Scott Nicholson by The Manor

Author:The Manor [Manor, The]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2012-07-03T14:14:50+00:00

CHAPTER 15

Getting the log onto the wagon, then to the manor and down the stairs to the basement, had been a real bitch. Ransom refused to help carry the log through the house, but Miss Mamie had roused some drinkers from the study, enlisting their help. Paul, Adam, William Roth, Zainab, even Lilith. It was a miracle they hadn’t dropped the log on their toes, but at last it stood up-right, supported by scrap lumber and wires tied to flails in the joists overhead.

“That had better be some statue, after all this trouble,” Miss Mamie had caled from the head of the basement stairs before slamming the door and leaving Mason alone.

No. Not alone.

He lifted the sheet of canvas. The face of Ephram Korban stared at him. Had Mason realy carved such smug perfection? But the work wasn’t complete. Now that Korban had a face, he needed legs, arms, hands, an oak heart.

This would be the sculpture that earned Mason Beaufort Jackson a mention in the magazines. Forget The Artist’s Magazine or Art Times. This baby was going to land him in the pages of Newsweek. Mason began writing headlines and article leads in his head, a feature in Sculpture to start with.

MILLTOWN BOY MAKES GOOD

If you heard that an artist was named “Mason Jackson,” you’d automatically assume that he’d adopted a nom de plume.

(Wait a second, “nom de plume” is only for authors. Okay, call it a pseudonym then. The article writer would work that bit out.)

But there’s nothing put on about this up-and-coming sculptor. Jackson has been called “the Appalachian Michelangelo.” This young southern artist may have his feet planted in the land of moonshine and ski slopes, but his hands have descended from a more heavenly plane. Jackson’s sculpture series, The Korban Analogies, is opening to wide acclaim at the Museum of Modern Art in Philadelphia and will soon cross the ocean to London and Paris, where critics have already rested the heavy crown of “Genius ” on the unpre-possessing man’s head.

Jackson’s tour deforce is the powerful Korban Emerging (pictured, left), which Jackson calls “a product of semidivine guidance.” The Rodinesque muscularity and massiveness of the work has impressed even the most jaded critics, but there’s also a singular delicacy to Jackson’s piece.

No less a discerning eye than Winston DeBussey’s has found the work faultless. He calls Mason an “uncanny master” of wood, a medium in which so few top artists dare to work these days.

“It is as if there is no difference between the pulp and human tissue,” raves DeBussey in a rare moment of expansiveness. “Jackson breathes organic life into every swirl of grain. One almost expects to look down and see roots, as if the statue is continually replenishing itself from the juice and salt of earth.”

But Jackson takes the praise in stride, offering little insight into the mind behind the man.

“Each piece is conceptualized through a dream image,” Jackson said, speaking from his farmhouse-cum-studio in Sawyer Creek, a small mill town nestled in the North Carolina foothills.

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