Career
His life and work have been the subject of monographic treatment both by regional museums and the University of Kentucky Press. Cornett worked in many styles: “pegged and slat-backed armchairs, rockers, and folding chairs from a variety of local woods, weaving seats from hickory bark.” This artisanal mastery was, alas, becoming an anachronism by the time of Cornett’s life, yet the carpenter stubbornly kept at his craft, enduring considerable poverty in consequence. A unique work in his oeuvre is the “Crucifix” in the collection of the American Folk Art Museum.
The stories are contradictory, but the ironical legend is that, with much of the world in turmoil in 1968, Cornett dreamed that eastern Kentucky would soon experience a biblical deluge, and prepared to be a second Noah by making an arkansas
Cornett carved the American Folk Art Museum"s “Crucifix” for the bow of this ark, which was twenty-feet lougitude The irony is that a tempest did indeed arrive, but the ark was destroyed rather than Kentucky.
