At 91, a Junkyard Poet of Windmills

2010-04-21 (수) 12:00:00

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LUCAMA, North Carolina ? Just when you think you’ve traveled too far down Wiggins Mill Road, and you start to look for a spot to turn around, the rusting masterworks of Vollis Simpson loom into view.

Nine meters in the air, held aloft by sturdy steel pillars, are some of Mr. Simpson’s pieces: a team of horses pulling a wagon, a metal man strumming a guitar and an airplane cum rocket ship that might have escaped from an old comic book. They are painted in a dozen colors and festooned with propellers that spin in the breeze. With every gust they creak and whir like some phantasmagoric junkyard band.

And down below, barely distinguishable in the shade of a barnlike building with “Simpson Repair Shop” painted on the front, is a gaunt man with big, gnarled hands bent over some scrap metal. It’s Mr. Simpson himself, a retired farm-equipment repairman who turned 91 in January, and who has hammered from discarded steel and aluminum a long second career as an artist.

Mr. Simpson, a graduate of the 11th grade and the United States Army Air Corps, is the creator of some of the most recognizable work in the genre of American homemade art by selftaught practitioners .

His work is on permanent display in Baltimore, Atlanta and Albuquerque. City people regularly find their way to his place, and some of them give him $125 or more for a little nutsand- bolts dog with a propeller for a tail. His biggest pieces have sold for many thousands of dollars, though he gives a lot away.

The attention seems to befuddle him . When he first started making these things he calls his “windmills” 25 years ago, did he call it art?

“Didn’t call it nothing,” he said. “Just go to the junkyard and see what I could get. Went by the iron man, the boat man, the timber man. If they had no use for it, I took it.”

The inspiration was in his gleanings, he said. “I’d look at a piece of metal, think of something and jump right on it.”

Mr. Simpson, one of 12 children, learned to fix things before he learned to read. While stationed in the Pacific during World War II, he made his first windmill from parts of a junked B-29 bomber, to power a giant washing machine for soldiers’ clothes.

Some years later Vollis decorated a discarded windmill and planted it in the pasture . Then, starting in the mid-1980s, one thing led to another, and tractor repair was gradually supplanted by whirligig construction.

Mr. Simpson credits the whirligigs with carrying him past the 70 years or so that his father and brothers lived. But even as he puts in 10 hours in his workshop on some days, he wonders about the future of the amusement park his pasture has become.

“I guess it’ll just rust and fall down when I’m gone,” he said.

Meanwhile, there’s work to do.

“I got to get to the supply shop and get some cogs and chains,” he said, mostly to himself.

By SARAH MASLIN