Right Brain, Left Brain: Art adds color to Fort Drum NEC employee's life

By Mr. Steve Ghiringhelli (Drum)January 23, 2014

Art adds color to Fort Drum employee's life
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Art adds color to Fort Drum employee's life
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Art adds color to Fort Drum employee's life
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Art adds color to Fort Drum employee's life
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Art adds color to Fort Drum employee's life
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FORT DRUM, N.Y. -- When visitors to Bldg. 10690 pull in behind the barbed wire perimeter and cross the armored threshold, they may enter Fort Drum's Network Enterprise Center with a sense of seriousness or pangs of caution.

Once in, however, the very first face they encounter is bright, welcoming and friendly.

This is not a glitch in the system. Jim Woodworth's sunny outlook is just one of many examples of the strong and positive customer-centric culture at the NEC. And combined with a hidden artistic talent, Woodworth flourishes inside one of Fort Drum's most left-brained environments.

"Jim is an exceptionally caring and devoted employee," said Ken Roney, chief of Business Management Branch at NEC and Woodworth's direct supervisor. "He is often pulled from one sort of job to another, frequently without much notice. He always goes beyond traditional customer service expectations for our Civilian workforce and Soldiers."

As security manager of the Business Management Branch of NEC's Information Assurance Division, Woodworth is in charge of every element of physical security, managing the access and control of not only his building but also a dozen or so other NEC locations throughout Fort Drum.

But when his office lights are off and his door is closed, the 60-year-old native New Yorker can often be found in his tiny cramped studio, a sectioned-off space in his home's garage, where his imagination takes form on canvasses dabbed, slapped and splattered by the tips of his paintbrushes.

'Art was always a part of me'

Woodworth took art in college during the 1970s, but he said he later pursued business management to make a better living.

After a couple of years as an active-duty MP in the Army, he joined the Army National Guard near his home in Hornell, N.Y. In 1974, he began working as a medical administrative assistant with Veterans Affairs down the road in Bath.

Aside from his regular duties at the VA, which often included stressful times of processing patients in and out through the night, Woodworth offered to paint a Hawaiian ocean landscape in the nursing care unit. Spanning eight feet, the tide represented the veterans coming and going through Bath who had served overseas, he said.

For the VA's bicentennial celebration in 1976, he also designed and painted an enormous eagle on the façade of the building that was featured prominently in a local newspaper.

"Whichever field I was in, art was always a part of me, and I found ways to express it," he said.

After taking a job up at Fort Drum in 1985, Woodworth moved to northern New York with his son, Jason. He met and married his wife, Ellen, several years later.

Together, they have a 20-year-old son, Jonathan, and 18-year-old daughter, Emily.

After retiring from the Army National Guard in the 1990s, Woodworth said he continued working odd jobs at night and weekends after a full day at Fort Drum to make ends meet for his family.

Also, his art continued to express itself in the most unlikely of places.

From stocking shelves at a supermarket or working as a night manager in a convenience store, Woodworth said his talents were put to good use, doing everything from helping to design special promotional kiosks to painting Christmas-themed artwork on windows.

"I tried to keep up my art," he said. "I didn't lose my talent over the years."

Renaissance

But something of a transformation came just three years ago at the Woodworth home in Great Bend, N.Y., when the latent artist built a large two-car garage with enough room off to the side for a studio, where he could pursue his art again.

Most of his oil paintings are nature scenes. His preferred aspects are clouds and trees. The inspiration comes from one of his family's favorite pastimes -- hiking, especially in the Adirondacks. Whether it's a waterfall deep in the woods or autumn leaves reflecting on a lake, Woodworth said he likes to first experience and study an environment before taking a picture to later paint it.

"I walk out there and see what I see," he said. "Whatever scene it is, I look at the colors, trees, clouds -- what are the images communicating? I want to make that tree, that cloud, that flower look real.

"I want people to enter my paintings," he added. "When you look at my paintings, I hope that you can kind of move around and feel you are (in it)."

At the Fort Drum NEC, co-workers and supervisors have been pleasantly surprised to learn of Woodworth's hidden talent.

"Jim's artwork is creative and of very high quality," Roney said. "I just didn't imagine him being so artistic."

Woodworth's art most likely affects how he approaches work and life, Roney added.

"With such a hectic and erratic type of workload, it probably provides him an outlet for stress as well as a goal that he looks forward to during stressful and demanding times," he said.

Woodworth's exceptional performance at NEC in recent years led Roney and the division chief to present him with the Commander's Award for Civilian Service last week.

Although he uses still photos to paint, Woodworth said he hopes to one day try the more challenging "open air" painting. "When I retire, I plan to do open air and paint as I see it," he said. "But clouds move, lighting changes, bugs come and go, the wind kicks up."

Gaining confidence as he has relearned his painting technique, Woodworth has accepted specific commissions to paint what others want to see.

In one instance, he spent two months worth of weekends painting a panoramic nature scene on the curved fiberglass of a small silver camper titled "Adirondack Memories."

Woodworth notes that his journey back into the art world, which shows no signs of slowing, has been a wonderful experience.

"I always had an art talent," he said. "Even though I stopped for a while, I always had the interest. To come back to it has been so much fun."