An Artist of Tools and Industry

            Several years ago the artist Rachel Lussier rachellussierart.com set up her easel in a family-owned hardware store and began painting the tools that covered the walls: individual oil portraits of a ball peen hammer, a hand saw, a trowel, needle-nose pliers. In the brief text that accompanies this “Hardware Series,” Lussier writes that the paintings reflect “my preoccupation with objects designed for the human hand.” She finds “allure and beauty” in these tools she has turned into still lifes, and she celebrates as well the hardware store itself, a meeting place as well as a business that is rooted in its community. Click here to see the series.

            After the intimacy of the hardware store, Rachel shifted scale dramatically, travelling to the abandoned Bethlehem Steel Plant in Eastern Pennsylvania to paint curving and angular sections of the corroded furnaces, tanks, and smoke stacks. If you’ve ever seen an abandoned steel plant, you know the mix of awe and desolation evoked by these massive shuttered factories. This plant in Bethlehem has been closed for over twenty years.

            Rachel is not a studio artist; she likes to take her equipment out into the world to render the objects she finds there—from a screwdriver to a rising vent pipe to an airplane fuselage—and also to remove some of the barriers that separate the artist and art-making from the viewing public. “I am fascinated,” she writes on her website “that most people appear to be just as curious about how the art is created as by the final product itself.”

            Among those visiting the Bethlehem Steel plant—it’s a tourist site now—are men and women who used to live in the city but moved away (likely following the next available job) or people who worked for decades in the plant and still live nearby. Some stop and talk to this woman standing before a canvas on which a rusted chunk of history is taking shape.

            Rachel has emailed and spoken with me about these exchanges. It comes as no surprise that people talk about how many jobs the plant provided, not only for making steel itself, but also for everything from bookkeeping to sales. And then there were all the goods and services purchased by workers at Bethlehem Steel, keeping the city economically vital. People talk about the way someone with a high school education or less could make a good living on union-scale factory jobs, and they talk about the generations of families who worked at the plant. One woman points to a towering crane that her grandfather operated for thirty years.

            The people talking to Rachel also convey the awful, thundering force of the plant when it was operating. Twenty-four hours a day. Three shifts. Loud and hot and dangerous. The plant had its own fire department, and one fellow who was a firefighter tells Rachel that he knew five different men who were killed on the job.

            Overall, Rachel explains to me, she feels from the people she meets “a sense of loss.” The expression of loss is sometimes straightforward: A woman who had moved to Ohio says that she started to cry when she drove within sight of the plant. And sometimes what is expressed is more abstract and runs deep. In the middle of conversation, a guy says “We don’t know who we are now.”

This loss of identity along with the economic rupture that contributed to it has been much discussed nationally since the 2016 election, for Donald Trump tapped into it, and, as with everything he touches, has cheapened and exploited it. Rachel is grateful for the stories people tell her and tries to honor them as she paints the rising smoke stack of an old furnace, quiet and cold behind a chain-link fence. 

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Rosie and the Sound of Groceries

I received some lovely email about my last post in which I imagine my mother, Rosie, going back to school. Thank you. If you'll indulge me, I'll offer one more portrait of Rosie, this one not made-up, a vivid memory of the end of her work day at the restaurant. The passage comes from the conclusion of a preface I wrote for the Tenth Anniversary Edition of The Mind at Work.

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When my mother Rosie came home after a long day waiting tables, she would spread out on the bed an old white kitchen towel turned gray from years of coins and dump her tips on it. As she told my father and me about her day—a fight with the cook, a regular’s troubles at home—she would count and separate the coins. I had a weird fascination with that towel. Old, dirty, but the grime had a silver cast to it, the color of money. “If it wasn’t for the tips,” she told me many years later, “we wouldn’t have made it.” There was a front and back counter in the restaurant, and she described working with her sidekick, Ann, another career waitress, how they’d listen—when they could slow down enough—“listen real hard” for the sound of the tip and know if it was a dime, a quarter, a half-dollar, “or no sound at all…you either got stiffed, or they left a dollar.” I don’t remember many dollars on the bed.

I take some coins out of my pocket, close my eyes, and give each a short toss onto the table. She was right; they have distinct sounds, a tink, a thunk. The sound of groceries, of rent, of school supplies, of gas for the car. 

There is a direct line between those tips and me being able to sit here and write about my mother’s work, and my uncle’s, and all the other people who make so much possible through their labor. There are about two million waitresses in the United States. Through a combination of physical and social skill and the ability to think on their feet, they support families and put kids through school, or pay for their own school, or help aging parents. They make restaurants function at the point of service. They contribute to the social fabric of the neighborhoods where they work.

There are roughly two million home health care workers in our country, tending to those who are too sick to care for themselves. There are somewhere around one and a half million plumbers, carpenters, and electricians, daily clearing the flow of water, completing a circuit, building and repairing our shelter. The list continues, outward and across the country: ranch hands and farm workers, long-haul truckers and local drivers, firefighters and miners and welders, the untold numbers of people who work in factories, canneries, and meat-processing plants.

Collectively, these men and women form a massive web of skill that makes our country function, that maintains and comforts and, at times, rescues us. They are so present, their mental and manual abilities so woven into our daily lives that their skills are taken for granted, at times slip out of sight. The Mind at Work documents their ability and pays homage to it.


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