Journal Gazette from Mattoon, Illinois • Page 15

Tminonnf 2C01 DEAR ABBY Need help sorting out your life? C2 MORE INSIDE UfeshKB Comics, C4 Entertainment, CS QUESTIONS OR COMMENTS? CONTACT FEATURES EDITOR BETH HELDEBRANDT C7AT 235-5656 OR 345-7025, ext. 257 OR E-MAIL AT 1 s. ,1 Mt. I RACHEL rr" SYKES 'in II Mm I I II 1 -i f- it: I vr I 4, S. II 'l II ten i i i i hki i i pi i im ii Abraham Lincoln is shedding tears In this work by David Claypool.

"I think if Abraham Lincoln was living today, he would cry over the way life is today," Claypool saTdr David Claypool takes soap, sawdust and more and sculpts, them into anything that comes into his mind Meeting for the first time again If you are weary of recent journalistic fare about dire misfortune, beer tents at local festivals and stem cell research, you can now vary your literary diet with a new topic. Have you ever suddenly realized that a new acquaintance in your life is someone you knew once before? I am not referring to a vague feeling about having met or seen the person in the past. You have no clue until an old memory suddenly surfaces. Many years have lapsed between these meetings. The person is almost unrec: ognizable.

You both may or may not have changed a lot. With memories now awakened, your own intuitive corroboration tells you that you knew this new acquaintance before. You recall details about the earlier meeting or meetings. You have mental images that were stored through no conscious effort on your part. Just exactly how the brain stores pictorial images is not yet understood.

Any connection between two or more suppressed memories may occur even later as much as 40 years or more. Who can say what triggers this connection? An American psychiatrist, internationally acclaimed for his research into the brain's functions, expects much more information about the brain will be discovered during the next 10 years. In the meantime, we can explore our own experiences. I know of at least four instances when the stranger I met had entered my life before, and I had a belated realization of this. We tend to recall our early life as we grow older.

The story that follows tells of meeting someone first as a child and then as an adult without realizing they were one and the same person. Sunday school boy reacts I was about 10 or 11 years old when I was a passenger in the back seat of our car one Sunday morning. Mother and my aunt were making an unannounced visit to a church where my aunt had been a former pastor's wife some years earlier. Upon our arrival we were treated like eagerly awaited guests. We went into the longest and narrowest room I had ever seen.

A very pleasant lady wearing her widest grin informally introduced us. 1 was identified in the context of my relationship to a former pastor's wife. There were a few short rows of the typical rounded-ba'cli wooden Sunday School chairs for children. An extrachairwasfoundforme.lt was placed at the right end of the front row. Slightly larger than those of my younger seatmates, it was still a little cramped for me.

The pleasant lady who seemed to be in charge moved around quickly in the small space allotted her between our rows of chairs and the raised platform to our rightl became aware of a cherubic-faced, happy-looking boy facing all of us from the side. The lady referred to him several times as "Matt" in ways that I did not comprehend. "Matt" was slightly larger than the rest of us. He appeared to be held in high esteem and seemed very self-confident, as though enjoying a position accorded to a royal family. Could he have been the pastor's well socially-programmed son? We began to sing a couple of unfamiliar-sounding songs.

They seemed uninspiring to me. I was used to the familiar peppy tunes of my own Sunday School. My attention was quickly diverJejLto the handsome young fellow sitting alone off to my right. All he did was act like an overseer. "Matt" had not seemed to be aware of my presence earlier when I was having a good gawk at him.

I never saw him even look my way, I found his continuously-smiling face quite charismatic. There was a lull in the opening i "i TV -fr yv BY SUE SMYSER Features Writer Dipping his hand into a recycled coffee can, David Claypool scooped up a fistful of white goo and mixed it with fine sawdust, kneading, plying and squeezing the mixture to get the right feel. When the now brown, softball-size glob was the thickness of clay, he poked a finger into two places, pulled out the shape of a nose in another spot and added a cheerful smile. Just as quickly, he squeezed the face back into a ball shape and set it aside, with plans to make it into something else later, possibly a dog, cat or duck. "It's a family thing to do," he said.

Claypool, 61, of Mattoon became interested in creating things when he was going through a divorce at the age of 27 and needed a way to relieve stress. "I felt like I was going insane. I read an article in Readers Digest about sculpting. I prayed that night that the Lord would let me do something" with my hands," he said. "I picked up a bar of soap and the first thing I carved was a horse's head, and a friend bought it," Claypool said.

Now, he says, "I can carve anything I He said he doesn't study art books or take classes because he wants his art to be as original as it can be. Claypool brushes his various sculptures with acrylic paint and lets them dry, then gives them several coats of polyurethane sealer. When it's finished, the piece is feather light and extremely tough, as he demonstrated by throwing one on the floor. "I waste nothing," he said. "I melt the soap scraps from my carvings in a pan and get a gel, then add sawdust and it makes a paste.

If you have toilet tissue, soap, a fork, knife, spoon and food dye, you can create." Sometimes he takes the created piece and coats it in 'thick liquid latex. When it dries, he peels it off in one piece and pours plaster of Paris into the mold to make duplicates of a certain piece. Of all the items he has created, he is most proud of a historical clock he designed. It has a red, white and blue flag containing 13 stars and features a prominent bust of Abraham Lincoln crying and a poem that Claypool wrote himself. "I studied how (Lincoln) sptike and wrote a poem that I put on the plaque," Claypool said.

"I think if Abraham Lincoln was living today, he would cry over the way life is today." Claypool also dabbles in writing poetry and enjoys creating cartoons. He has a book of designs he put together, and he is now working on a plaster of Paris bust of a friend. He also likes to write songs. Claypool said he was trying to get a grant from the Illinois Arts Council to further his work. "They call my art traditional art, but I don't think you can call it traditional.

I guess you might say its primal or primitive." Referring to himself as a starving artist, he says .1 he is a poor man's sculptor. "I think simplicity brings honesty and the mix is a marriage." He said he gets enjoyment out of art and is not in competition, just doing what he likes to do. "I've got so many ideas, it's pathetic," he said. "There is no limit in art, but what you limit yourself to." wtffc -i i i kll.lldl I David Claypool mixes soap and sawdust as a medium for his work. -tew 13': 4- 1 II Kn til Above Is a cat Claypool made.

At right re two figures he created, the first made of plaster, and the other made of sawdust. See MEETING AGAIN, C2.