The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
SELF-PROCLAIMED ‘BUM LAUREATE’
Homeless by choice, artist inks understated drawings that reflect society
MIDDLETOWN — City regulars are accustomed to seeing the wiry man of uncertain age in his trademark closefitting jeans and wavy mop of hair, kneeling on the sidewalk, intently focused on ripping up handfuls of weeds sprouting between the concrete slabs.
He has a well-worn face, features etched from years of outdoor living. His relative spryness — although he is the first to tell people “I’m old” — belies his 64 years.
This is Freddy Carroll, self-proclaimed The show represents the last decade of his work. Carroll, 64, who is homeless in Middletown “by default,” said, “I didn’t choose it, I fell into it. I live between pallet and tarp.” Bum With a Broom.
Actually, in conversation, he proclaims himself many things — Bum Laureate, Mr. Middletown — whatever turn of phrase strikes his fancy in the course of a conversation.
And he will laugh wholeheartedly with every coinage.
For the next two weeks, Carroll is the featured artist at MAC 650 Gallery & Artist Co-Op, 650 Main St. The opening reception for “Fred Carroll: The Collections” is Saturday (this evening) from 7 to 11 p.m.
Over the years, he’s been creating stick figure commentaries: simple pen drawings, which touch on politics, current events, education, philosophy and more. The show represents the last decade of his work.
Carroll is homeless in Middletown “by default. I didn’t choose it, I fell into it,” said the artist, who euphemistically explained he lives “between pallet and tarp.”
Carroll, who grew up in Queens, New York, and came to Middletown in 2004, has been drawing since he could hold a pencil. “And I never did have any use for a crayon — black and white for me my whole life.”
His medium is primarily white card stock left over from jobs at Young’s Printing on Court Street — and whatever pen is available. “These things take an average of five to 10 minutes, but a lifetime culling the material,” he said.
Carroll’s commentary is by no means effete.
In “Janitor Shop Talk,” two figures, whose professions are signified by the tools they lean upon — one soft-bristled, and the other, a stiff push broom — are caught mid-conversation.
“And that’s when I realized the cigarette butt was stuck to a piece of gum,” one said. “No ...” the other said wryly. Another, in which a teacher (understood by the pointer in hand) has written the alphabet in capitals and lower-case letters on the blackboard, asks his students, “Who knows what this is?” indicating the letter “l.”
Carroll finds it particularly funny that students nowadays aren’t taught cursive writing.
“In the last two years, they’ve stopped even trying to teach cursive. Where’s the only place you see cursive nowadays?” he asks, waiting for the answer. “On a Coca Cola truck rolling by.”
Over the years, Carroll has created his art at local coffee shops, where he hangs out to get his caffeine fix — O’Rourke’s Diner and, before that, Klekolo World Coffee: “Where I’ve drunk battleships full of coffee.”
One of his pieces shows a man poised with a bowling ball. It’s a setting he knows well, having lived in a bowling alley for an entire year in 1988.
“You see the attention, the intention, the concentration, and you know exactly what’s going on,” he said. “How many pins is he going to knock down is the only question.”
Matt Nyland, of Southington, an exhibit builder at Kidcity Children’s Museum on Washington Street, helped hang Carroll’s work Wednesday morning, multiples of which are mounted on large cork-board panels at MAC 650.
He first met Carroll at the museum, where Carroll was cleaning up the property.
“You can tell where he’s been. He makes a difference,” Nyland said. “And you can tell where he hasn’t been.”
Carroll disagrees that cleaning is his obsession.
“There was some guy in the Bible who said, ‘I can do no other.’ Maybe if I had dogs to walk, and handball to play, chess all day, and everything I could possibly want, I might stop cleaning, but I doubt I even would,” Carroll said.
Carroll has held a number of jobs over the years, including dish washing, in a factory and construction. All provide fodder for his art.
“Fred has enormous integrity and his own beliefs, which don’t always (agree with) society’s,” said AnneMarie Cannata McEwen, executive director of The Buttonwood Tree on Main Street. “He is an extremely generous person. He’s really very kind, and he’s really very concerned, and he’s really quite intelligent. (But), he wants freedom so much that he can’t abide by any rules.
“It prevents him from keeping a job, and prevents him from following anyone’s guidelines. He’s all about freedom,” Cannata McEwen said. “He also doesn’t care about what other people think.”
Several of Carroll’s corn brooms are on display in the show, including a couple Nyland created for him.
“I was researching broom quotes, because I wanted to put a quote on it. I had to choose — this was an easy choice,” Nyland said.
He settled on one by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that exalts man’s ability to choose his own profession in this country.
Carroll hoists the broom, peering at the small writing, reading as the words wind round and round the handle.
“If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as a Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry.
“He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, ‘Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.’
“He saw that piece of wood, and thought, ‘Wow. That ought to have a broom on the other end of it,’ ”Carroll said.
Ask him how he’s managed to glean so much knowledge with only a high school education, Carroll has a ready answer.
“The fact that I’m better than you in chess doesn’t mean I’m smarter than you. While I was getting good at chess, you were raising kids, paying a mortgage, fixing the roof on the house, dealing with the car, dealing with the in-laws: all those things I’ve never touched,” he said. “I’ve never been married, never owned a home, never owned a car, never had a driver’s license — so all my intellect and energy is free floating.”
Cannata McEwen marveled at Carroll’s artistic ability.
“He’s able to capture a person’s essence in just a few strokes of his pen — and I don’t really know how he does,” she said. “Middletown is better because Fred is in it.”
For information, see MAC 650 Gallery & Artist Co-Op on Facebook or mac650.com.