Florida Folk Artist Kevin Clucas: One Man's Refuse Is Another Man's Re-purpose

 Article and photos by Tony Mangia

It was about four years ago when I had the pleasure of meeting Kevin Clucas while on my daily bicycle ride through Port Charlotte. I remember buying a manual lawn edger for two dollars at his garage sale, and then being delighted when he threw in a wooden flamingo head as a bonus. Almost every day afterwards, while peddling to and from Kiwanis Park, I sometimes noticed him tucked away behind parked cars and working at a bench in his drive way. The drone of jigsaws or the hum of electric sanders occasionally interrupting the faint sounds of reggae or bluegrass wafting through the air around him as I cruised by. We gave each other an occasional friendly wave — the kind that strangers who see each other, but don’t really know a lot about, give in a neighborly fashion. 

One day I happened to spot a couple of brightly colored fish hanging from a rack on the grass beside him.  And, as an unofficial collector of marine life replicas  —which I hang from a lanai wall  in my house — my curiosity got the better of me. That wonderful school of interesting looking fishes gave me a reason to stop and find out more.

Kevin goes by the nickname Trap —and signs his work likewise. Trap is a moniker Kevin, working as “car-man” for the Santa Fe Railroad in Chicago, simply picked up after being near a supervisor who accidentally slipped on the job and jokingly asked Kevin, “Are you trying to trap me?” in front of some co-workers. Like a lot of things around the workplace, that’s all it took for a new lifetime sobriquet.  

One afternoon, Trap, wearing what seems his trademark white Santa Fe Railroad cap, took the time to energetically tell me about his projects. I soon became his first paying customer after humbly asking to purchase a hand-painted wood cutout of a dolphin with a blue marble-like eyeball that had caught my attention.

The tri-colored, ever-staring fish became a permanent feature on my own wall of sea creatures.

Over the years, I always saw Trap out in his driveway putting bigger and more eccentric fish wall decorations on the rack. I occasionally stopped to chat about his handiwork — which I would describe as Florida Folk Art. It was a rare day I didn’t see Trap’s familiar white cap lowered as he sanded or cut common discarded items into works of art in his el fresco workshop.

During that time, I watched his craft evolve from dazzling painted fish cutouts made from old planks and discarded shelves to more elaborate fish figures carved out of branches, tree stumps or whatever materials he can scavenge and put together. 

I liken some of Trap’s more colorful. imaginative and playful creations to a sort of three-dimensional Aquatic Boterismo — or what I imagine Botero might have produced … if his models were fish.

According to Trap, he began fashioning these works of art after retiring from his old job of checking the mechanics of railroad cars and coming to Florida full time in 2016. 

Where the desire to work in this expressive medium came from, he has no idea.

“I never had any art experience,” Trap claimed in his Great Lakes twang. “And I am not what you would consider a fisherman.”

It seems that any sort of formal training came from working the rails of the Santa Fe…ba-dum-tshh.

The humble artist claims he used to refinish furniture as a hobby and cites the fishing culture surrounding Charlotte Harbor as a possible influence on his choice of subjects.

“I just like to think of myself as a re-purposer,” he jokes about his use of discarded items. 

In other words, to paraphrase the old saying, one man’s refuse is another man’s re-purpose.  

Trap has the gift of turning even the most mundane of rejected objects into fabulous visual entities which can be proudly shown and appreciated. It’s easy to imagine blue waters, tropical settings and diving locales while gazing at his work and then wonder how he looks at a particularly plain object and comes up with his sometimes whimsical and exotic ideas.

My favorite is a sperm whale he constructed out of an old mesh-metal ironing board.

Always looking for different material to utilize wherever he can find it, Trap roots through neighbors’ front lawn discards finding table parts, siding planks and even using sections from an an old barbecue smoker. In the vivid coral reef of Trap’s mind, I imagine he could find a purpose (porpoise?) in anything from wood to metal to plastic.

An angel fish made from an old washboard is just another testament to that creativity.

“I always use natural wood and no particle board,” Trap stressed about his most commonly used material.

And while most of his components come gratis from scrap piles or friends’ contributions, Trap shows me a stack of prized Aspen planks he purchased for $50 piled outside his garage.

“These are great for woodworking,” he beamed while wiping some stain off his fingers onto his paint-smudged cargo shorts.

Trap usually works eight to ten hours a day in front of his garage. It’s where these abandoned, inanimate items come to life as sea denizens in his abstract and vibrant style.

“I usually work on one project at a time, “ he said. “ But I have a short attention span and might get distracted to one or two other pieces.”

Trap and his wife, Jackie, disagree on how many of those pieces he has completed. The artist lowballs it at about 40, while Jackie says it’s well above 100.

“We have fifty-five in-laws who have probably gotten one,” she laughed.

Trap usually gives his mostly hand-tooled designs names like Abalone Annie or Anjail” (An angel fish with stripes that resemble prison bars) and named a lime-colored fish for Jackie’s mom, Limey Lily. He is currently working on “The Woodorado Series” a comical wording pertaining to his new series of wood-carved el dorado fish.

His favorite piece? Hurricane Harry, a nearly five-foot wood sailfish priced together from ornate chair legs that Trap made for his father. 

I like to call myself Trap’s first paying customer, but either way, his handiwork is finding its way into many other people’s homes. Funkie Junkie (with shops in Punta Gorda and Port Charlotte) recently started displaying his work on consignment and Trap has become an in-demand artisan who has sold about a dozen pieces in only a few months — with some going for as much as three hundred dollars.

Many of the more elaborate pieces take at least three full days of careful cutting, intricate carving and specialized coating or painting. Trap had lately started on making snakes from trimmed, wavy-shaped tree branches a friend happened to find and drop off, but since then, he has returned to marvelously immortalizing his first interest and inspiration — fish.

“I never thought I’d make money doing this,” Trap told me. “I just wanted to make something out of nothing.”

Sometimes nothing becomes something magical.

—Trap’s artwork can be followed and purchased at: Kev’s Coastal Creations on Facebook

Mysterious artwork appearing along Hudson River explained

Story and photos by Tony Mangia

MYSTERIOUS WOOD SCULPTURE ARTIST REVEALED

Upper Westsiders have been noticing the whimsical art for a long time — maybe years. Bikers and runners on the riverside path can't help but stare at the ever-changing piles of driftwood with the occasional plastic or metal accessory stacked up every twenty feet or so apart. Car drivers stuck in rush hour hell can even see the odd folk art along the West Side Highway. It helps break up the monotony of a long jog or boring commute. Dozens of these sculptures appear out of nowhere north of the 79th Street boat basin and disappear before crossing 110th Street.

Like wood cairns popping up out of nowhere, these displays line the east shore of the Hudson River. Some are simple, maybe a couple of small pieces of driftwood, to the elaborate jigsaw of a hundred sun-bleached branches and trestles which form small fortresses. Most of the sculptures look like giant eagle's nests or life-sized wooden figures waving to the sailors toiling on the endless procession of river barges. Other pieces need a little more interpretation. Maybe they resemble a tiny wooden Stonehenge or the stick man of Blair Witch to some of recreational boaters. "They are fun," exclaimed a fan named Mary. "Haunting," comments her friend, Andrea. Both agree that they like the stick monuments and, like anyone else who has seen them, wonder why and who would spend time building these temporary exhibits rising up for a mile and a half along the banks of the Hudson.

For years I peddled up Riverside Park to the George Washington Bridge on my bike—even when the path was an obstacle course of muddy patches, stairs and ventures onto Riverside Drive, not the smooth paved path it is today. The funny looking bundles of river wood were always there--always changing. The maze of crooked branches and driftwood made me smile. They were a wonderful mystery until I met the single-named creator—Alvaro.

Alvaro, who lives in Manhattan, and rides his bike to the river weekdays around noon to scavenge among the rocks for his building materials. Alvaro explained that he has been doing this since spring and has taken up where the "unknown old man" who started it, stopped. The unassuming artist doesn't delve into his personal life except to say he's of Italian descent by way of Columbia. He has been in New York for 22 years and proudly states that he is a stained-glass artisan by trade. The tanned Alvaro claims his Italian heritage draws him down to the river to "create and do something artistic." The Hudson River Greenway is his art gallery.

Wandering on the craggy river shore, between casting fisherman, and lazing street people, Alvaro picks through the bottles, paper wrappers, old diapers and "Coney Island Codfish"— otherwise known as used condoms. Alvaro doesn't specify what makes a good piece of building material. He doesn't seem too particular, but he does pick and choose. Maybe it is the crook of a branch or the width of a stump? Maybe it's the right bow of a small tree that completes a previously unfinished piece? Only the soft-spoken artist knows.

The sculptures usually have a short life. They have no names or titles. They are never the same and like a child's sandcastle swept away by the tide, Alvaro's creations meet a similar fate—only to wind and vandals. The northern gusts of the Hudson can topple some of the lighter stacks, but the real culprits are kids and "one bitter, old homeless man who has something against my work," claims Alvaro. He doesn't know who his nemesis is, but has spotted him vandalizing his work. Alvaro doesn't come to the river on weekends, so that's when the packs of destructive teens usually break up his displays. Each Monday, the artist starts gathering his wood, finds a new spot and starts building his happy parade of formations again.

I don't know how long Alvaro will keep crafting his temporary driftwood curiosities. The river will continue to yield an unending supply of material and inspiration and—in a city full of franchise chain stores, loud pop culture and fake celebrity—Alvaro's vision and anonymity help give New York City back some of its quiet incantation. I know the quirky little structures in Alvaro's free art show can make anyone's journey up or down the Hudson shore a little more enjoyable. See it for yourself.