He never meant to become an artist | Jim Burch
Jim Burch never imagined he’d become an artist. He grew up far from galleries, on Ohio farms where nothing stayed put for long. His family were sharecroppers who moved every few years. The equipment was old, the repairs were constant, and improvising was a way of life. If something broke, you didn’t replace it. You bent it back, wired it together, and coaxed it into working again.
That early training stayed with him.
As a boy, he once found a pile of broken toys: a wagon, some battered trucks, pieces missing everywhere. To most kids, they would have been trash, but Jim saw problems waiting to be solved. He patched them together with whatever scraps he had, unknowingly touching the first spark of a talent he wouldn’t rediscover until decades later.
What he didn’t expect was that Park Place would hand him back a long-lost part of himself.
One of his first friends there had spent his career as a garbage man. They bonded over old tools and odd hardware the way some people bond over sports. They would trade questions over breakfast. Did you ever use one of those? What was that thing even made for?
The spark arrived, of all places, in a Firestone tire shop. While waiting for new tires, Jim noticed a huge hubcap on the counter, filled with metal bits pulled from punctured tires over the years. Thousands of strange pieces. A worker handed him a coffee can and told him to take whatever he wanted. Jim felt odd leaving empty-handed, so he picked out a few pieces.
One of them didn’t look like anything he recognized, though the employee swore it had once been stuck in a tire. Jim kept turning it over in his hand. Something about its shape tugged at a memory. If he had still been making those little metal cars he’d made forty years earlier, this piece would make a good start for a garbage truck.
That thought was all it took.
Back at Park Place, he set the mystery piece on a board and started rummaging through the coffee can. A bent scrap suggested a cab. A slotted piece looked like a window. Other bits fell naturally into place. When he finished, he had a small metal garbage truck that looked like it had rumbled straight out of the 1920s.
Then he made another piece. And another. A motorcycle. A car. A long train built across an old wooden school paddle. He never sketched or planned. He let the pieces tell him what they wanted to be.
Word started getting around. Residents brought him broken watches, washers, key rings, and odd scraps they weren’t sure what to do with. His second bathroom slowly transformed into a workshop lined with tiny containers of parts. The shower still works, he insists, though it’s clear its true purpose has changed.
He says he never knows what he’s making at the start. Something in the pile will just speak first. That’s the piece he follows. On restless nights, he can spend an hour moving tiny scraps around until they finally click and become something new.
In less than two years, he created more than twenty pieces. Artists began coming to see his artwork, including professionals from Oak Park and the Chicago art scene. They pointed out things he had done by instinct. Color balance. Composition. Visual weight. Details he didn’t know had names.
For Jim, the praise is unexpected, almost amusing. At eighty-eight, he wasn’t looking for a new passion. Yet here it is, unfolding in a second bathroom full of scrap metal and quiet evenings of imagination. Outside the workshop, his life stays full. He swims laps in the pool. He volunteers with BUILD Chicago, sitting in healing circles with young people who trust him simply because he listens.
His pieces may soon travel beyond Park Place. Representatives from the Elmhurst Public Library and local art organizations have visited and are considering displays. Jim just hopes the pieces land somewhere they’ll be enjoyed. He doesn’t care whose name is on them.
There’s only one phrase he truly treasures: the title that grew naturally from his story. From mystical scrap into a visionary whole.
It suits the artwork on the walls. And it suits the man behind it, a boy from those dusty Ohio farms who learned early how to mend what others had thrown away and who, all these years later, is still turning what was lost into something meaningful.
