Retreat to Savannah

After I’d talked with David and set up starting with a half-credit course on Native American abstractism, as modeled by Georgia O’Keefe and Avis Blair, in a month’s time to allow me to pull the material together, I decided to roam the art department of SCAD to refamiliarize myself with what was there. I told myself that I wasn’t looking for Louie Boutan, even though David had told me that he was in sculpting studio and also told me how I could get to the studio.

Surprise, surprise, my walk through the department led me to the sculpting studio. He was working in marble on what could already be seen to be a kissing couple. The two were androgynous enough to be taken as a man and woman, which most beholders would automatically do, but folks like me would see two men. He was being very clever in his execution of the piece.

And he was quite a piece himself. He was using an electric stonecutter’s saw that was making a loud-buzzing racket that made me run my tongue over my filings to assure myself none of them needed work done on them—or even now were having work done on them. He was dancing around the hunk of marble from which the heads and hands of the couple had emerged but nothing below yet and was wearing just athletic shorts, sandals, and a safety mask. Both his body and his movements were graceful and sensual, and my body ached for the touch of him. It took him several minutes to realize I was standing there, and I can’t say that one of my hands hadn’t gone to my crotch in the interval.