By Jennifer Deacon
Driving down highway 7 in East Ship Harbour, you can't help but notice a property whose house and lawn are covered by whimsical, colourful folk art. This is the home of Barry Colpitts, a folk artist by chance.
"I was working at the Sackville jail in the 1980's and I needed something to relax my mind,” Colpitts said in a recent interview. Inspired by his Uncle Fred who carved ox yokes, he started to carve images of his family and friends and decorate his property with them. "I never thought about carving and making money at it, but people were stopping to ask about buying stuff. I started selling a few and the next thing you know I started selling it like crazy and making a kind of living off of it. There's not much money in carving, that's for sure, but we've been getting by. It's been 20 years that I've done nothing else but this."
Colpitts enjoys going to the popular Lunenburg Folk Art Festival each year and his work was featured on the 2009 festival poster. Folk artists from across Nova Scotia compete to be included among the 50+ artists. What he enjoys most is the chance to talk to fellow folk artists. "As much as you can bring with you, you can sell,” he said. “It's fun to go, you see the same people every year. It opens at noon and you sell pretty fast. It's usually about 20 minutes and you sell out. That's not everybody now, that would be half a dozen or so of us but everybody does pretty good."
Colpitts has made a speciality of carving whirligigs, an art form that emerged in the mid-18th century in which artists design gadgets that use rotation powered by wind energy to drive mechanisms that make repeated motions or sounds.
"Lately the things I love to carve most are whirligigs,” Colpitts said. “Figuring out how to make them out of trees the way I do. Sawing the trunks in half and using the tree whorl and the way the branches grow out even. As far as I know I'm the only person in the world that does that. If someone else was making them like that I suspect they were here looking at mine. I've had all sorts of people here measuring.”
Colpitts' desire to work with the natural growth of each tree, and his sense of humour cause each piece to project joy. No wonder several of his whirligigs were selected into the Going with the Wind: Whirligigs by Atlantic Canadian Artists exhibition in 2012 at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton, NB.
Colpitts’ folk art is in private collections all over the world. He competed for and was awarded grants from the prestigious Canada Council for the Arts to create unique pieces. He is also in the permanent collection of The Beaverbrook Art Gallery, The Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, and the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau, Quebec. Most of all, every day, his work brings a smile into the lives of all those who have his work in their homes, and to travellers driving past the outdoor gallery on the walls of his house.
