Columns

Gimme Shelter: A teachable moment

AMBROSE CLANCY PHOTO
AMBROSE CLANCY PHOTO

There have been some circumnavigations of note around Shelter Island lately.

Last week the Great Peconic Race had its inaugural run with almost 90 people paddling around our shores. And Friday afternoon with Hap Bowditch — welder, craftsman and artist — as my guide, I made the circuit.

“Here we’re starting at Hay Beach Point,” Hap said, “heading down to Ram Island.”

Every landmark was announced, as I guided a “plasma cutting torch” on a template in Hap’s shop, carving a map of the Island out of steel.

I live with an artist, who once told me that the joy of sketching something, from a human body to a tree or distant mountains, is a way of understanding the object on a higher level. It’s also a way, she said, of somehow touching the subject.

Slicing steel into an image of the Island I’ve come to cherish over the past two years was giving me that gift. But the real gift was from Hap, providing his time and space.

I’d met him a few times and spoken to him about the art he creates. I was nosy enough, I suppose, for him to invite me to his shop, where he said he would teach me welding.

Driving over to Midway to his place Friday afternoon, I thought the “lesson” would be good column fodder and a pleasant way to kill an afternoon with an engaging and entertaining companion.

But Hap had other ideas. He truly wanted to teach me.

“Do you want to learn?” he asked. “I want you to really learn something today.”

I realized he was serious, as he coached me in “stick welding,” where metal is incinerated at the end of a torch to bind materials together. It was magic. With my “shield,” or visor on, the molten metal at the end of my torch was neon green, but when I raised the shield it was crimson, slowly cooling to gray.

In Hap’s shop, where the colors are rust and sea gray and black, and tools and even machines he’s built himself are all in easy reach centered around an iron work table, this miraculous transformation of materials was an everyday occurrence.

It’s easy to see why the idea of alchemy, of magic, sprung from forges and shops in the ancient world like this one on Midway, which of course is modern and advanced, but unchanged in many ways. Now, as then, practical objects making life easier are formed and repaired, and art is created to make life deeper and more vivid.

Speaking of practical, Hap was telling me that I had to learn to stick weld by sound. If I was hearing bacon sizzling I was doing all right. But if I heard sputtering, I was not.

I listened: The sound coming from my work was like a run-for-your-life kitchen fire. Hap, however, was encouraging.

But after I laid my shield down the wrong way the second time, he wasn’t so encouraging. He just pointed at it with a look I remembered my father giving me on certain occasions. Respect the work.

The stick welding was for a tiny base where Hap was attaching delicate, perfectly formed cattails, bringing to life in miniature steel a piece of Shelter Island wetlands.

His work is remarkable, in every scale and dimension, from those exquisite cattails to long boats, schools of fish and grouped figures. The form also varies, from representational to abstract. “I need to do both,” he said. “For balance.”

If you ask him about his art, he’ll tell you how he started as a welder. Hap’s father operated heavy machinery. “He cleared land from Orient to Jamesport,” he said. “He started working for one Polish farmer who told another and it was like a domino effect.”

From the age of four he sat on his father’s lap and pulled levers on machines. He was in his early teens when he told his father there was nothing he wanted to do more then operate machinery.

If that was going to be his work, his father told him, then he had to learn to be a mechanic and a welder first, to properly care for the means of his livelihood.

Ask him again about his inspiration and he’ll refer again to work, of how when he started to make sculpture he’d go into the shop on Sundays and work all day, non-stop. “My body was shot, but I was free,” he said.

On a wall of the gallery next to the shop, he showed me his “notebook”; hooks on the wall where found objects, old tools and pieces of scrap were hanging. He held in one hand a thick iron file, and in his other, what he’d made from one exactly like it — a graceful, curving cobra, perfect down to its scales and flattened head and forked tongue.

In 15 years he’s sold 584 pieces. Last year he sold 36, and so far this year 18 sculptures have left his shop for private collections.

“So now we’re just rounding the point at Quinipet,” Hap was saying as the plasma cutter moved ever so gently around Jennings Point. I had been in every creek and cove of the Island and was now tracing my way along the homestretch.

When I reached Hay Point, where I’d started, Hap looked over my metal map. “I guess you wanted to create a pond here,” he said, pointing to a small hole in the steel made by my unsteady hand.

Hap filled in my pond and in a blizzard of sparks from a grinder made rough edges smooth around the piece, before handing it to me.

I thanked him but he said there was no need, I had made my Island myself.

“And I think you learned something,” Hap said.