, Lucas conceived the idea of creating a distinctive, whimsical mailbox from the scrap metal parts that were plentiful around his house. The resulting iron man with a mail receptacle tucked under his arm solved the problem, and the postman had no more trouble identifying the Lucas’ home.

Lucas’ success encouraged him to make other such figures. Gradually, the creations moved in both directions from this first work: upward, to towering, gigantic men made entirely of spot-welded steel ribbons or twelve- to fifteen-foot dinosaurs of the same materials, and downward, to ten- to fifteen-inch men and animals made of railroad spikes, bent wire, and other pieces of scrap metal. Although he has no formal art training, Lucas’ sculptural work clearly combines sills he learned from observing his grandfather’s mechanical and automotive repair techniques, his grandmother’s basket-weaving, and his great grandfather’s blacksmithing.

In addition to creating three-dimensional sculptures, Lucas also paints. Indeed, painting was his first artistic endeavor after his back injury, but he found that painting did not bring in enough money to support his family while he was out of work. As in his sculpture, humor is frequently the underlying theme of his colorful paintings, which combine realistic and quasi-abstract elements.

Lucas says, “I go to…the scrap yards. I go to dump sites. And I want kids to see this thing—I don’t want them to see it in the shiny…newness of it. I don’t even attempt to paint so much of my work. I leave my sculptures natural…because you want the kids to see the [our] whole society is not shiny and pretty, glamorous as we pretend it is—because it’s not. If we…really peel ourselves back and look at the true part of ourselves, we would be some of the ugliest things you want to see.”

Lucas maintains a close friendship with fishing buddy Kathryn Tucker Windham, Alabama’s grande dame of storytelling. The Birmingham Museum of Art is currently exhibiting the work of Charlie Lucas, and the University of Alabama Press is releasing a book about Lucas this fall, authored by Ben Windham, Kathryn’s son.

Items in the APT Auction

Charlie Lucas Folk Art Sculpture (1)
The Man With Blue Hair

Charlie Lucas Folk Art Sculpture (2)
Family

Charlie Lucas (Folk Mixed-Media)

Items in the APT Auction

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