Peach pit carver releases the art within

LaBrush's peach-pit sculpture of a man riding a giraffe

May 15, 2000
Web posted at: 2:36 p.m. EDT (1836 GMT)

FREDERICK, Maryland (AP) -- Inside every peach is a pit, and inside each pit is something Alfred LaBrush wants to show you.

It might be a soaring eagle. Or a bear. Or a family of bears, one with a salmon flapping in its jaws. It might be all these things, set against a tumbling waterfall, painstakingly carved in a three-dimensional, inch-high tableau.

"I should have been a surgeon," LaBrush says. Instead, the self-taught artist, 58, has used his steady hands for 46 years to chip away at the brittle stones, creating delicate, fanciful sculptures.

He has more than 75 of them, but the disabled printer never exhibited his collection until last summer when he showed it at a peach festival in nearby Thurmont.

It wasn't for money -- he won't sell the carvings -- but for charity. His booth was sponsored by a group opposed to drunken drivers. Like the driver who smashed into LaBrush's pickup truck in 1996, leaving the artist's left arm and hand partially paralyzed.

"A lot of the young people, when they see the collection, say, 'Gee, I thought just about everything had been done that can be done,"' LaBrush says. "There's still simple things out there, just like finding these images in peach pits. You don't have to drink and do drugs."

The crash, along with injuries from an accident at work in 1992, have slowed LaBrush's output, but speed isn't a concern. A sculpture can take three months of work, on-again, off-again. He finishes just one or two a year.

And he treasures them all: the praying man that was his first attempt at age 12; the whimsical human figure astride a giraffe; the red-tailed hawk with paper-thin wings swooping down on a mallard duck; the waterfall scene with two eagles, three bears and a freshly caught salmon.

LaBrush works on a tiny sculpture in his studio in Frederick, Maryland. He examines every pit to discover elements waiting to be carved

A whittler since boyhood, he studies peach pits for images outlined by surface ridges and creases -- "Every one you pick up, you can find something," he says.

He cleans them in the washing machine and cures them in bleach and water, a process that takes eight months or more. Then he chips off everything that isn't part of the picture.

Some are relief carvings, like the painted climber in green shirt and red pants crawling up the seed's horny surface. And there are 3-D works so fragile that LaBrush sometimes snaps the figures off while carving.

A collector of waterfowl art once offered him $2,000 for one of his works, LaBrush says.

"I was tempted," he admits. "But I'd never be able to find another one like that. They're one-of-a-kind and you just can't go back and duplicate them."

LaBrush picks up extra cash by selling his more modest peach pit pendants, engraved with images of flowers or the church spires of Frederick.

Peach-pit carving originated in China, where the fruit is a symbol of longevity, according to Tim Hallman of the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco.

In the United States, it flourishes in the South, where peach orchards are plentiful, says Matt Lippa, a folk-art dealer in Mentone, Alabama. Baskets and monkeys are common themes; nature scenes are rare.

"This is probably more detailed than I have ever heard," Lippa said in a telephone interview.

Becky Freeze, manager of the Thurmont peach festival, calls LaBrush's work amazing. "I can't even imagine being able to see that teeny, tiny thing," she says.

LaBrush expects to donate the collection to a museum and hopes to teach the art to others.

"It would be kind of selfish to be able to have all this and not share it."

Copyright 2000 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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