The hard life of a May River oysterman is captured on tin by artist D. Pierce Giltner. Choppy water, cold air, wet feet, sore hands, bent back. It’s not easy being an oysterman working the tides. The effort is backbreaking, the hours long, the nights all too short. And the culture is fading faster than winter daylight. Such images are starkly depicted by Bluffton artist D. Pierce Giltner in his latest collection called “Drack,” a series of paintings about a May River oysterman by the same name who has followed generations of his family who worked the oyster beds. The 18 images rise out of acrylic on tin gleaned from abandoned and dismantled old South Carolina slave and tenant cabins. Feeling the edge of one of the paintings, he pointed out the appearance of what he called “cold, rolled steel.” It was a rough texture like old canvas that looked as if it had rusted, but in touching it, the fingers came away clean. The old tin roof had aged naturally and what remained behind was a surface that lent itself well to raw painting, palette knife-strokes … hard-edged lives portrayed with admiration. “I try to preserve the past to present to the present,” Giltner explained at his series’ opening at the Club at Shell Hall on Friday night. Those who buy the art receive a brief write up about the origins of their painting’s surface. Giltner does the dismantling himself. His background was and still is woodworking. He scrambles in and around collapsing buildings looking for recyclable boards, beams and remnants of the past. He seeks out the structures looking for salvageable materials —wood, tin and personal items left behind and long forgotten — that he turns into either visual art or unique structures under his other business, Cedarstacker Rustic Installations. At the same time, he researches and documents the history of the houses, some- times even speaking with neighbors or former residents. “I talked with a man who said his father’s father’s father lived in the house I was working on,” Giltner recalled. “That meant his great-grandfather had been a slave.”

"The hard life of a May River oysterman is captured on tin by artist D. Pierce Giltner." By GWYNETH J. SAUNDERS BLUFFTON TODAY