by Vincent Edwards
IN THE High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia, there are two
beautiful silhouettes which are the work of a young artist, Joseph
Cranston Jones. When he was only two years old, he became a victim
of a disease of the spine which was so crippling that he had to lie
in bed or in a chair all the time.
When Joe was six years old, a circus came to his hometown of
Augusta. A brother held him up to the window to see the parade. Joe
missed nothing. Every animal registered upon his sensitive brain as
on a photographer's lens. He observed them all--the lion, the
tiger, the bear, the elephant, and all the rest.
Not long afterward he asked his mother for a pair of scissors and
some paper. She gave him her small embroidery scissors. Then Joe
went to work. One by one, he cut from the paper the shapes of all
the animals he had seen in the parade. He showed them with their
lithe, vivid forms, and he arranged them in the same order in which
they had marched down the street past his home.
Mrs. Jones was quite amazed. She had never dreamed that her
bedridden son had all that talent. From that day on, Joe never
lacked for a way to pass the dull hours he had to spend in
bed.
When he was fourteen, he was taken to the Scottish Rite Hospital in
Atlanta. Doctors thought they might find some way to relieve his
malady. There he lay for a whole year in a brace, in one fixed,
unchanged position. But never for a moment did he give up cutting
out his silhouettes. When he held his hands up to cut, bits of
paper would drop down in his face, but Joe brushed them away and
kept right on.
Everyone who saw Joe's work greatly admired it. They had never seen
such delicate tracery of landscapes or such vivid representation of
moving figures. Joe's friends thought he might be helped by special
instruction. But when teachers came, they said he already knew more
than they could teach him. In his line he was a genius!
When the boy's silhouettes were sent out to magazines, editors were
only too glad to use them--and they asked for more. Those beautiful
designs were even printed in England.
After a while, Joe had enough money from his silhouettes to buy a
home in Augusta for his mother and sister and brother. He even
bought a small car with a special brace for his back. He now could
be driven out to the woods to watch the animals and to study
them.
The next year he was asked to illustrate a famous book of fairy
tales. But now at last Joe knew it was too late--the incurable
disease had overcome him. He was only twenty-one when he
died.
Before he passed away, however, Joe expressed in the following poem
his invincible spirit:
A Pine's Thanksgiving
Master of all creation--
hear me in my thanksgiving!
I thank Thee for the strength
Thou gavest me when
As a sapling I cracked the rocks
that bound me.
I thank Thee that though in earthly
weakness I bent and
mourned before
The storms of years, none of them
have broken me.
For it all I thank Thee, Master!
For mine is the strength of rocks
and storms I have conquered;
And the mountains speak to me
of Thy power, and the ocean
breathes--Eternity.
