Native American artist Ned Barton from Fayetteville uses nature as canvas - Entertainment & Life - The Fayetteville Observer - Fayetteville, NC
Native American artist Ned Barton from Fayetteville uses nature as canvas - Entertainment & Life - The Fayetteville Observer - Fayetteville, NC
Entertainment & Life
Native American artist Ned Barton from Fayetteville uses nature as canvas
Barton crafts homemade primitive art such as Native American women and men’s regalia, clay pottery, moccasins, Indian drums, nifty gourd pocketbooks, pine needle baskets and his favorite craft work of all — dried-out bald cypress tree knees decorated by hand with largely Native American imagery burned into the tapered wood’s peeled ridges.
Ned Barton prefers to do things the older people’s way.
It’s how he learned from his grandmother, Otella Jone, and his mother, Ina Barton Goins.
Like those women before him, Ned Barton is Lumbee Indian.
And like those women before him, Barton has a God-given knowledge and talent for creating primitive Native American art.
“He just knows how to do artwork. And people like his artwork. At least you use your talent, Ned, that God gave you and don’t let it go to waste,” longtime friend Angela Jones told him on Monday morning as they talked behind his Fayetteville home.
“His is a love of art,” she said.
In this case, it’s a love for making such homemade primitive art as Native American women and men’s regalia, clay pottery, moccasins, Indian drums, nifty gourd pocketbooks, pine needle baskets and his favorite craft work of all — dried-out bald cypress tree knees decorated by hand with largely Native American imagery burned into the tapered wood’s peeled ridges.
Cypress knees are cone-shaped projections that grow vertically from the roots of the tree in wet or poor soil. Generally, they are seen on trees growing in swamps, and the knees are widely used for making tables and lamps.
As he put it, “No two are alike.”
“I can see them in the fields,” Barton said, “and I know what I want to do with them.”
Barton, who is 59, is carrying on the tradition of his Lumbee tribe heritage. He said he doesn’t know anyone else in Fayetteville who does this kind of artwork, and he figures no more than two or three people do it in the Pembroke area.
Etched into the light, fibrous and sponge-like wood are images of proud Indian braves and beautiful Indian women, feathers, butterflies, bear claws, dragonflies, wild grass, birds, turtles and the like.
On this morning, he could be found in a metal storage shed that sits behind his mother’s house in central Fayetteville, where he also resides. Some of the cypress tree knees he has gathered over time are now housed in the shed while plenty more are scattered and propped up around the backyard that’s littered with various other odds and ends he hoards with works of art in mind.
Barton, who is about as bald as a bald cypress tree, sports a salt-and-pepper beard and, on this chilly but sunny day, he was wearing a Carolina Panthers 2003 NFC Conference champions T-shirt.
He told Jones he wasn’t cold.
He said it was the Indian in him.
Barton’s prone to rambling as he speaks, jumping from one subject to another while weaving in interesting bits of history that he has gleaned over time.
One of his extended family members simply described him as “a walking history book.”
Growing up in the 1960s, Barton attended the former Les Maxwell Indian School on Indian Drive in east Fayetteville.
At the age of 21, he enlisted in the Army and would serve his country from 1981 through the early ’90s as a military policeman.
He’s closing in on retirement as a press operator at the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company on Ramsey Street.
According to Barton, people have come from faraway places —including Florida, England and Italy — to buy his decorated cypress tree knees that gleam with a polish when he applies a clear gloss onto them.
“I like the shining,” he said with a natural smile of his own. “It makes it pop out more.”
People hear about his work from his appearances at Indian pow wows and such street festivals as the John Blue Cotton Festival in nearby Laurinburg. They appreciate the beauty of his gifted handwork on one of God’s crude but natural palettes.
“I like watching the people’s face when they see it,” he replied, when asked what he likes most about making these rustic collectibles.
About once a year, he’ll go out and collect the cypress tree knees. He said a lot of people allow him access to their property. When the state is building roads, Barton added, “I rescue them. Even when you cut them, they grow back. They’re like fingernails.
“The knees nobody wants,” Barton added. “Because nobody wants to go in the swamps to get them. You never go to one area and take everything out.”
Back home, he then routinely boils the wooden cones — which can be solid, hollowed out or twisty — so he’s able to pull off the bark. He also can do that by hand or by sanding the wood. After that, they’re allowed to dry for one or two months, becoming more sponge-like in the process.
“Then you’re ready to burn them,” he said of his handheld power engraver tool. “You do artwork or paint them.”
Just as Barton has done since his high school years, he’s eager to show others how to create such primitive artwork. He talks about holding classes in a former furniture store on site. But he worries that the youth of today are far more interested in their computers and cellphones than carrying on Native American traditions.
Those ways of the past, those ways of the Indian people, are important to him.
It’s in his blood.
“I try to do more the traditional that older people did,” he said. “The challenge is to find a piece of wood and let the wood tell the story.”
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