In Nisei Odyssey: The Camp Years, a writer tells the story of seeing art in the everyday.
"There was one man. A slight man and a quiet man in our Area C who saw something more than firewood when he picked up the slab wood. He picked slabs with especially thick bark and proceeded to carve bas-reliefs of an eagle, a dragon and possibly other things out of the bark on these slabs of firewood. As the carving progressed it revealed a cellular striation in the bark which could be viewed as the feathers of the eagle or as scales in the case of the dragon. The reddish-brown of the bark with the light yellow striations created an object of art out of a very common thing for this man with imagination and eyes to see."
