LUCAMA, N.C. -- Vollis Simpson has taken the scrap and metal of his life's work and created a wonderland of perpetual motion.
In a pasture where his daddy's mules once grazed, the 76-year-old welder has erected 26 whirligigs and windmills -- some towering 40 feet in the air. In a brisk wind, they clang and gong. In the sun, they gleam. At night, under bright lights, they glitter like a pirate's jewels.
Mr. Simpson calls this pasture full of mirth his "mess." Others see sculpture. Words don't matter. He is busy creating just such a piece for Baltimore's new museum devoted to the work of "visionary" artists, individuals unschooled in the ways of mainstream art. The work will grace an outdoor courtyard of the museum, located on the edge of the Inner Harbor and set to open in September.
"He's called by many in this field 'The Calder of the South,' " museum founder Rebecca Hoffberger says, referring to Alexander Calder, the late abstract artist known for his mobiles. "I think he is the Calder of the future. He has the most joyful sculptures I've seen."
Standing amid the clutter of his repair shop, Vollis Simpson has another view of his work: "I just had a lot of material out here. Had to do something with it."
And do he did.
Imagine, all in one, the brightness and color of a state fair, a Christmas garden and Oz towering behind a post-and-beam fence in the Carolina countryside. That's the effect, especially at night, when you drive down any of the five rural roads that converge at the old mule pasture.
The headlights of the car illuminate the whirligigs, reflecting off the pieces fashioned onto the painted steel structures. Each piece is a three-dimensional mosaic, glittering green and blue, yellow and white, red and orange. They are junkyard jewels fashioned from bicycle wheels, chemical tanks, ventilators, pipes and cables, stainless steel Hamilton Beach mixers, even silver wine goblets.
By day, under a Carolina blue sky, Mr. Simpson's genius reveals itself. A few pieces resemble carnival pinwheels as big as Gulliver's hand. Others swing and creak like giant weather vanes. They showcase the wizardry of a mechanical mind: A cowboy whips a mule team; a musician picks his guitar; a boy rides an old-fashioned bicycle.
Art aside, it's the nuts and bolts that move Mr. Simpson. How to make sure that in a wind, swift or lazy, the bicycle wheel will turn, the hand will strum the guitar, the mule's ears will flap. He's got a lifetime of engineering feats in his head: 40 years of repairing heavy equipment, rebuilding old trucks, hauling farm machinery, moving houses.
"He's always been a tinkerer," eldest son Mike Simpson says of his father.
"When people would say what does your daddy do . . . I would always say what he would say -- 'jack-of-all-trades,' " adds daughter Carol Simpson Dunn.
To a visitor, Vollis Simpson finishes the phrase: "master of none."
"A lot of people call me some things besides an artist," he says, laughing.
Mr. Simpson built his first windmill while stationed on the island of Saipan during World War II. The Japanese destroyed some U.S. bombers and he gathered up the scrap. He rigged up a makeshift washing machine propelled by Pacific breezes.
"It weren't nothing fancy, but it worked," he recalls. "I had soapsuds running two blocks."
After the war, he returned to his native North Carolina and married Jean Barnes, whom he had met while home on a furlough. He built the repair shop across the road from the mule pasture and opened for business. His sweat and muscle put three children through college.
Always building
He spent his little free time building something -- a small replica of a Model T Ford, a riding lawn mower, a go-kart for his children. When the energy crisis hit, he built a windmill to power a blower for a wood-fired, homemade boiler.
Then, about 10 years ago, he took 11 old bicycle wheels, a tumbler from a dryer, a cache of bullet side-mirrors last seen on '55 Chevys and dozens of reflectors and welded the first of his playful windmills. He erected it at the edge of his shop property. Twenty-five would follow, most in the mule pasture.
He has no blueprints, no engineering designs. "More or less, I got in my mind what I'm going to do," he says. "I sleep on most of it."
In the beginning, he says, "my wife quarreled with me all the time. Local folk all laughed at me."
Jean Simpson views the whirligigs and windmills as the hobby her husband never had. But like his work, they can consume him.
"I think it makes him sleepless sometimes when he's got one going in his head. . . . He's working on it even when he goes to bed," she says.
"It has grown and it's grown to where it's just part of our lives," says Mrs. Simpson, whose humor is as dry as her husband's. "Other women are golfing, fishing -- I've just become the windmill widow."
Although he doesn't bother much with being an "artist," Vollis Simpson clearly enjoys this "mess" he's made. And he's proud of it.
"It's perpetual motion," Mr. Simpson says, standing beside one of his creations. "That thing will fool you how long it turns."
Below another, he says, pointing to a mirror positioned on a shaft: "Once in a while I'll be in the shop, then the light reflects off that mirror, it'll never strike the same place twice."
Once a month, he services the windmills and whirligigs, greasing what needs greasing.
"I always got to be doing something. I'd be miserable if I wasn't doing something," Mr. Simpson says.
Since the world discovered the pasture full of whirligigs, television cameras and museum curators have arrived at Vollis Shop Road. Wonderstruck tourists have driven past and then backed up for a second look.
"People come out here and say, 'Turn it on,' " Mr. Simpson says. These days the pasture gates are locked and Mr. Simpson has been known to shine a spotlight on rowdy young mischief-makers at night and sound a siren he keeps in his shop.
Two summers ago, Rebecca Hoffberger, founder of the American Visionary Art Museum, arrived at Mr. Simpson's door. She had seen his work in Roger Manley's book on visionary artists, "Signs & Wonders." Ms. Hoffberger wanted to commission a windmill for the new museum planned for the foot of Federal Hill.
Handshake agreement
"We made an agreement on a handshake," Ms. Hoffberger recalls. "And he would not take any advanced payment and he said he wanted it all finished before he took anything from us."
Mr. Simpson has sold smaller versions of his whirligigs -- a 3-foot unicyclist goes for about $350, propeller planes, pint-sized replicas from his Air Force days, sell for about $100. But the piece for the Baltimore museum is his first big sale.
How much, he won't say. "Even my children don't know," he says.
So will Baltimore's whirligig have ducks with flapping wings? A unicyclist riding like crazy? Two woodsmen sawing and sawing and sawing? What?
Vollis Simpson is mum.
"Not a half-dozen people know about it," he says, "I keep it broke down. I got it in half-dozen places. It's not a secret, not the atomic bomb or nothing, but you know how people run their mouth."
He's installed his works in museums in Atlanta. And he expects to do the same in Baltimore.
"If the ol' Maker'll let me," he says.