COPPER SILVICULTURE

By J. Trace Kirkwood

When I’m out on the road, I never know what type of people I’m going to encounter. I would be lying if I said that the constant travel wasn’t a bit fatiguing. It is. If I’ve been on the road a lot during the week, I find myself nodding off around 8:30 on a Friday night because the miles and time and uneven rhythm of the road all converge upon me by that hour. At times I’m torn, though. The road can be wearing, but I shudder at the thought of being confined in some fluorescent lighted hell-hole office in some non-descript building in some smog-blanketed city somewhere.

I’m free out there on the road, but it is not really the freedom that invigorates me. It’s the people. I work with a lot of fantastic people, and they all are very kind to me. That helps a lot, but sometimes I find complete strangers who make me thankful I’m not pinned up in an office.

John VandenBrook is one of those strangers, and I met him on Tuesday (Nov. 20, 2007) while working at the Fulton County Courthouse in Hickman, Kentucky. I noticed John and his family early in the day. He was helping his wife and daughter pore through old marriage and estate records in the county clerk’s office while I was helping the staff move old records out of the attic in preparation for a move. I was busy, and they were busy, so I did not speak to them.

When I was pulling out of the parking lot in the afternoon, I noticed VandenBrook sitting in the back of his family’s mini-van with a fistful of tiny copper wires that went off in all different directions out of his hand. My curiosity got the best of me, so I stopped and asked him what and the heck he was doing. A big smile came across his face, and he said, “I’m making my trees.”

I got out of my car and found him sitting next to a box of intricately crafted trees made of copper wire and colorful beads and crystals fastened to quartzite rocks. Only, he doesn’t just stick the colorful trees to the rocks, he crafts the root system just as intricately as the branches and leaves so that it looks like the roots are clinging onto and into the stone. They were beautiful. And, there Mr. VandenBrook was twisting and bending tiny strands of copper into another one of his fantastic creations. He was very at ease with what was doing, and I was at ease watching him. I’ve always found watching artists and craftsmen doing their work to be very relaxing.

“Oh, I got a little bored in there,” VandenBrook told me, “so I came out here to make another tree. I always carry my supplies with me.” He pointed to another small box in the back of the van.

It looked to me that his supplies were nothing more than some copper wire, beads, crystals, a few large rocks, and his hands. Before my very eyes those four components were coming together in the form of another tree to be placed on a flashing piece of stone full of flecks of mica. I wondered if he was forming the big maple tree in front of the courthouse or some tree from the corners of his imagination.

The whole time he talked to me, his hands worked those wires, pulling off five or ten of the small strands to fashion a branch or a series of stems.

Even though he struggled in his high school art classes, VandenBrook always considered himself to be an artist. His creations in high school didn’t exactly conform to the curriculum the art teachers had in mind, but he developed his talent in sculpting wire into trees later in life. While he worked in a machine shop in Missouri, he started crafting spiders and other bugs and fastened them to the sides of the machines so they looked as if they were crawling on them.

One day he took some of the copper and fashioned it into a tree. A fellow employee took it and asked if he could make another. Soon, most of his fellow workers were asking if he could make them one of his trees. It resulted in the classic success story. VandenBrook ended up doing a private show for a group of wealthy women in Montgomery, Alabama, which is near where he lives. Now, his artwork is in galleries in Alabama, Missouri, and Kentucky. He also travels to art shows throughout the South.

Not all of his creations fit in the palm of a person’s hand. He has made trees as large as six or eight feet tall, and his father displays one of the trees in his front yard in Missouri.

While he and I were talking he explained that he gives a lot of his artwork away to charitable organizations to auction. “God gave me this talent,” he said, “so, I figure I should use for some good.”

That’s part of the beauty of this world. A man can get bored and sit in the parking lot of a Kentucky courthouse and twist simple copper wire into magnificent artistic creations.