Published: September 13, 2009 10:25 pm      

Receiving his rust rewards

Chris Beck was working as a carpenter renovating historic homes in Chattanooga when the housing market crashed.

“That’s all I knew,” said the 33-year-old Dalton resident. “That’s all I had done. I was freaking out.

“We felt the hit with my job in January (of this year),” he said.

Beck, who had already begun selling his metal sculptures at area art shows, decided to turn to his artwork full time. He and his wife, Susan, decided to rely completely on God to help them through.

“When you feel like your choices have become nil and void, you are left with God,” Beck said. “It was around March of this year I started doing this full-time.... It was an all-out blessing food fight. God was like ‘Here. Here.’ I didn’t go two or three days without an e-mail or phone call, without something affirming the decision... Financially there were blessings as well. It’s not like we’re making a ton of money, but the money’s not what’s important. It’s the encouragement. Man, God’s been so good.”

Beck is scheduled to participate in several art shows in the next few weeks, including the Creative Arts Guild Festival on Saturday and Sunday and the One Bridge Folk Art Festival in Chattanooga Sept. 26-27.

Beck uses scrap metal and old machine parts to make everything from flowers and butterflies to Jesus hanging on the cross to clothing. His materials are donated by friends and family.

“I think it’s really cool that you can make flowers and bumble bees and lady bugs out of metal, but they’re still light and airy,” Beck said. “The rustier the better. My stuff is not polished or clean. It is rusty. Even though it’s rusty metal, it’s not gross. It’s pretty. It’s easy to look at.”

Some of Beck’s more unique pieces are the clothing he sculpts using sheets of roofing tin. A pair of blue metal pants with patches hangs from suspenders in his tool shed in the backyard of his home. He has also made polka-dot underwear hanging on a clothes line and a suit, complete with a red rose in the lapel — both of which have sold.

“Some how, some way I came across an old ironing board,” Beck said. “I thought ‘What am I going to do with an old ironing board?’ I put a (metal) shirt on it with an iron. That’s how I started making clothes.”

The roofing tin is harder to weld with than some of the other metals Beck uses, he said.

“It doesn’t weld easily because the welder is so hot,” he said. “It’s like holding a match to a piece of paper.”

Beck uses the roofing tin to make many of his sculptures, including flower petals and butterflies. Beck paints many of the sculptures, made with the roofing tin, with latex house paint.

Many of his other sculptures, including a giant eagle in his backyard, are left unpainted.

A sculpture of Jesus hanging on the cross sits near his patio. It is made up of many farm machine parts, including tractor axles and gaskets. Another sculpture of a dancer is made of items, including screws and door knobs.

Some of Beck’s ideas come from photographs he sees, but many are given to him by Susan. After watching the popular TV show “So You Think You Can Dance,” Susan gave her husband the idea to sculpt a dancer.

Beck does not have an artistic background and has never received formal training. He had never welded before he began sculpting two years ago.

Beck’s love for folk art began several years before he took it up himself. He and his wife began collecting pieces after visiting a home with several pieces of folk art.

“We decided instead of getting a new toaster... or something for each other for our anniversary, we would get art,” he said. “We both wanted to do the art thing. That turned into Christmas, birthdays, Halloween, because it was Tuesday. We just started buying stuff.”

The couple focused on collecting pieces from untrained artists and sculptors, many of whom had other jobs as concrete masons or junk yard owners.

Through that hobby, the Becks met Charlie Lucas, a junk yard owner from Alabama who has become a well-known folk artist.

“He does metal sculpture, and he is the real deal,” Chris Beck said. “He is what I consider a true artist. After seeing him in his environment and what he did, I wanted to weld something.”

The Becks were living in Atlanta at the time, and Chris Beck began bringing home scraps of metal from job sites or “random pieces of metal I found on the side of the road,” he said.

“I started bringing home a muffler here, a tire rim there, an old rusty wrench, a gear part from a bicycle,” Beck said. “That was in October of 2006.”

By December — Beck had not begun welding — but had a large collection of rusty metal growing in his back yard.

“I said, ‘You either need to do something with this or get it out of my yard,’” Susan Beck said. “I’m glad he finally did something with it. It would have been a real shame to have thrown it all away. It’s exciting for me to see him do something he is passionate about.”

The following April, with about 30 pieces finished, Beck applied for an art show in Chattanooga called Who-Fest, which is held each Memorial Day weekend. He was accepted, and has been participating in shows ever since.

It was being in Chattanooga for that show that caused the Becks to want to move to north Georgia. They found Dalton, and have been living here for two years.

“It’s really cool to get up and go to work every day in my back yard,” Chris Beck said. “It’s work.... but it’s pleasure. It’s a joy. It is very fulfilling.... It’s very humbling for me to have other people approach what I did and appreciate it so much. They’re getting a feeling from a rusty piece of metal. That’s so awesome.”