Myrtle Beach local creates artwork using a magnifying glass, sun, science

Kevin Thompson prefers to spend sunny days sitting on the Myrtle Beach boardwalk burning small, brown designs into small wooden boxes.

The 60-year-old Myrtle Beach resident doesn’t need electricity or gas to create his artwork. All he needs is the sun and a pair of magnifying glasses given to him by his grandparents.

Thompson has been burning geometric patterns, quotes and symbols into wooden objects ever since he was in Boy Scouts, where he learned several ways to start fires without matches. While playing around with the magnifying glass, Thompson realized that pointing the glass at a log didn’t actually start a fire – it just left a mark.

“I can use anything with wood on it,” he said Friday in front of the Ocean Front Bar and Grill. “Sometimes I even leave little messages on whatever I’m making.”

Thompson showed off an earlier work inscribed with ‘My karma ran over your dogma’ on the inside lid. He was working on another cedar box with a centered heart and the famed Elvis Costello lyrics “peace, love and understanding” Friday afternoon.

There’s rarely a plan when it comes to what Thompson burns into his artwork; he usually just starts with a few lines or geometric shapes and works from there. He can’t ever burn the exact same design twice, but that’s what makes his work so individualized, he said.

“Once you put down a mark, it’s there,” he said. “There’s no going back. You just have to work with what you have.”

Thompson’s unique creative process has a tendency to draw a crowd, especially during beautifully sunny days in a tourist town. Debra Manner, who was in town with her daughter Kaylin for a tournament, stopped to watch Thompson work for a few minutes.

Debra and Kaylin Manner, who are from Virginia, said they’d never seen an artist use the sun instead of more traditional burning tools.

“I’ve never seen anything like it; it’s so neat,” Debra Manner said.

“I’d get so frustrated if I had to do that,” Kaylin Manner added. “I wouldn’t be able to get the lines as straight as I wanted.”

But the lack of perfectly straight lines is why Thompson uses a magnifying glass rather than traditional woodwork schools, he said. Using a soldering iron creates too-perfect designs that’s too similar to drawing for Thompson’s wooden art projects, he added.

“With those tools, it’s like writing with a pen. But with a magnifying glass, it’s just like painting with a brush,” Thompson said.

The Myrtle Beach artist works as a bartender but has done “a little bit of everything” over the years, he said. He doesn’t sell his artwork on the boardwalk – for legal reasons – but does like the free advertising the beach attraction gives him while he creates his pieces, he said.

Thompson sells some of his work at local shops, including Half Baked Smoke Shop on Eighth Avenue North in Myrtle Beach. He also takes commissions through his Facebook page, titled “Sunburntartz.”

Thompson said he’s always been a little weird, but that’s partially why his creative process is so different. Not many people use a magnifying glass instead of a soldering pen, but his brother once shed light on why Thompson chose this method.

“He said ‘It’s not that you’re a better artist than everyone else, it’s just that you’re more screwed up.’”

“I’m not going to argue that point,” Thompson said.

This story was originally published November 13, 2015 at 4:42 PM with the headline "Myrtle Beach local creates artwork using a magnifying glass, sun, science."