Hey, Dollface

Nov 26, 2011

As has become the custom in recent years, my family met at my sister's house in scenic Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania for Thanksgiving dinner. Aside from rare quality time with my family, a highlight of any visit to my sister’s house is poking around to see what my sister's de facto husband, Dan, has been up to lately.

"Outsider Art" is a term the art world attaches to work created by people who usually lack two things: money and unbridled ambition. Or, at the very least, connections. Although Dan lacks all these things, I’m not sure he’s eccentric enough to qualify as a true "Outsider." Though, maybe. "Folk Art"? Mmm, again, maybe.

He makes things out of broken machinery, old bicycles, cloudy lenses, rusty springs, and whatever else he finds while rummaging through life. When he saw me taking pictures of his various paintings and sculptures, he pulled me aside and took me to the basement. No disrespect to Dan or what he makes out of what he finds, but his workshop might be even more interesting than his art. Looking around, it's hard to tell what anything is. "Is that a tool? Is it a work in progress? Is it an unmolested turn-of-the-century widget?" Very often, whatever you pick up is a carcass of something Dan put together, then took apart again. "It used to be a bird, but I needed those springs for the motorcycle over there."

He makes a lot of partially functional vehicles. That is to say, vehicles that often (but not always) roll and usually have something on them that, if you push or pull or wind, will do something, although none are rideable in any practical sense. You'd never know it to hear— or better yet, see — Dan explain them, however. It's easy to get caught up in his vivid descriptions and imagine these rusty jalopies puttering down the street, spitting oil and coughing smoke. If nowhere else, at least in a parade.

The backyard, too, is filled with rusty curiosities getting rustier. Jasper, my sister's three-legged dog, followed us outside to smell a collection of sculptures I'm sure he's smelled a thousand time before. Dan reached down and scratched Jasper behind the ear, on the side of his missing hind leg, and Jasper's eyes rolled back in ecstasy.

"Did you take any pictures of the porch?" Dan asked.

Jasper sensed we were about to go back inside and rushed to take a quick piss. We waited for him to lift his stump and relieve himself then headed to the other side of the house.

"This is my favorite place in the world," said Dan.

The next day, we walked into town, and Dan showed me a storefront in a historic stone building that he considered renting. It was a well-lit gallery space, about 500 square feet, with an equally sized workroom in back. In the end, Dan didn't think he could cover the rent by selling his creations to tourists, and he let the opportunity pass. The space was subsequently rented and now housed a smelly-soap-gift shop. Dan and I stood outside on the street while Deborah and my sister lingered inside the store.

The rent was 500 bucks. After looking at storefronts in New York when Deborah had been thinking of opening a jewelry store, 500 sounded like a bargain. "You don't think you could cover that nut?" I asked Dan.

"Not without cranking out a bunch of cheap little knick-knacks to sell. Nobody spends a couple of hundred bucks on sculptures around here."

"I see your point," I said. "But the stores don’t seem to carry anything you couldn’t find in any other tourist town. I think you could create a unique vibe."

"I'm one hundred percent sure I could make an interesting space, and that people would definitely poke in to have a look, but I'm not convinced they'd buy what I'm selling."

"Maybe you could paint little local landscapes. Those sell, don't they?"

"Yeah, I suppose."

"I'm always bewildered by how gift shops like this one selling smelly soap thrive. It seems that no matter what else there is to see or do in any given artsy fartsy tourist town, women will always buy smelly soap."

Just then, Deborah stepped out of the store carrying a paper bag. She stopped on the sidewalk, unrolled the bag, put it up to her nose, and sniffed. "I bought a soap," she said.