|
|
 |
This biography from the Archives of AskART:
| The following is reprinted with permission from "Adirondack Life" magazine, volume XXXVI, no. 6, September/October 2005
"The Grass Menagerie: The outlandish sculptures of the late Forrest Lanfair, outstanding in his field" by Galen Crane, Photographs by Mark Bowie
On East Schroon River Road a few miles north of Warrensburg sits a modest little white-and-blue house with a silver-painted standing-seam tin roof. Its front porch is piled high with objects that defy immediate identification. Just across and hard by the road is a drafty looking barn of aged, brown boards. But what distinguishes this otherwise ordinary place from similar Adirondack homesteads is the collection of large, almost comically rendered sculptures set around the lawn and field-figures of farmers, farm wives, livestock, a couple of town drunks, a caveman family, an elf, minutemen, a goat butting a woman in the rear end. The arresting objects-made from concrete or fiberglass over wire frames, then painted and, in some cases, outfitted with props like a broom, rope and glasses-are the work of the late Forrest Lanfair, a third-generation Warrensburger who worked his way up from postal carrier to clerk to postmaster there. (Lanfair was seventy-nine when he passed away in 2003.) His daughter, Donna, a slight woman of fifty-seven with light blond hair and a gravelly voice, lives in the house and is the keeper of the collection. She said her father began making the whimsical creations about twenty-five years ago. His first two pieces were an elf and a mushroom.
Since then, he maintained a pace of about one piece or multipiece set per winter. His springtime ritual of taking his latest creation from the home's sunroom-his cold-weather studio-to a place in the grass often led to open speculation on the part of his fans. "People couldn't wait to see what he was going to put out each spring," Donna said. What was the artist's inspiration? "They came from his head. He really was a clever person with a great sense of humor," she said.
The plowman, with his gut bursting through his work shirt and between his suspenders, is a case in point. Right from the start, it was clear the pieces were popular with art lovers, but not always with the happiest results. Soon after Lanfair set out his first two sculptures, the elf went missing. A few days later, a note arrived requesting a ransom for its safe return. "The state police set them up, but no one came," Donna recalled. Some time later, the elf was discovered half-buried in the ground behind a Warrensburg church. (A few years after that, another piece-one of the cave people-was stolen. No ransom note this time, but it too was discovered half-buried, this time in Bolton.)
Threats to the sculpture garden have come in more seemingly benign forms. Donna looked out the window one day recently and saw a man and what appeared to be his son inspecting the pig's face closely. She assumed they were simply looking at the artwork's detail. Later, after they had left, she was outside and noticed they had picked the eye out of the pig's left socket (some of the sculptures sport glass eyes).
Other visitors show utter disregard by letting their dogs relieve themselves on the lawn. Still, all the attention is worth it. Lanfair said she gets letters from all over the world-as far away as China-from people who have visited Warrensburg and, brought to her either by accident or by a local with knowledge of the sculpture garden, were struck by the odd discovery. People visit at all hours. "All day they stop," Donna said. Even at night. Not all the reviews are positive. One summer, a woman stopped by and gave Lanfair an earful-she didn't cotton to the booze bottles toted by the drunken couple in front of the house. "She said it wasn't a very good representation for children," Donna laughed.
Forrest Lanfair was utterly without pretension. A group of motorcyclists discovered the sculptures one summer and thereafter made yearly visits to the installation. When some neighbors circulated a petition to keep the bikers away, Lanfair would not sign it. Age and weather are taking a toll on the sculptures; mold and lichen have found purchase on the flat surfaces and in the nooks and crannies of the textured concrete. Donna is slowly working at patching the pieces using BlocBond, a mixture of portland cement, fiberglass and additives-then repainting them. "I might get my grandchildren to help paint. It'll be like a coloring book for them."
When asked to name a favorite of her dad's works, Donna hesitated, then said it'd have to be the farmer leading his plow horse. Among visitors, it's one of the most popular. But she had a hard time picking one; they all have distinct personalities. "I kind of thought they were cartoonish at first, but it turns out that that's what people want." Lanfair appeared to have had an affinity for tongues: there's one protruding from the mouth of the plowman's horse, another from Mrs. Caveman. And the Adirondack Skeeter has a giant drop of blood hanging from his (and another from his proboscis).
One piece, however, bears a painful memory. Donna's fiancé was carrying a "Spirit of '76" drummer down from the house eight years ago when he suffered a fatal heart attack. "I wanted to take a hammer and smash it to pieces," she said. Lanfair's works are true outsider, or visionary, art, according to a definition put forth by the American Visionary Art Museum, in Baltimore: "Visionary art . . . refers to art produced by self-taught individuals, usually without formal training, whose works arise from an innate personal vision that revels foremost in the creative act itself. In short, visionary art begins by listening to the inner voices of the soul, and often may not even be thought of as art by its creator."
Paul D'Ambrosio, chief curator of the Fenimore Art Museum, in Cooperstown, explained that outsider art is often considered "the art of the socially marginalized. It's outside the mainstream of American culture, yet often reflects cultural or community traditions." In the mid-twentieth century, when recognition of outsiders' work grew-the French referred to it as art brut, or "raw art"-the stuff was considered the product of insanity, or at the very least, said D'Ambrosio, "a tortured psyche." Art purists, he said, still subscribe to this stigma. "But often, when you meet these people, you realize they have friends, families, jobs." In other words, they're often normal folks.
Lanfair's pieces have caught the attention of museums in the Adirondacks and farther afield. Individuals have made entreaties as well. Following her father's death, Donna received a letter from a man in New York City who had previously inquired about buying some of the art, but Lanfair had refused. "'I know he never wanted to sell them, but I thought I'd call you and ask,'" Donna recalled the man saying. She could easily acquiesce and sell all or part of the artwork and alleviate some of the tax burden on the seventy-acre property, but she refused to. "They belong here as long as I'm here."
Editors' Note: On July 5, 2005, just before Adirondack Life's deadline, Donna Lanfair passed away after a brief illness. According to her daughter Stephanie Ackley, the family is considering selling or donating the sculptures to several interested organizations around the region in order to defray the costs of settling the estate. Although the collection could be broken up, Ackley expressed the hope of keeping the works where people could see them instead of having them disappear into private collections. "That's what my grandfather would have wanted," she said.
|
| ** If you discover credit omissions or have additional information to add, please let us know at registrar@AskART.com. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|