To Be Or Not To Be

Wood becomes art in Adkins’ hands

Woodworking is a passion for John Adkins, a Fayetteville physician, who will show his creations for the first time this weekend.
Woodworking is a passion for John Adkins, a Fayetteville physician, who will show his creations for the first time this weekend.

Just as a sculptor leaves no stone unturned, John Adkins leaves no piece of wood unexamined.

For the Fayetteville physician, wood is a passion, an art - and maybe a little bit of an obsession.

Adkins’ home on East Mountain is full to overflowing with his largescale wooden creations, which might explain why the time has finally come for him to exhibit and sell some of them.

“Getting ready for the show has been something like running a marathon or pulling teeth,” he admits. But “I decided to make myself do this.”

Walking from piece to piece with Adkins, it becomes clear that letting any of his art go will be difficult. He remembers where he acquired every tree, and each has spoken to him of its desire to become something that lives on.

“I’ve always built things, made things,” he says. As a youngster in the Arkansas “flatlands” - Manila - he did wood burning and carving, but about 10 or 12 years ago, he started hauling home logs - and then stumps - and then whole trees. Many of them were rotten inside, but to Adkins, that’s where much of the beauty waits to be revealed. Box elder, for instance, turns a deep blood red when it rots, and Adkins can show off that color by cleaning the wood, then stabilizing it with epoxy and sometimes metal rods.

And then it speaks to him.

Some pieces become functional - benches, tables - and some have wilder ideas. They grow up to bedancers .... or spiders ... or a giant fish with carved teeth and secret compartments in its head.

Working only with a chain saw, a grinder, a sander, a drill and various chisels, “I’m releasing the wood from its prison,” Adkins says.

Adkins has as many as 50 pieces in progress at any given time. Part of the problem with letting pieces leave his workshop is that “it’s hard to say anything is ever finished,” he explains.

“You can sand on it forever.” Fortunately, he adds, “I’m not having to eke out a living as an artist. That frees me up artistically.”

Adkins chose medicine as a career path when his childhood dream of becoming an astronaut failed him. He has motion sickness.

But medicine became a passion, too - particularly wellness - and when he’s not working with wood, he’s encouraging patients tomake healthy food choices.

Spending money on more expensive food with fewer additives and preservatives translates to spending less money on expensive medicines, he believes.

As for his own health plan, it happens in his workshop, his yard and in the forests where he finds his next project. He doesn’t watch television, doesn’t play on the computer, isn’t interested in sports, he says. But he’s dragged home trees so big that his trailer was broken in the process.

“I was raised working hard.

I never thought anything about it,” Adkins says. So he doesn’t think anything about hauling home a multihundred-pound log, either.

But eventually, he says, he realized he could either open up a warehouse - “Weird Wood,” he says he’d call it - or use an art show as an opportunity to document what he’s created with photos, then sell some pieces and clear space for new projects - “before what’s stored in the yard rots too much to salvage.”

The exhibition, titled “Alien Reef,” will be a family affair.

“I’m excited about this show because my daughter (Kate), a multimedia artist, will be in town and able to show some of her beautiful paintings,” Adkins says. “Also my son (Michael), a wild drummer, will be in town, and he and some of his great musically artistic friends will be giving us some good music for the opening.”

Adkins just hopes visitors will like what they see.

“I’ve been working on wood for most of my life, and it seems the more you fiddle with something, the better you get, hopefully.”

Whats Up, Pages 13 on 01/18/2013

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