I'm going to go a little off-topic with this post to show you some of the pictures and tell you a little about my trip to the Bahamas.
When we left for Andros Island, sometimes known as "The Sleeping Giant," with the Florida FlyIns class, me and UF photojournalism student Jeremiah Wilson, who took all the photos in this post, we planned to focus on a story about famous woodcarver Henry Wallace , pictured above. But when we arrived in the isolated community of Red Bays on the northwest coast of the island, we decided to broaden the story to encompass the lives of several artists who live in the little community. This is a sampling of the people we met and traveled with.
On September 29, the class left the U.S. in a small, Lynx Air Internationaldual-propeller plane. Here's a picture of some of the students preparing for the flight. (Left to right: Front row, Marvin Halelamien and Jessica McHugh. Second row, Kristin Nichols and Tracy Cassagnol. Third row, Jessica Fisch and Dominick Tao. )
This was the lowest-flying plane I've ever ridden. The clouds outside looked like a field of icebergs surrounding us.
The picture to the right is of Tim Hussin, one of the photojournalism students on the trip, on the beach at Forfar Field Station, where we stayed for the week. This where we ate, planned our articles and stumbled home to when we came back from a night of drinking at Sheila's, a nearby bar.
Henry Wallace gives birth to a woman of wood. The carving’s red flesh is uneven and broken by sharp ridges rising from the fine grain of her belly. Her wooden nose is a nub protruding beneath two shallow eye sockets. Her mouth is a rounded rectangle. Her breasts are mismatched, one sharper than the other.
The carving started as a piece of dead mahogany tree that Wallace, whose art has been displayed internationally, found three to four miles from the isolated community of Red Bays, on the northwest coast of Andros Island. On his shoulder, a dark oval marks where the tree scraped against him as he navigated treacherous rocks and holes on the walk home about a week earlier.
In a few days, the carving is coming to life. The Rasta woodcarver only works with dead wood. He has chipped away at her nose until it has shrunk into a delicate bridge with shallow nostrils. A smile parts her full lips. Oval eyes without pupils have formed in the once empty sockets. Once-flat fruit sitting atop a plate on her head have gained definition and become three-dimensional. Her breasts are round, and her skin has been sanded smoother
Wallace, who has been carving professionally for 39 years, said he will receive $2,500 for the finished statue from a fellow Bahamian artist in Nassau. The statue is a gift for the art lover's sister, who lives in Gainesville. Wallace works six days a week and rests and meditates on Saturday, the Rastafarian Sabbath. He makes money from big commissions and smaller carvings, such as wooden bonefish, sold to passing visitors.
Art has to take a backseat sometimes for Wilton Russell. The musician divides his time between woodcarving, crabbing and performing odd jobs to pay the bills. The 51-year-old, who has a reputation for telling stories, took Jeremiah and me out to one of the crabbing sites. It's a patch of swash, saltwater marsh, near Old Red Bays, where the Black Seminoles who settled the present-day Red Bays lived before a hurricane struck the settlement. Russell talks to the crabs as he pulls off their legs. He apologizes to them and throws their still-living bodies into a cloth sack. He says he does this because he knows what it's like to struggle. Russell wants to leave the island and pursue his art. He, Wallace and Otis Marshall, who plays the electronic keyboard , played "rake and scrape" music for the class on one of our last nights on the island. On the island, Russell is called the Suicide Bomber (Musical Suicide!, he clarifies) and Rubber, short for Rubber Man, for his Junkanoo dancing.
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