Whirligigs in Acid Park in Wilson, North Carolina

Artist: Vollis Simpson

.

“[I] just go to the junkyard and see what I could get,” he told The New York Times in 2010. “Went by the iron man, the boat man, the timber man. Ran by every month. If they had no use for it, I took it.”

He collected air conditioner fans, ceiling fans, industrial fans — the biggest is 25 feet across — and covered them with reflective pieces of highway signs that he cut by hand, so that when light hits them at night, the sculptures dazzle like fireworks or church windows that spin. He swears he didn’t measure, didn’t weigh, yet each windmill, as he called them, moves with engineered precision.

“I don’t use a ruler much,” he said on YouTube. “I can go down there with a hacksaw and I can come within a damn eighth of an inch just guessing at it.”

Simpson was one of the greatest visionary artists in the country, says Roger Manley, director and curator of the Gregg Museum of Art + Design in Raleigh, North Carolina, and author of Signs and Wonders: Outsider Art Inside North Carolina. “I think he’s North Carolina’s greatest sculptor, not just great self-taught sculptor.”

Rebecca Hoffberger, the founder and recently retired director of the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, agrees. “The level of Vollis’s imagination and the scale in which he was working is without precedent.”

Simpson trained himself on the math and mechanics to turn other people’s discards into brightly colored and whimsical Ferris wheels, clowns on bicycles, airplanes and rocket ships, men pulling a long saw, his son playing a guitar, ducks, horses, and dogs, all representations of his life as a farmer, father, and soldier.

Simpson was one of 12 siblings, born in 1919 in tiny Lucama, North Carolina. His father was a farmer, but Simpson was more interested in the machinery, eventually building a business moving houses and heavy farm equipment. In 1941 he was serving in the military on the island of Saipan when he converted the propeller of a junked B-29 bomber into a windmill that powered a much-needed washing machine. Back on the farm, he invented crop sprayers and built 13 cranes by welding pulleys, booms, and gantries, Manley says, and attaching them to the back of Army surplus trucks. He used them to move brick buildings or huge factory machinery, to pick up combines stuck in the mud or — legend has it — a locomotive when it fell off a trestle bridge.

He was in his 60s when he started building whirligigs for the fun of it.

He had prestigious visitors as well. In the mid-1990s, Hoffberger was preparing to open the American Visionary Art Museum. She’d seen Simpson’s work in Manley’s book, and after Manley introduced the two, she commissioned Simpson to create a signature piece, the visual draw to her new museum. Manley drove Simpson to Baltimore to see the site. Simpson, who had never been out of his home state except during his military stint, didn’t know how to ride an escalator and had never seen multiple-crossover overpasses. “It was like taking somebody from back in time,” Manley said.

Simpson crafted the 55-foot Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness, repeatedly voted as the most beloved public art in Baltimore, so precisely calibrated for the space that it looks like visitors could reach out and touch it from the balcony.

He took his sons up to help install it in 1993, Hoffberger says, sinking an old Exxon pole 13 feet into the ground, Mike Simpson climbing on the structure while his father held a rope to keep the boom from swinging in the wind.

“He must have done that for well over three hours,” Hoffberger said. Then a staff member offered to give Simpson a break. “It took three of my young male staff to hold it, and they were only able to hold the boom for like a half-hour without being exhausted. And he had done it by himself. That’s how strong he was.”