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[Back to index of May/June 2009 articles] Like Prayers in Iron By Paul Donnelly Up a dirt road outside Flint Hill, Va., past the farm with the two silos as you head toward a pointy hill, a spry, thin man works magic with metal. He has spent all morning making an iron collar, tightly wrapping separate pieces of a beautiful railing, which required him to first create a kind of bridge to hold it all up for forging. A visitor notices it’s still hot, almost too late. “Oh, I still get burns sometimes,” the smith laughs, holding up his right hand. “Started to pick up a hot piece across all four fingers the other day. You don’t grow out of it” – the tendency to forget that while iron stops glowing around 900 degrees, even dark metal can be three times hotter than frying bacon. It’s been a generation since Nol Putnam, the Rapahannock artist of White Oak Forge, did his columbarium gates for Washington National Cathedral. “It’s generally utilitarian,” he says of blacksmithing, “so it’s not been considered to be an art form.” The stained glass in the windows, the stones of the piers and flying buttresses, the famous gargoyles and carved limestone bosses, are all made to be looked at. The screens and gates that are typical of ornamental blacksmithing, though, are made to be looked through. “I’m 75 years old,” Putnam says, sitting in a chair inscribed in Latin ‘to serve, and not to be served’, presented by the Lenox School for Boys. When he left teaching everything from history to creative writing, “I basically bought myself the time to learn blacksmithing.” Almost entirely self-taught, “I still have the first tool I ever made,” he says. It’s in the fire now, a coal rake worn down nearly half an inch on the left. “I didn’t want to go on the fair circuit, and make a hundred variations on the same little hooks to sell,” so the turning point in Putnam’s career was architectural work – staircases and balconies, he says. How did he get the Cathedral commission, joining the likes of 20th century master blacksmith Samuel Yellin, one of the most visible opportunities for an artist in iron? A bulletin board at a welding shop. While he’d had conversations with the Cathedral staff before, nothing had happened. So when the Cathedral realized that they needed another blacksmith after all, as Putnam tells the story, they checked the tacked up business cards. One for “Joe’s Welding Supply Shop” had a nice picture of a blacksmith on it, so they called: “Oh, no, we don’t do that,” the welders explained. “But we know someone who does.” An ancient craft now rebounding, blacksmithing has peculiar religious resonance – literally, since hammers and anvils ring. But it is a dark art – not entirely metaphorically, look at a smith’s hands – which is perhaps why the great prayer of St. Patrick specifically asks protection against the “spells of witches, smiths and wizards.” Putnam knows: “Oh, it’s always had a religious and psychological dimension. In England, especially, smiths were supposed to be in league with the Devil. The tradition is that when you’re done with the fire for the day, you make a cross with your tools to keep the Devil out of the forge.” Putnam, an Army veteran and confirmed Episcopalian, was actually baptized when he was 40: “I told a friend that if he could carry me to the font, I’d be baptized – so he did it.” “There are spaces,” he says, gesturing with coal dust on his hands, “where I feel a sense of awe.” One of them is plainly the Cathedral – “I did a gate for the Rockefellers years ago. It was a nice job. I’m very proud of it. But it wasn’t the Cathedral.” A young visitor holds up a heavy sphere: “Yes, that’s a cannonball,” Putnam smiles, “destined to become a swage block” – that is, the epitome of destruction will become a tool to make beautiful things. “Blacksmiths are toolmakers,” Putnam explains. “We made the swords and the plowshares. We make our own tools. On any given day you start out a floor sweeper, then you are an artist, designing the gate or the fence, then you’re making the tools that you need to make the piece, and then at the end of the day, you’re the floor sweeper again. It keeps you humble.” These days, Putnam continues to do demonstrations and take commissions – like the fence and gate he was working on this Saturday. As a smith, “I consider myself a classicist,” he says. Demonstrating how to turn a bar of pure iron into a leaf, he strikes it sharply on the anvil horn. The end glowing cherry red makes a satisfying snick! And the metal twists naturally, like a stem. It’s a kind of alchemy, not limited to the physics of heat and force. Putnam works with primal elements – earth, air, fire and water – but more than that, he makes useful objects that are durably beautiful – and sometimes he even uses cannonballs. Giving the iron leaf to a young smith, he grins: “Go thou, and do likewise.”
[Back to index of May/June 2009 articles]
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