Getting back in the groove

All the records on the shelf in Mark Farmer's study look the same. The edges are black and the nearest two inches are heat-warped.

"They'd probably play still if I dropped the needle closer to the center," he says, pulling out a wiggly-looking Lovin' Spoonful album. "But of course, my record player was lost in the fire, too."

The fire was in 2014. It was arson, apparently to cover the tracks of a burglary. If it had only been the record player, or even just the house, Farmer explains, those could have been replaced. Not his original artwork, though.

Though the feeling of loss never goes away completely, he says, nowadays he's found his groove again. To passersby, he would appear to be just an eager conversationalist with thin spectacles and a mustache that curls halfway to his earlobes. His house is once again filled with original art, bicycles and bicycling magazines.

Farmer has worked in pen-and-ink for decades in and around the Cape Girardeau area and lost decades' worth of work that night. His drawings mostly are big, stately pieces with uncommon attention to detail, which only made their loss more upsetting to Farmer.

Mark Farmer inks in his sketch of Port Cape.Laura Simon

He had insurance and received maximum benefits for the possessions he lost, but he didn't have the home-business insurance that would have covered the art. That sum, he explains, would likely have cleared $2 million.

"To lose your life's work in one night," he says. "You know, to something that was deliberate, too ..."

At first, he attempted to restore some of the pieces that hadn't been entirely burned, soaked by firemen's hoses or frozen in the February weather.

"I'll do anything to keep from throwing it away and having to start over," he says. "Even back when I was younger, if I spilled ink on a picture or something, I'd just make the edges ragged and make it look like a mule had kicked a hole in the barn or something."

But in moving past the loss, Farmer says he's been able to embrace opportunity.

"I'm lucky that the watch I wear is one that tells me what day of the week it is," he says. Otherwise, he'd just stay lost in his work.

"If I thought it was tedious and I hated it, I wouldn't do it, but I really enjoy doing it, and I'm reasonably good at it, since I've worked hard at it for so long," he explains. "I'd only stop if I had to go to the bathroom or if my butt hurt from sitting for too long."

He draws just about every day, he says, and his current project is a down-to-the-brick accurate drawing of the Port Cape building from the perspective of the river wall in downtown Cape Girardeau.

"I like drawing old buildings, old houses," he says. "What better subject than this?"

Sooner or later, he says, he's going to have to switch over to using a tablet instead of a pencil and pen to make his drawings.

He's not thrilled about that.

"I've got to this level with pen and ink," he says. "I don't really want to have to start all over."

But if there's one thing in particular the fire loss taught him, it's that in art -- as in cycling -- sometimes there's no other option but to start over.

"I'm just gonna have to do it," he says.

tgraef@semissourian.com

(573) 388-3627