Man Has His Art Really Nailed Down.

Byline: Slim Randles For the Journal

Bosque Beat

When John Alston went to Spain last year, he packed the usual things: camera, toothbrush, extra socks, hammer and nails.

"I always take along a hammer and a few nails when I go someplace," says John, sitting and having a cigarette guiltily outside his home in the foothills of the Jemez Mountains. "I was on the beach in Rota, and I hammered some nails in some driftwood there. One piece, I made a wish and threw it in the ocean and who knows where it'll turn up? China, maybe?"

He smiles at the thought, and he is able to chuckle quite a bit about his own art form. John Alston hammers nails into boards. He hammers thousands of nails, tens of thousands of nails, into boards. And those boards not only become quite heavy, but beautiful. The nails disappear individually and become parts of snakes and mountains and lizards and Kokopellis and the faces of people.

John reaches over and touches one of them, and the tiny nail heads are overlapping into what appears to be scales. Some of them stand higher than the others and this gives this unique -- in the true sense of the word -- art form its three-dimensional quality.

"I can show you letters from galleries all over the place," John says, "telling me they aren't interested in this because it's a craft, not art. Maybe it is. I don't know what to call it, but I just call it nail art. I like to think of it as art, and not just a bunch of nails pounded together by a hammer."