Jim Stevens is an award-winning, legally blind multidisciplinary artist, artisan, author, and military veteran based out of his studio in Wheat Ridge, Colorado. He's also the artisan behind our cattle horn Scrimshaw Belt. We asked Jim to walk us through his career and his art.
You've had an adventurous life. Tell us about your early experiences.
When I was in the military, I led two six-man teams doing long range reconnaissance missions in Vietnam. Our job was to go behind enemy lines to gather intelligence, and occasionally we were asked to rescue downed pilots before they could be taken to the north.
When I got back to the States, I was mistakenly assigned to be a drill sergeant at a cook school at Fort Knox. It didn’t take long before the Army realized their mistake and pulled me out. They sent me to Panama, and I ran intelligence missions in Latin and South America. In my off time I made friends with the Panama Canal divers who did maintenance on the canal locks. I walked out on the dock one day, saw their gear laid out, and asked one of the old divers if I could borrow it for a minute. He looked at me and said, "You know how to use it?" I said no problem. It didn't take them long to figure out I had no idea what I was doing, but they took me under their wing and taught me to dive and work underwater. When I got out of the military, I had a skill set already built-in, and I put it to use as an underwater commercial diver.
After the military, how did you first get into scrimshaw?
A bad knee and back from combat injuries shortened my diving career and eventually I needed a different job. I was sitting at a Denny's one evening, and the two guys in the booth behind me were talking about a bar of precious metals they wanted melted down and separated – gold from silver, silver from platinum. It was a Friday night, and the man expected to do the work said he didn't have a chemist on hand. I slid out of my booth and asked if I came in Monday morning and broke the bar down, would he give me a job. I spent the whole weekend at the public library learning everything I could about precious metals refining. Monday morning, I walked into his refinery. He sent me to the chemical room and I broke the bar down chemically, separating the metals. I got the job.
That refinery also took in ancient mammoth ivory from gold miners up in Alaska. I thought the ivory was beautiful, so I carved a piece and left it on my boss's desk. That afternoon he came in and said, "Hey Jim, you're fired." I said, "What?" He said, "And you're hired. I sold that sculpture you did in ivory to a gallery owner in Boston, and he wants ten more." I thought, oh my god, I better learn about ivory.
What does "scrimshaw" actually mean?
Most people think of scrimshaw as just etching images into ivory or bone. But it also includes carving. The entire art form was created by Yankee whalers. When they caught a sperm whale, they'd take the ivory teeth and etch designs into them, then rub lamp black from their lanterns into the lines to color them in. They also carved the teeth and other ivory they traded for in their travels into tools and gifts to bring home to loved ones. A lot of people don't equate carving with the term, but it's always been part of the tradition.
What happened in 1996, and how did it change your work?
I've had bullet fragments lodged in my head from a combat wound sustained in 1970 during the Vietnam conflict. In 1996, while teaching at the University of Colorado, one of those fragments moved and caused a stroke in my visual cortex. I lost all but two degrees of my eyesight; it's like looking through a pinhole. I lost my job at the University and around that time I also got divorced and was raising my two youngest daughters on my own. After a couple of years, my daughters told me to get back into art. I told them I couldn't see but they kept insisting, so I spent two years, ten to twelve hours a day, relearning how to do art. Around the year 2000, people started buying my work again – scrimshaw first, then charcoal drawings, paintings, and everything else.
You've invented two new painting techniques since losing your sight. How?
I heard angry crying in the backyard one day from my six-year-old grandson who had tangled his fishing line around his toy fishing pole trying to teach himself to cast. I went out to help. Clouds passed overhead, and the monofilament fishing line across my fingers looked like it rippled, even though it hadn't. That struck with me. Five months of trial and error later, I'd worked out how to use monofilament as a canvas – that's my paintings on monofilament strings.
That process also showed me something else: because there's space between the strings, the eye blends everything together on its own. I'd always thought abstract realism can easily look muddled on a canvas, so, to try and make a different form of abstract realism, I painted a realistic portrait on a clear acrylic panel, leaving the negative space completely transparent, no shading at all. Then, I designed and painted a separate abstract piece on a blown plastic panel that would work with the portrait and I placed it behind the realistic painting. When I set the standoff distance right, the abstract created all the shading for the portrait in front and I realized I had combined pure realism with pure abstraction. Another five months of trial and error, and that became my abstract linear paintings. Both techniques have since won the VA National Gold Medal for Fine Art.
The Scrimshaw Belt was your first experience working in segmented cattle horn. What was that process like?
The first thing I discovered when I sectioned the horn was numerous internal cracks and delamination. I thought, this is going to be tricky. Cattle horn is much more temperamental than the water buffalo horn I’d worked before and it’s thinner, and it delaminates faster. Curving it to fit the stainless steel is a big problem too, because when you soften it to set the curve, you have to be so very careful.
I went online to see how people work cattle horn for knife handles and watched a number of videos. Every single one had mistakes or something left out. So, I used a couple of spare cattle horns I had from my experience making black powder horns for black powder rifle clients and began segmenting and experimenting. After mastering the techniques needed, I finally cut into the horns you'd sent me.
Part of it was chemical too, finding the right adhesive to bond the finished plate to the stainless steel. I went through three different resins before I found one, a separately toughened resin, that actually held when the stainless steel and cattle horn were both properly prepared for the bond.
My grandson Christopher Swope, the same one from the fishing pole story, is eighteen now and sat in and learned the process with me while I made your buckles. He's probably the only other person who knows how to do them properly.
** Each Scrimshaw Belt is a piece of true craftsmanship.
