Small is Possible. Lyle Estill
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