Читать книгу Small is Possible - Lyle Estill - Страница 13
ОглавлениеTHERE’S A METAL SCULPTOR in Rockwood, Ontario named Andreas Drenters. He worked with his brother to assemble a remarkable sculpture called Pioneer Family. It was a larger-than-life Conestoga wagon, complete with children and dogs that made its debut in Montreal at Expo 67.
I remember Expo 67. When we went as a family I was five years old. We believed in World Fairs.
And I later became friends with Andreas. He worked out of a tiny shop in Rockwood, Ontario, and filled the grounds of an abandoned nunnery with magnificent pieces of scrap metal sculpture. He was an inspiration to me.
When I bought my farm in Moncure, it was covered with trash. In a time before landfills, tradition dictated that you tote your garbage to the property line and form a pile. When your neighbor did the same thing, everything was clear. Which means the busted subsistence farms which dot these woods are demarcated by trash. While some has decomposed over the years, the metal remains.
I came along in the era of public landfills, but the instinctive recycler in me would not let me throw metal away.
I sorted glass by color. And I bagged aluminum cans by the ton. And whenever I could, I would load my pickup truck up with ferrous metals, and drive to Siler City, where I would sell it to John over at Bish Enterprises. Bish is a scrap yard and army surplus store. John would pay around a penny a pound, which meant a good day would result in five bucks. On my way home empty, I would stop at the stockyard, and give my money to the fellow who mucked out the stalls with the Bobcat.
He was supposed to load people for free on certain afternoons, but he got accustomed to my scrap-metal tip and was happy to hook me up with a scoop or two of fresh manure. My poor old truck would ride low with a load of metal to Siler City, and return riding low with soil amendment.
I would occasionally do the trip with my daughters, in which each of us would guess the weight of the outgoing load. The winner would pocket the money, which generally meant we came home with milkshakes instead of manure.
But after years of hauling from the woods to the scrap yard, I started seeing things in the metal. I would fish out certain pieces, drill holes in them with my electric drill, and bolt them together. Tami would come home from work, and I would say “Look, honey, there’s a mosquito in the front yard.”
She would look at the “sculpture,” which had tin cans for eyes, and she would look at me with a worried expression. Using a hand-held hacksaw, and nuts and bolts, I made caterpillars, and a giant Canada goose, and flowers for the yard.
Friends and family started noticing when they came to visit, and they occasionally asked to purchase a piece. “Mother’s day is coming up, and my Mom would like that,” Phifer said. At the time I was running around Research Triangle Park each day trying to sell software for a living, and I had no desire to sell my art. Which made me politely decline.
That only increased demand.
My journey into art was triggered in large part by a trip to Sweden. Tami and I awoke one morning in Hanover, Germany, at the end of a grueling technology trade show, and boarded a train for Sweden.
It was Easter, and though Sweden is not a religious country, the place was largely closed. The service was horrible, the weather was drab, and my fantasies about Sweden as the model progressive country were abruptly dashed. On top of my broken expectations, Tami and I decided that it would probably be best if we split the sheets on our return.
She wanted kids. I already had kids. And we pretty much agreed that it would be best if we went our separate ways.
We were in Uppsala, visiting a church renowned for its Viking runes, and as we walked through the cold drizzle, thoroughly disheartened, we encountered a garden-sized chess set made of wood set in a private glen in a public park.
It was a miraculous affair. We played a game. It was fun.
I thought of my scrap metal piles at home, and envisioned a life-sized set made from scrap. For some reason, it occurred to me that if we could have a giant-sized chess set at home, having more children with Tami wouldn’t be that bad.
I built my big board, and Zafer arrived, and our love of corporate life evaporated.
Tami went back to work for one week, cried her eyes out, and traded in her jet-set job for motherhood. She decided to become an art broker, which she intended to do with a kid on her hip, from her headquarters in the corner of our living room. And she kicked off her new business by selling a life-sized chess set to Laura over at Reba and Roses, which was a renowned landscaping and garden art center.
With an “order” in hand, I needed to get busy, and I quickly realized that I had no way to do real welding. I collected all the design elements for the first set, and had them welded together by John Amero over at Amero Metal Design. He gave me a lesson in how to operate my oxy-fuel rig, and then left me to my own devices.
I landed a one-man exhibition at the Carrboro Art Center, called Junkyard Frog, for which I brazed my brains out.
I collected some interesting scrap metal from an abandoned mill and made a piece which I called “Going to Town.” It was a family on a buckboard. Mom, Dad, daughter, son, dog, pulled by horse. When braising cast iron the trick is to use nickel rods and to sand-cool the joints. I put a tractor tire in place at Summer Shop, and filled it with sand. I would complete a joint, and immerse it in the sand, let it cool, and pull it out for the next one. And I did this a hundred times to fabricate Going to Town.
When Going to Town showed up in the Carrboro Arts Center, I paid tribute to Andreas Drenters and Pioneer Family. Its scale was tiny compared to his. But his influence was evident. The show was selected as one of the top ten exhibitions in the Triangle for 1998.
It wasn’t long before I realized that if I was going to make a go of metal sculpture, I would need to be indoors, and I would need better electricity, and I would need to learn how to actually weld.
That combination of ideas put me on the real estate hunt. Anyone headed out of our house has a twisted half-mile drive to the end of the lane. When they reach the Pittsboro-Moncure Road upon which we live, they will find themselves about equidistant between the two places. Take a left and you are headed for Moncure. Take a right and you are Pittsboro bound.
The day I decided to search for a place to set up shop I took a left.
The unincorporated village of Moncure has a handful of churches, a post office, the Jordan Dam Mini Mart, an elementary school, a bank, a post office, and Ray’s General Merchandise — which is a Citgo station with a butcher shop and about anything else someone might need.
My desire was to not only open a sculpture business, but also to open an “arts incubator,” where other artists would rent space, come into their own, and settle in Moncure. I saw the Village of Moncure as the next Soho. Real Estate was cheap, places were abandoned, and I figured it would be easy to effect an “artistic renaissance” in the community.
The site I chose was a single story white building on Old US 1, about the middle of town. Elbert had won it in a poker game, and his wife Claudia ran a beauty salon in one of its rooms.
I needed some cash to launch the project, so I headed down into the hollow where Wilbur and Margaret lived. Margaret was a county commissioner at the time, and was an emissary from the black community. Her brother Wilbur is our county’s greatest salesman. Whether it is pumpkins, or firewood, or collard greens, or whatever, he has been selling products off the back of his truck for generations, and is undoubtedly one of the wealthiest individuals in Moncure.
I explained my vision to them. They were to donate money to the Botanical Garden in Chapel Hill, and the Botanical Garden was to buy one of my giant chess sets. I was to take the money, and transform Elbert and Claudia’s place into Moncure Chessworks, which would then incubate studio artists, introduce the community to chess, teach chess to children, and otherwise transform the community.
They liked the idea. And they were in.
With an order in hand, I rented the place and went to work. A dear friend from college, Jim, jumped in and helped with the transformation of the building.
We moved in together as artistic roommates, intent on making our way as studio artists.
The building had enjoyed a long and varied life, but the most famous of its incarnations was that of juke joint. In a village where there was no such thing as liquor by the drink, Elbert managed to create a thriving speak easy, with live bands, a VIP lounge, and a reputation which drew black folks from miles around.
We turned the stage into a spray booth, rigged up compressed air, and I set up a metal working shop where the VIP room once stood.
I hosted chess tournaments, at one point bringing in Emory Tate, who at the time was slotted to become the first African American grand master chess player. I offered chess lessons. And with the help of the masonry class from Northwood High School, I built a twenty-four square foot solid concrete chess board in the side yard.
As the years wore on Elsie painted a mural on the side wall, and Mike built an outdoor grinding station and scrap yard. Jim moved a kiln in, and we started having openings that would draw a crowd. Kerry moved into one corner and worked in stained glass. The place began to pulse, and whenever I landed big commissions, whether they were chess sets, or otherwise, I would take on help. Stayce and Stacey and Heather and Janice and I had a blast shipping everything from giant toys, to giant steel teacups, to thematic chess sets.
By far the greatest transformation came from Jim Massey who lived down the road at the Holly Hill Daylily farm. He was the first person to ever “buy” a sculpture from me. Jim is a connoisseur of botanical life, and a purveyor of registered, named, and hybridized daylilies, among other things.
His artistic sensibility is unique, and he has become an avid collector of “outsider and visionary” art. Back then he would simply take a pair of manikin legs, dress them in ruby slippers, wedge them beneath his newly constructed gazebo, and refer to the piece as “Dorothy.”
He’s built gardens around his headless Madonna collection, and constructed a giant mound of hollyhocks “because nobody ever features them, you know.”
The Holly Hill Daylily Farm is an ever-changing place that is full of surprises with each visit, and more importantly, full of Jim. He brims with stories, and sentiments and advice, and loves to poke fun at the establishment, all the while bemoaning how hard it is to stay in business. After each season I ask him how his year went, and each year is “Awful, just awful — thirty percent less than last year.” Despite that, his farm has rapidly expanded. New buildings, and ponds, and sculpture — it is a remarkable place.
On the occasion of my first sale, I drove to his place in the rain. I had fashioned a clump of daylilies out of steel strapping and some bicycle parts. I left the sculpture on the truck, slipped through his gate and walked up to his house.
He came to the door cautiously. I explained that I had been making scrap metal sculptures, and that I had never sold one, and that I had made one which I thought he would like, and that I would be happy to install it for him under one condition.
“That is, if you like it, you have to buy it.”
He thought that was a reasonable proposition, and so he sent me, and one of his minions down to the front field to do the install. As we were finishing, he came lumbering down from the house, beneath a full sized patio umbrella that was being carried by another of his associates.
As he approached, he said to his first assistant, “Will I like it?”
The answer came back, “Oh, yes.”
He stepped up and studied the sculpture and immediately turned to me (who was soaking wet by this time) and said, “I’ll take it. How much?”
It was my moment of truth. I was professional salesman. And I caved. I had no idea.
I said, “I don’t know. I could take flowers. Whenever I come shopping here, I dig from this side of the path,” pointing to the area where the plants tended to be in the seven to ten dollar range. “If you would like, you could pay with plants from that side,” pointing to the area where the new releases were growing. Newly released plants could be twenty-five to a hundred and fifty dollars each, and while I always marveled at them, I could not afford them.
“All right” he said, motioning to one off his workers, let’s give him a Holly Hill Sunset, and dig a couple of Festival Enos, and here, get him some…” and he sent me home with over three hundred and fifty dollars worth of plants.
I had sold my first sculpture. And I had gone from a gardener to a “collector of daylilies.” It was unbelievable.
When Chessworks came to town, Jim remained suspicious. He would stop by occasionally and tell stories and chat, and he kept abreast of the new work. But he was not a buyer in the early days.
Once he had me weld a child’s bicycle into a wheelie for a display he was working on, which I believe I did for free. And eventually he would pick up the odd piece here and there. When I had help, he would happily pay them to grind out posts or install art fencing for him. His own deer fence, which he has been building out of bicycles for about a decade, may yet prove too labor intensive to complete.
A turning point for Chessworks was an occasion when Jim indicated that if I would put a planter out in my full sun, cracked asphalt parking lot; he would fill it with plants. I ignored the idea until one day when I was at the scrap yard with Janice, who spotted a series of giant “bowl liners” made of manganese that looked liked giant coffee cups without handles. “Those could be planters,” she said, at which point I had the crane toss one into the back of my truck.
I dropped the “planter” in the parking lot, fetched two more. I positioned the three planters in the parking lot and let Jim know I was ready to go. He brought the dirt, and the plants, and before things were even in flower I came into work one day with a note slipped under the door, asking for a price.
I was immediately in the planter business, and Chessworks has been shipping bowl liners ever since.
While the planter business has contributed nicely to the financial success of Chessworks, it was the plants that made the statement. In later years I built a giant planter in front of the shop. I fished the original bowls out and plunked a two thousand pound chess pawn in the middle, bearing a shiny stainless steel flag that read “Art for Sale.”
Jim has furnished that expanse of cracked asphalt with banana plants and giant thistles with bright blue blooms the size of baseballs, and lantana, and whatever else has triggered his imagination. I was so inspired by Jim’s plantings that I started my own honeysuckle collection. Jim dropped a wisteria into the mix, with cautious instructions that it be pruned just so. His garden contributions have transformed a non-descript building on the edge of a forgotten highway into a showpiece that demands that drivers hit the brakes and investigate this fecund roadside attraction.
In my latter years at Chessworks I routinely had visitors who stopped for seeds, or cuttings, and couldn’t have cared less about the art.
Perhaps Jim is a customer. Or perhaps he is a partner. Over the years I have driven traffic to his farm. And over the years he has driven customers to me. When he added garden art to his annual sales event, I sold every piece I delivered, and he did not take the usual percentage cut.
I suppose that if someone were keeping a ledger of our transactions, I would be ahead. He has fed my boys popsicles, and he has donated plant material to the biodiesel co-op, and more importantly, he has inspired me to push on.
Once when I was shipping a giant chess set I had all of the pawns lined up such that they were peering over the edge of the truck. Jim popped in and suggested that they looked like “The Moncure Boy choir.” I liked it. I made a piece called the Mon-cure Boy Choir, which consisted of twelve singing choirboys on a riser. It sold to a collector at a show in Maplewood, New Jersey. And it led to the fabrication of the Greensboro Boy Choir for a garden shop in downtown Greensboro. And it led to the production of the Sanford Boy Choir.
At the height of Chessworks, when I was shipping big chess boards throughout the region, and competing in sculpture competitions near and far, and staging openings with fair regularity, I brushed up against Don and Clyde.
Don was a lawyer turned artisan who ran a successful pottery with his partner Kenny. Clyde was a former district attorney turned real estate mogul who owned a big chunk of downtown Sanford. Together they were staging a pottery festival, which was an enormous undertaking.
They had television advertisements and potters from throughout the region, and they had decided to do with pottery in Sanford what I had been attempting to do with metal sculpture in Moncure. We were a good fit. They had an eye on economic development.
And I had been at it for a while.
Clyde hired me to create some enormous sculptures for his buildings and install them downtown. My crew and I put the Sanford Boy Choir atop a three story building on Steele Street. And we made a series of giant toys that adorned the face of one of his buildings. One year those toys made the phone book jacket, as a defining Sanford landmark.
But Clyde’s brilliance wasn’t merely in commissioning substantial pieces of art. The deal he struck with me was that I would spend the money he paid in Sanford.
Which I was delighted to do. During those years, I took my crew to lunch in Sanford. My family rented videos in Sanford. I became a well-known customer at the scrap yard, and the local welding store.
I traded sculptures for large lunch tabs that could sustain a handful of us dining in style every day. When it was time for a fancy dinner on the town, I would book the window of the Italian place downtown and fill it with my family of six.
The deals Clyde and I struck made me a member of the local business community, involved me in the artistic revitalization effort, and caused me to re-circulate my money in the effort.
Mac and Jan opened an art gallery downtown and sold my work. We headed to Sanford for plays at the remarkable Temple Theatre, and we spent summer nights in front of the band shell kicking a soccer ball with the kids and listening to the local bands.
It was a wonderful and heady time. I was making a living as an artist, and playing the role in Sanford, and Sanford was thriving.
But the pottery festival never managed to surpass its big first year. Part of the problem was structural. Sanford built its convention center on the edge of town, rather than downtown where the revitalization was in full swing. Don and Clyde were successful at attracting thousands of out of town guests to Sanford, but they came to the edge of town, and left again, without spilling into the shops and restaurants and other venues.
Dollars collected at the festival itself left town the moment the potters closed their booths. And the event never went on to become the economic anchor that it was intended to be.
The five-star restaurant closed, and Mac and Jan folded up shop. A deathblow to the cause came when the city leaders closed Depot Park in the heart of things, for a two-year renovation. Clyde sold some of his buildings, and the giant toys came down, and Sanford slipped back into Sanford as usual — which is an industrial town with an amazing scrap yard, and a vast amount of abandoned brick buildings.
The renaissance never really took, and Sanford — like Moncure — never really went on to become an artistic Mecca.
Nowadays I see Jim at the farmer’s market. I recently started an evening primrose collection based on his offerings. I vanished into biodiesel, and he is still anchoring Haywood — just on the other side of Moncure. He has moved an old Post Office onto his lot and stocked it with an amazing collection of outsider art. His Haywood Museum of Art stuck — perhaps inspired in some way by my efforts to spawn an artistic re-creation–of the village.
It’s hard to evaluate Chessworks as a project. From a financial prospective it was borderline. It did bring some artists to town. There was something to the SOHO effect, but it would be hard to describe Moncure as a vibrant community of artists — despite the signs the Department of Transportation erected on three sides of the village, which read: Welcome to Moncure, Community of Artists.
I spent about six years as a full time studio artist, and managed to build a sustenance for one person. Chessworks stood for a decade, and remains a pleasant roadside attraction. Many have fond memories of great parties and romances and pieces of work gone by. And Moncure has become known for its artists. But self-reliance is a long way off, and I am not sure where to plug Moncure Chessworks into the framework of the possible.
I left Chessworks in the hands of Tuesday Fletcher, with whom I have fabricated hundreds of sculptures. She is an accomplished welder, who stayed with me for the construction of our biodiesel plant. She elected to close Chessworks in the fall of 2007, bringing an end to a remarkable ten year run.
It could be that the soil in Moncure might have been too thin for an artistic renaissance. And it could be the experience informed me. And caused me to head to the other end of the road — to Pittsboro where there are more resources and deeper cultural soils.
