[va-richmond-general] article on bird house craftsman from the Washington Post
- From: <k-kreutzer@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "Va-Richmond-General@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <va-richmond-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 16 Oct 2003 18:12:32 -0400
Kathy Kreutzer
Chesterfield, VA
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Simple Treasures
By Patricia Dane Rogers
NATHALIE, Va.
American folk art has secured a permanent place in the rarefied art
world. The focus of aggressive collecting and intense academic interest,
portraits of dour women and large-headed children on plywood, schoolgirl
samplers and earthenware jars are setting record prices and possess a cachet
once reserved for Hudson Valley landscapes and 18th-century highboys.
Last fall, 200,000 visitors lined up to see quilts made by rural African
American women at the Whitney Museum. (The Gee's Bend exhibit is scheduled
at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in February.) The American Folk Art Museum in
Manhattan recently reopened in a gleaming $22 million headquarters. And more
than 30,000 visitors are expected to throng the Kentuck Festival of Arts
near Tuscaloosa this weekend -- a folk art jubilee showcased in the October
issue of Smithsonian Magazine. Prices of contemporary pieces in
particular -- primitive dogs and houses finger-painted in mud, and found
objects such as lunch boxes covered with pastel polka dots -- are rising
sharply, commanding five figures for work by self-taught artists that once
might have fetched a couple of bucks.
Prized examples of folk art are found enshrined in museums, galleries and
prestigious private collections. And sometimes, they are found nailed to a
rail by the side of the road.
Perched on shelves along a football-field-length stretch of highway here,
hundreds of rustic wooden birdhouses line the lawn in front of Hazelwood
Antiques. Rough-hewn rural churches, country stores, tobacco barns, Noah's
arks, sharecropper houses, board-and-batten cottages with picket fences --
most no bigger than two feet tall -- stop traffic passing on the busy rural
road. The buildings are constructed of weathered, sometimes peeling boards
and tin reclaimed from torn-down buildings. Miniature country stores are
brightened with snippets from cigarette advertising signs, old Coca-Cola
caps and plug-tobacco tags; a tiny fence is built with strips of lath; a
church steeple crowned by a salvaged rocking-chair finial.
"No two houses are alike," says their creator, Ben Hazelwood, a former
tobacco farmer. "I like to call this my little town."
Hazelwood, a self-deprecating man whose formal education ended with the
eighth grade, says his father, who died two years ago, was the true folk
artist of the family. "I just grew into it," he says. "Coming up on a farm
you learn how to build and fix things. I also watched my Daddy while he made
birdhouses. I built right many while he was living, but I'm not in his
league yet."
Ginger Young, a dealer of contemporary southern folk art in Chapel Hill,
N.C., says Hazelwood's work fits firmly in the tradition. "True folk art is
an expression of human ingenuity using resources at hand," she says. "This
guy doesn't go to a Michael's craft store and buy a kit. He uses what he
has, and what he makes is functional, enduring and beautiful."
Hazelwood, 42, who lives here with his mother, Christine, and younger
brother, Mike, is heir to a dual enterprise begun by his father, Gregory
Hazelwood: the family antique store -- a collection of attic treasures
housed in rambling sheds behind a clapboard Victorian -- and the birdhouse
business only recently revived.
Gregory Hazelwood, who began making the birdhouses in his later years,
whittled each with his pocketknife to while away the winter months and
supplement the family's tobacco income. He built a rail along the highway to
display them, and started selling to passersby.
"A lot of dealers bought Daddy's churches and country stores, but after he
passed, we took them down," says his son. The obituary, which appeared in
the Martinsville, Va., Gazette, read simply, "Hazelwood, 72, died August 27,
2001. . . . He was a farmer and he built birdhouses."
The family gave up on tobacco after his father and an older brother died.
"The tobacco was a family thing," Hazelwood says; they simply lacked the
manpower to continue. Recently, he decided to give the birdhouse venture
another go-round, partly as a sideline to the antiques business, partly
because he enjoyed the creative outlet. "The birdhouses," he says, "have
always been a good market."
This time though, the little houses are the fruit of his own vision with
the help of "several buddies" who have retired or been laid off. "Folks are
losing jobs right and left around here at the textile mills and tobacco
fields," he says. "It's awful. Don't know what folks are supposed to do."
His first effort, 20 years ago, produced a house still inhabited by his pet
pigeons, which, like the flocks of bantams, geese and peacocks he keeps
around -- for color and companionship more than anything else -- strut from
one end of his yard to the other. Though made without patterns, Hazelwood's
houses have subtle refinements such as red dots and dashes signifying
brickwork, and scalloped trim often finished with a jigsaw. Color depends on
materials at hand.
While Hazelwood might be reluctant to call himself an artist, antiques
dealer Robert G.D. Pottage III of nearby Halifax Court House has no such
reservations. "What Ben is doing really is folk art. Creative details come
from his imagination," says Pottage, who has sold fine antiques to curators
from the Smithsonian, Williamsburg and Winterthur museums. "It's where his
hand and mind take him that makes it come about."
Gerard C. Wertkin, director of New York's flourishing Museum of American
Folk Art, says part of the genre's enduring appeal lies in its honesty. "It
is the expression of an authentic spirit straight from the heart without
formal academic training. Folk art is aesthetically powerful," he says.
"Whether it's 300 years old or made yesterday and no matter where it comes
from -- the Deep South, New England or anywhere in the country, it touches
us."
Small-scale replicas of larger structures are a familiar manifestation of
the tradition. "Birdhouses fall within a constant thread of miniaturization
that people enjoy," says Wertkin, whose museum has a "whole series of
miniature houses from doll houses and tramp art churches which were carved,
painted or otherwise created for the sheer joy of it."
Brian Noyes, art director of Smithsonian Magazine, is author of the
article about the Kentuck art fair in the current issue. A collector
himself, he considers the displays throughout his Arlington home to be art,
as opposed to decor. "Little houses made of tiny beach pebbles, face jugs
and assemblages of rocks and fossils in neon colors are sculpture," he says.
"They define the character of the house."
Hazelwood, who put the birdhouses by the roadside a couple of months ago,
has been surprised by the response. He says he's spotted a few knockoffs
going up around the area, but says they're mostly new, made with glue,
instead of nails. "They won't hold up outside," he says. "The onliest wood
we use is old. Some of it's been around 100 years."
One recent weekday afternoon, Phillip Smith, an electrician from Alta
Vista, a few miles to the north, drops by in a company truck. "It's my
wife's birthday, and I think she'd like a birdhouse," he says. "I'm also
looking for a coal bucket."
"Got plenty of them," says Hazelwood, whose stock of antiques and
collectibles comes mostly from area flea markets, swap meets and estate
buy-outs. Plastering the sheds out back are old license plates and road
signs reading Dale Earnhardt Drive and Coca-Cola Ave., which Hazelwood
bought at a trade lot sale in Alta Vista. A 12-foot-tall sign shaped like a
Coke bottle and dated 1949 came "from a truck stop somewhere between here
and Florida." (The big Labor Day flea up in Hillsville, he confides, is "the
Super Bowl.")
Depending on size and complexity, Hazelwood's birdhouses cost from $50 to
$125. A foot-high blue church with a belfry and pointed gothic-style windows
was $85; a sprawling dog-trot cottage with a side porch and fence, $125. A
few of the smaller houses had been outside only for a day or two but already
bluebirds were in residence.
Hazelwood says he's never visited a museum. "But I've been to Durham and
to Raleigh," he says. "They're good places to visit but no way I'd want to
live there. From what I understand, one big town is like another." He far
prefers the familiar peace and quiet of the farm, his family and his beloved
birds.
Hazelwood Antiques is at 11235 L.P. Bailey Hwy., Route 501, near
Nathalie, Va., about a 41/2-hour drive from Was ington. Appointments
suggested; cash only. For information, call 434-349-3947.
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