LOUISVILLE, Ky. — You might consider Frankfort resident Lucian Parker a professional hobbyist.
His interests are wide ranging and he’s always trying something new. At first glance inside his Frankfort home, you might think this story is about a man who started making violins in his free time.
“This is the Guarnerius, 1708 pattern,” Parker tells Spectrum News 1.
Dancing across his kitchen table are handmade replicas of some of the instrument’s most iconic forms, like this Stratovarius.
“Then you bend the sides and put those around the edges,” Parker said, demonstrating how to form the body of a violin.
Violins are scattered around his home, which doubles as an art gallery.
As technically challenging as crafting a violin may seem, Parker says the process is more time consuming than anything else.
“It’s real tedious, but it’s not like it’s really, really hard.”
Parker has a funny relationship with time and looking back on time may be another way to say “history.”
Parker likes history too.
“Well, my grandmother, she kept a lot of photographs,” Parker explained, flipping through a book filled with historic photographs.
In fact, Parker wrote the book on of his family’s lineage and his hometown of Peaks Mill, Kentucky.
“I collected data over the years to do a book on the history of Peaks Mill, but I’m not really a writer,” so he says.
“A History of Peaks Mill” goes way back and is filled with scanned photographs of his family’s personal collection representing generations of residents of Franklin County, Kentucky. It’s thorough.
Parker doesn’t consider himself a writer, but you can certainly consider the 75-year-old a painter, and Parker would probably agree.
After retiring from a career as a psychiatric social worker, Parker discovered he was good at a lot of other things.
“I found out over the years the one thing that I’m really, really, good at is trying to find something that I might be good at. So I tried a lot of stuff,” Parker said with a subtle smile.
And the thing about hobbies, occasionally they intersect one another.
“I’m taking violin pieces and putting them on the canvas and then painting over top of them,” he said.
Think, Monet with all his swirling colors and where the details are best absorbed from a few steps back. Parker applies the bodies of violin and cellos to a canvas and paints over them to a point where initially you don’t realize they are there.
Parker spends his time by living in the present and by doing that he sort of lives forever.
“Violin making is just one of those things and I still do painting, I do construction stuff, I lay rock, I cut rock, I collected marbles, postcards, I’ve collected Indian relics. I fish when I get a chance,” he said.
He also rides a motorcycle. We haven’t even touched on his adventures in Central America.
If you would like to check out a copy of “A History of Peaks Mill,” you can find it on book shelves at the Paul Sawyer Library in Frankfort.