By Deb Peterson
When a tornado ripped through Gassville in 2008, Clara and Bill Cobb lost more than 100 trees in Weaver Hollow—the land Clara had grown up on, inherited from her parents, Gurnzey and Bertie Weaver, and on which she had raised her children, Angela, Jason, and Pamela. After the cleanup, the hollow was left littered with bark, a constant reminder of the terrible storm.
Four years later, while Clara walked in the thinned woods, she picked up a piece of that bark and saw it with new eyes.
“This whole place is full of bark. I wondered if I could make a horse out it,” she remembers musing. “I absolutely love horses.”
Clara gathered bark, twigs, fungus, moss, river cane, anything that caught her eye. She chose pine needles for the tail, got out her hot glue gun, and set to work creating her first horse.
Her friend, Sue Wilson, encouraged her to enter it in the 2012 Baxter County Fair.
Clara won Best of Show that year, just two weeks later.
“Everyone had a fit over it,” she says, in her quiet, lowkey way.
Clara’s imagination soared. She made more horses, some owls, and a three turtles for her sister, Linda Marion, who has a turtle pond in her home in Ralph. “Her turtles climb up and rest on my turtles,” Clara says.
Their sister, Connie Meeks, of East Cotter, has some of Clara’s horses, and Clara makes bark crosses for her brother, John Weaver, of Mountain Home.
“I tried a butterfly,” she says. “I just could not do it. Usually, each piece just falls in place.”
Elk and deer are next on her list.
She uses all different kinds of bark, except walnut, which is too hard for her to clip, all picked up off the ground, and pulls moss from different places so she doesn’t kill it.
“I find a lot of great stuff around dead trees,” she says.
Time for Art
When Clara isn’t creating bark animals, she often paints or draws, usually horses, and sometimes sculpts faces out of a polymer clay called Sculpey.
She would rather be working, but after growing up with a wood stove for heating, breathing the dust and fibers in a shirt factory for 30 years, and smoking three packs of cigarettes a day until 1989, she suffers today from COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease).
Some days are better than others, but she never knows, hour to hour, when the disease will keep her from breathing. Clara doesn’t let it keep her down.
When she lost her factory job in 2009, she went back to school at Arkansas State University-Mountain Home and earned an associate’s degree in business management. She’d like to build a shop and sell her art, but right now, that’s a dream. She doesn’t have the energy to create enough art to sell.
“Maybe some day,” she says, taking as deep of a breath as she’s able. She blames her smoking, primarily, for her COPD, and the fact that she didn’t listen to an elderly man she cared for as a candy striper at Baxter Nursing Home when she was just 17.
“His name was Mr. Parsons,” Clara says, remembering his admonition clearly. “He couldn’t breathe, and he said to me, ‘Please don’t smoke.’ I didn’t listen, and now I’m paying for it.”
Mr. Parsons’s message is now Clara’s message: Don’t smoke.
She quit in 1989 after her entire body cramped painfully while she drove home from work one day.
“I had heard of a hypnotist just across the border in Missouri,” Clara says. “I smoked a cigarette before I went in for my appointment, and I have never smoked another one. I wouldn’t have lived another year.”
But the damage was already done. Today, Clara is happy to have the breath to enjoy Weaver Hollow with Bill, her husband of 44 years, and their eight grandchildren and five greats, and to occasionally gather a basket of bark to satisfy her imagination. Although Clara’s art is not currently for sale, you can find more info about her work on her website, melenco9.wix.com/weaverhollowcreation, and on her Facebook page, facebook.com/WeaverHollowCreations. M! February/March 2014
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