Man sculpts tiny mountains and lighthouses in painstaking detail

By Kim Underwood
Media General News Service
Published: September 18, 2008

JONESVILLE, N.C. - Phillip A. George sculpts mountains in the eyes of needles and builds lighthouses on the heads of pins.

If I arrived in hell and were told that I would be spending eternity working on such projects, I would say, “Surely I didn’t do anything to deserve that.“

But everybody has a different idea about what makes for a satisfying challenge, and, for George, it has come to be making the teeny-tiniest art that he can.

He not only sculpts Pilot Mountain inside the eyes of sewing needles, he also paints the microscopic mountains. And he paints the lighthouses that he sculpts on the tops of pins. The other day, he was at work on a whale and a squid fighting inside the eye of a needle.

Ask George why he does such things, and he says, “For me, it’s the challenge of it…. I like figuring stuff out.“

George freely acknowledges that not getting upset when something goes wrong can be a challenge.

“The first rule I put down was no profanity,“ he said.

He has had the experience of looking away to find a tool and looking back to find that the lighthouse he had worked on for hours was gone. When something so tiny disappears, he said, it’s not as if you can count on finding it on the floor.

Before he got into working inside the eyes of needles, he painted on grains of rice. After working with pins and needles for a while, he picked up a grain of rice one day.

“It was like painting on a wall inside a house because of all the room that was there,“ he said.

Before he starts to work on a design inside of a needle, he imagines himself small enough to stand inside the eye.

“The smaller you make yourself, the bigger the eye of the needle is,“ he said.

After looking around in his mind’s eye and envisioning how the completed sculpture will look, he gets to work. He won’t say exactly what materials he uses to make the sculptures and he won’t talk about the special tools that he has designed to do the work because he doesn’t want that information to make its way to other micro artists. He is happy to show off the system of magnifiers that enable him to see what he is doing.

George, 53, was born on Christmas Day. His mother, Mazie George, thinks that his birthday has something to do with his talent.

“He has a gift,“ she said.

She remembers him loving to draw and paint when he was in grade school, and paintings that he created over the years share the walls of her living room with family photos.

George is a self-taught artist who never got around to finishing high school. One summer in high school, he got a job in Washington working with concrete. When it came time for school to start, he didn’t go back.

“I fell in love with a girl, and I wanted to stay up there,“ he said.

In the years that followed, he held such jobs as stone mason and commercial fisherman. He married along the way and had a son, Bradley George, who grew up to become a producer and program host for radio station WFDD-FM.

His father’s art impresses Bradley George.

“He does this really incredible stuff,“ he said.

Over the years, George’s artistic impulse has manifested in a number of ways. When he was a commercial fisherman, he did scrimshaw on the sword-like upper jawbone of swordfishes. He has done black-and-white ink drawings inspired by M.C. Escher. He has carved animals out of logs.

He has spent 2½ weeks building miniature gristmills, laying the miniature rocks as if he were building a real mill and making individual wood shingles for the roof. For the chimneys of miniature tobacco barns, he has made individual bricks. The barns include such details as a hornet’s nest, footprints in the mud outside the barn and a birdhouse on a post.

“If you had a magnifying glass, you could see a bird’s beak sticking out of that birdhouse,“ he said. “I like doing miniature stuff.“ .