{"id":3928,"date":"2020-04-27T11:02:34","date_gmt":"2020-04-27T15:02:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/walkingrichmond\/?p=3928"},"modified":"2020-05-09T15:13:47","modified_gmt":"2020-05-09T19:13:47","slug":"the-reverend-folk-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/walkingrichmond\/2020\/04\/27\/the-reverend-folk-art\/","title":{"rendered":"Reverend Folk Art"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Carleton Bakkum holding a folk art piece depicting Jesus breaking a child free from his cage, accompanied by a quote from the book of Mark. He experienced the inspiration for this piece while on a vision quest in Utah.<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n

By Emily Lopez<\/em><\/p>\n

Many people in my town know the name Carleton Bakkum.<\/p>\n

A soft-spoken pillar of the community, Bakkum served for 30 years as the Rector at Grace Episcopal Church in Yorktown,\u00a0 Virginia, where he gained a reputation as a kind of spiritual renaissance man who led his congregation into the 21st century with a gentle, guiding hand.<\/p>\n

Since retiring in 2019, Bakkum has finally been able to refocus his creative side. He’d learned photography at 14, and music has always been an important part of his life. But it was visual arts\u2014folk art, in particular\u2014that seemed to set him free.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was going crazy inside,” he told me. “Something had to be expressed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cheered on by his wife, Elsa, and their three sons, Carleton began creating wood sculpture in his garage without a single woodworking or art class. He began with vague, crude designs. This, he says, is the very foundation of folk art, versus other, more commercial art forms. “There are no rules.”<\/p>\n

For inspiration, Bakkum looked to Howard Finster,<\/a> another man of God who would become one of America’s folk art pioneers. A Baptist preacher from Georgia, Finster believed folk art should be made with stuff left over, says Bakkum. That alone was liberating; there’s a lot of scrap in the world.<\/p>\n

As a priest Carleton had to express everything through words and abstract thought. \u201cMy work was so verbal, everything had a fuzzy edge, I couldn\u2019t always track how something would end up.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was a machine in his workshop, the electric scroll saw, that helped him find his edge. When he started using that precise, fine-bladed saw, his work took off.<\/p>\n

A scroll saws’ “cut is real and solid,” Bakkum said, adding that folk art is very “body-centered.” Everything results from one\u2019s own movements, including the painting process, which he describes as “moving colors around.\u201d When a piece is done, it’s there\u2014you can hold it, move it, hang it on the wall. Unlike dance and music, which are ephemeral, physical art lasts.<\/p>\n

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\u201cYesterday the piece did not exist, but now it has a life of its own, and you have no idea who will see it or what it will do.\u201d One thing is for certain: His large colorful pieces, full of complex cuts and dimensions, are almost as well known as his calm and thoughtful demeanor.<\/p>\n

As an Episcopal priest, Bakkum helped many people cope with trauma, grief, and various forms of pain, so he understands, deep down, how the coronavirus is weighing on our souls.<\/p>\n

The pandemic “is creating a shared trauma among all of us,” he says, “but it also brings people\u2019s individual trauma to the surface.\u201d Tending to that trauma is important, and art can help.<\/p>\n

\u201cCreating has many healing abilities, but so many people don’t like creating anything because it makes you vulnerable.\u201d Yet it’s that vulnerability, he says, that promotes the healing. Making art “is a way to break up what gets stuck in us,” and to \u201cexpress our unseen world.\u201d<\/p>\n

Getting creative can help all of us cope with this difficult time, he says, adding a word of advice: Don’t get hung up on the end result.<\/p>\n

\u201cJust give your inner child a place to play.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Carleton goofs around with a Green Man piece that varies from his normal style. The Green Man is a legendary being symbolizing rebirth and the cycle of new growth that occurs every spring, an appropriate concept during this trying spring season.<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  By Emily Lopez Many people in my town know the name Carleton Bakkum. A soft-spoken pillar of the community, Bakkum served for 30 years as the Rector at Grace Episcopal Church in Yorktown,\u00a0 Virginia, where he gained a reputation as a kind of spiritual renaissance man who led his congregation into the 21st century Read more about Reverend Folk Art<\/span>[…]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4707,"featured_media":3929,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[97661],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3928","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-yorktown-va"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/walkingrichmond\/files\/2020\/04\/download-3.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7o53H-11m","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/walkingrichmond\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3928","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/walkingrichmond\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/walkingrichmond\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/walkingrichmond\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4707"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/walkingrichmond\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3928"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/walkingrichmond\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3928\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/walkingrichmond\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3929"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/walkingrichmond\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3928"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/walkingrichmond\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3928"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/walkingrichmond\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3928"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}