Holding his breath and waiting for the opportunity, probing, pocketing, and throwing, the action was clean and neat, and a small worm was "caught in the net".
The flat-headed man in front of him is called "elbow", and there have been thousands of swinging movements like this in more than 10 years, not tens of thousands of times.
The picture comes from Little Red Book @ Lin An, who loves to take pictures
Elbow is a blogger, Douban and Weibo have 10,000+ fans, you can open his home page to see, either share bugs, or share stones.
In fact, he just extended the things in his home to another space, to the Internet.
Daily sharing of elbows
(The picture below is easy to cause discomfort, pull down with caution)
In Minhang, Shanghai, he made his home look like a "natural museum."
It's a space of more than ten square meters, you can hear birds calling when you walk in, the glass box is home to insects you can't name, and greenery clings to the furniture across the entire ceiling...
The table is filled with various glass jars, which are either stones, like snails, like horseshoe (hòu), as if a random piece can take you through time and space, back to the era when the sea had not yet become a mulberry field;
Then look at the large and small insect specimens in the box, praying mantises, unicorns, scarab beetles, clip worms... If you told you that there were stones mixed in there, could you imagine it?
Carving jade into a variety of flowers, birds, fish and insects, elbows are very good at it, and they can even be fake and real.
He graduated from the China Academy of Fine Arts and is a jade carver who likes to study insects. Since graduation, I have lived a life of bugs and have not been to work.
01
The man who lives with bugs
Elbow's love of nature is innate.
He was born in Shanghai, and not long after his birth, he came to southern Anhui with his parents who "went to the countryside".
The childhood elbow lived in the town, which was not developed and the population was not large, and the town was slightly outward to the farmland, and further out to the hills. When I was a child, my elbows either went to the periphery or went to some green space to play, to catch grasshoppers and crickets. For him, the charm of the strange flowers, birds, fish and insects in nature is better than the games that his peers are fascinated by.
"I saw the one-horned fairy before, and I thought it was mutated, so why do I still have horns on my head?" I don't dare touch it, but I like it." Living in a small place, no one gave Elbow the knowledge of insects he was interested in, there was no museum, no zoo, and he could only go to the market for a long time.
After elementary school, he moved to Shanghai with his parents, and the rise of the Internet allowed him to learn more about the richer world of insects.
"There are all kinds of bugs in the forum." He began to visit various natural museum forums uncontrollably, hoarding insect-related books, and when he became an adult, he began to make friends with like-minded netizens, and when he was fine, he would bring equipment, go to the nearby mountains to observe, catch some to feed at home, and record its life history.
Childhood hobbies have been maintained until adulthood, pictured here is elbow in August 2020 in The bee seedlings found in the Shanghai wasteland
As interested in natural history, Elbow has loved to do crafts since childhood, pinching mud and cutting an eraser, no different from other children. It wasn't until junior high school that he began to find another way.
"There is always a text that impresses you, and the one that has influenced me most deeply is called "The Record of the Nuclear Boat", which is about a miniature carving craft made of walnut cores, which is very exquisite." So, Elbow tried to use the olive core he had leftover to make a nuclear boat, "I can actually make a look, I started to make a second and a third..."
The two hobbies collided together, and only then did this house of flowers, birds, fish, insects and their carvings.
On the left is the work of the elbow first playing nuclear carving
On the right is a stone sculpture from the elbow university period
Entering Elbow's home is like entering a private natural museum, but this kind of scene usually only appears in novels or movies.
Specimens of insects, ores retrieved from the mountains, butterfly-horned frogs (known as forgotten elves) raised in boxes... You'll find plenty of surprises everywhere.
A box of specimens, dozens of insects, but it takes elbows a year or so to collect and make, and such boxes, he has more than a dozen.
A seemingly unremarkable beetle may actually be a cocoon he picked up from somewhere in the wasteland and cultivated it.
Through carving, he carved out a concrete appearance of his love for nature, such as unicorns and cicada pupaes carved from stone; monkey heads and bird-catching spiders carved from fruit cores.
He also carved out the concept of life, cucumbers, gums, snails, random pieces are surprising.
If you are interested, he will tirelessly introduce you to those jades, "turquoise, lapis lazuli, Hetian jade, Qinghai jade... It's all good material." At this time, he was like a child, completely without the artist's shelf.
02
Insomnia that cannot be cured
He did not go to work since he was 27 years old
The road of becoming a jade carver without going to work, the outwardly interested traction, in fact, seems to be the active choice of the elbow, but there is a helpless reason at a deeper level.
Elbows before the age of 18, like most teenagers, are healthy and free. In the summer after the end of the college entrance examination, his state suddenly disappeared.
"I suddenly had insomnia all night..." said Elbow, "like a cliff, and it was getting worse and worse, and then I developed arrhythmia."
The elbow, which could not find the cause of the disease, survived the university and survived to work.
Elbow was a mobile phone case based on a beetle when he was a student
After graduating from college, he worked as an art teacher in middle school for a year and a half, which was his only work experience so far.
"When the teacher is not bad, but when he is young, he wants to try more, and his body is difficult to adapt to the nine-to-five work rhythm, so he thinks of quitting." 」
During the time when I was a teacher, at one point, the elbow suddenly fainted and fell.
So he left, but he didn't know what to do next for a while.
Smash the elbow of the wood to find the worm
"You can make money doing carving, but you don't expect to do it before you do it." The first work that Elbow sold was a small insect carved with an olive core, which sold for 800 yuan, and his salary at that time was only about 3,000, and that time, his parents, who had been watching him carve upside down, were also happy for him.
"It's a good market, and in 2008, wen play was more prosperous." It's just that how much he can earn and how long he can earn, he's not sure.
Compared with leaving his post, for the sake of safety, he spent two years admitted to the China Academy of Art and continued to study in Hangzhou to broaden his horizons.
Pottery works from elbow graduate school
In the three years of study, the jade carving market has also matured. During this period, he not only studied carving, but also learned pottery, and there were many cattle people around him, and his elbow vision and craftsmanship had risen greatly. In a carving competition held by the engraving forum, he won a good place.
Elbow's work: Monkey Head. It was purchased by the buyer and awarded the Tiangong Award, and won the Best Craftsmanship Award.
The movie "Forrest Gump" says that life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what the next moment will taste.
If the refinement of craftsmanship and knowledge is a piece of sweet white chocolate, then when he graduated, he ate a huge bitter dark chocolate.
In 2012, Elbow graduated from the China Academy of Fine Arts, and during a hospital examination he found the source of several years of occasional syncope, which doctors said was a disease called "hyperviruses", but did not prove that insomnia was also due to this disease.
For physical reasons, Elbow embarked on a path of not going to work, and as for income, it was purely based on interest and craftsmanship.
Elbows do carving only to make small pieces, the cycle ranges from 14 days to one or two months, and the number of pieces done a year is 8 to 15 pieces, "the income is not high, but fortunately, my material requirements are not high."
In 2014, Elbow and his beloved Anhui girl got married. They met in the Douban interest group, settled in Shanghai, and after marriage, the couple's monthly expenditure in Shanghai can be controlled at 4,000 yuan.
Soft pottery toys made by the elbow wife
Swipe left or right to see more
For this man who does not go to work, his wife will accompany him on expeditions, accompany him to do carvings, and earn a small income but always be happy and self-sufficient.
03
Keep it up
A teenager who doesn't grow up
The introduction of the Elbow's Douban homepage has such a passage: "Around the age of 18, from today it seems that he was forced to accept all kinds of damage. After struggling for a round, self-help, self-pity, self-lamentation, at the age of 30, began to adapt to the state of survival with the crippled, slowly persuaded himself, and learned to accept reality."
After several years of jade carving, elbows added another stroke to his medical records. Due to long-term desk work, he suffered from cervical spondylosis.
"The jade carver is also a youth rice, as long as you bury your head in it, one day you will suddenly find that you can't lift your head... Well, only by reducing the workload is to make this time a little later."
However, it is not only the order that is reduced, but also his travel plans.
He loves insects, and the better the place where he can walk is of course the better the hot strip on the Vietnamese side, the better the insects.
However, due to his physical condition, his actions shrank from the south to the north of Zhejiang, to the outskirts of Shanghai, and finally to the surrounding area.
However, this did not affect his exploration of the world he loved, and he found the larvae of Jiding in the abandoned trees of the abandoned factory area; he found more than 20 kinds of insects such as the Lisi moth in the cracked farmland of laozhongchun Road, and even encountered the rare weasel in the city.
In this regard, The elbow showed his attitude: "Man's time and energy are limited, and some people feel that I have to see the world in a limited time, but if I put my limited time into the infinite universe, it is bound to say that every point is general. You won't have time to dig deeper. So again, this amount of information, this amount of time, if you go deep into a channel or surround that is convenient for you to obtain, you can play this very thoroughly, so that the happiness and enjoyment you get are the same because your time is so short."
Since last year, Elbow has started a new attempt.
One of the elbow case desks
In Shanghai, he and a few smelly "enthusiasts" opened a studio called "Big City Bugs" and began to popularize the knowledge of species diversity.
From the basics to the food chain to the ecological environment to the shanghai's big and small friends popularized.
In March this year, the studio also launched a handbook called "1,000 Species of Insects in Shanghai", which brings together Elbow and several Shanghai Normal University graduate enthusiasts for 15 years, based on the results of a survey of native insects in Shanghai.
As soon as the booklet was launched, someone subscribed for 10,000 copies, which is undoubtedly a recognition of the persistence of elbows for more than ten years.
Insects, nature, jade carvings... These three are like things that the life force of the elbow cannot get around.
In an interview with Elbow in College Student magazine, the magazine asked about his creative inspiration, elbow said: "If I love art, in fact, the source of love for art is love of nature, and I have been fascinated by the diversity of natural things since I was a child. If I could live in Darwin's time, maybe I would think of becoming a naturalist, walking through the mountains, learning about everything, discovering new species."
Perhaps, a person who has a passion in his heart, whether it is going to work or freelancing, no matter what the situation, can find the joy of life in his work and carve it out and project it into reality.
Thanks to Elbow for giving the interview and providing the material
Some of the material in this article comes from Elbow's previous interview
Article from: Overnight
Copyright belongs to the original author