Larry Heath is bent over a four-foot sheet of metal, which is braced on a workbench in his front yard. Upon the surface of the metal he’s written, in black and red magic markers, measurements and sketches of a pond, barn, cotton field, trees, and shiny, happy people milling about. In the coming weeks, this rudimentary pastoral landscape will take on an intricate, three-dimensional life that is amazingly elaborate, detailed and substantial, yet also flexible and fragile. Heath, somewhat obsessively, explains to me how he will create this work of art using nothing but a hammer, tin snips, chisel and his own gnarled, callused hands. I nod at regular intervals, feigning comprehension; his mind is able to wrap around the details of shapes and dimensions and how they intersect and fit together in a way mine never could.Larry’s mind, it seems, has always served him well, while his body has failed him time and time again. Larry was born with several birth defects, including paralysis of the right side of his face and a degenerative spine disease. It was the rough beginning of a very rough life.
There’s a gnome-like quality to Larry. He’s short and squat and tends to walk around in his bare feet. Much like his metal sculptures, he seems sturdy at first glance, but upon closer inspection you notice he moves with a fragile stiffness. He leads me inside his house in Hickory, NC, which is decorated with dozens of his metal sculptures. They range from simple little boats and cars to amazingly elaborate pieces like “The Arbor,” an idyllic country setting with kids playing on a merry-go-round and a see-saw and a family enjoying a picnic, all of which is enveloped by a latticework of trees and branches. Somehow, Larry is able to take complex images like this that “light up in his head” and transfer them onto a single piece of metal that he cuts, snips and folds until the entire scene emerges. It’s an uncanny skill, or gift, as Larry calls it, and one that grows all the more impressive when you study the intricacies and detail of the work, and consider he uses no glues, screws, welds, or electric tools.
“Larry is an amazing artist,” says Barry Huffman, president of the North Carolina Folk Art Society. “There is no one else working in this medium. Each one of his creations is more complex and interesting than the one before. Not many people have the vision and spatial concepts to do what he does. I think he is definitely one of the best folk artists working in the South today.”
Nearly all of Larry’s metal sculptures depict a peaceful family setting. The angst-free, Hallmark quality of his work couldn’t be more different than the life he’s led. Larry’s mother tried to hide the fact that she was pregnant with him by wearing a corset. As an unmarried woman in the mid-1940s, having a child out of wedlock, especially in Virginia, was simply not tolerated. But eventually the truth came out, and rather than shame the family, she was sent away to Baltimore to stay with her married sister and have the baby in secret. A few weeks after Larry was born, his grandmother sent for his aunt and her husband, who moved to Norfolk, Virginia, with Larry in tow. For the next 17 years, Larry was raised believing his aunt and uncle were his mother and father.
It was a rough 17 years. He spent most of it in the hospital, where he underwent nearly 30 surgeries to try to reconstruct his face and repair his spine. At home things weren’t any easier. His aunt, who was essentially forced to take him, resented Larry, and often abused and neglected him.
“She wasn’t an evil bitch, but she liked to drink and party and raise a little hell,” Larry says. “My daddy (actually his uncle) was an old Louisiana Cajun, a man’s man, and he wasn’t what you’d call very touchy-feely.”
All of which resulted in Larry growing up angry, confused and emotionally shut down. Other kids teased him about how he looked, and he consequently got into a lot of fights. Finally, at the age of 17, he discovered the truth about his birth mother during one of his aunt’s frequent drinking binges.
“It was the only time she’d have anything to do with me,” Larry says. “She’d be slurring and spitting and sputtering her words, and she’d always say, “Son, someday you’ll understand why I do this.’ Well one day I called her on it. I knew something wasn’t right, and I bluffed her. She thought I knew everything, and she broke down and told me the truth. It answered a lot of questions.”
Larry left home at 18, but a dark cloud continued to follow him. Literally. While working a summer job, he was struck by approximately 23,000 volts of electricity while moving a power line from atop a roof. The shock knocked him off the roof and to the ground four floors below. “I was dead when I hit the ground,” Larry says. “The medics revived me. I was in a coma for 20 days, and spent 13 months in a full-body cast.”
When Larry finally recuperated he struck out on his own again. Although he never attended college, he was a gifted mathematician, and was soon put in charge of a construction crew that designed bridges. A few years later he landed a job with a pipeline company and traveled all across the country.
Things were finally starting to look up. He was making good money, and at age 28 he got married. Over the next seven years he and his wife had three daughters. But the good times didn’t last.
“My wife was an incredible lady, but I didn’t know what the hell I was doing,” Larry says. “I didn’t know how to love or be a good husband.” The marriage deteriorated, and Larry found himself drifting through life once more, without any real direction or purpose.
In 1979 he tied the knot a second time. Less than two months later the newlyweds were involved in a terrible car accident in which Larry’s wife was killed instantly and he was severely injured. Another month in the hospital. Larry had hit rock bottom. Overcome with grief, he checked himself in to a mental hospital, where he spent 60 days. During his stay, he told the doctors about his mother, and how he felt abandoned and unwanted. Somehow the doctors were able to convince Larry’s real mother to fly from Tennessee to the Norfolk hospital to see her son. It wasn’t the reunion Larry had been hoping for.
“We were sitting around this big table at the hospital, and I confronted her about everything,” Larry says. “Her reaction was, “What do you want me to say?’ She had a real attitude about it.”
In another unbelievable twist, during Larry’s stay in the hospital, he met another woman who later bore his child.
After Larry left the hospital he resumed doing what he was most familiar with — drifting aimlessly. He met another woman in Michigan, which resulted in yet another baby — Larry’s fifth. But again, Larry couldn’t keep it together, and that relationship ended too. He eventually returned to Virginia to be near his grandmother and other family members.
The human spirit can be very resilient, and Larry, admittedly a physical and emotional wreck, slowly started to recuperate. He moved to Swansboro, NC, in the early 90s and opened an antique business. His shop was along a bustling tourist corridor near the coast, and folks heading to the beach would often stop by. Always good with his hands, Larry started building birdhouses using the wood from old tobacco farms. One day a big executive from a paint company stopped by Larry’s shop and bought four of his birdhouses on the spot. That started the ball rolling, and soon folks from all over the country were stopping by to check out Larry’s birdhouses, including, Larry says, cousins of the Kennedy family. In all, he sold over 2,600 birdhouses and, at prices ranging from $85 to several hundred dollars, he did pretty well for himself. One day, almost as an afterthought, Larry decided to make a weathervane for one of his birdhouses. He took a piece of metal he’d gotten from an old tobacco farm and folded and cut it into the shape of a little rooster, and affixed it to the birdhouse. Something clicked, and Larry started making other metal sculptures — at first little boats and cars, then more elaborate pieces. In 1997 he sold one piece for $1,400 to a couple that shared a veterinary practice. “That was a pretty good chunk of change,” Larry says. “And it just took off from there.”
In 1999, Larry sold his antique business and opened a studio and gallery in Swansboro, where he started working on his metal sculptures full-time. Larry soon earned a reputation as one of the more innovative and cutting-edge “outsider artists,” a term used to describe a self-taught artist whose work is outside the mainstream art world.
Larry’s work indeed seems inspired by a purely visceral impulse — a compulsion, really — to create and give shape to the ideas in his head. “It’s an internal thing, an emotional thing,” Larry says. “I can’t stop. I’ll get up in the middle of the night and work for hours. It gets me higher than any drug ever could.”
In order to reconnect with old friends and get more exposure for his art, Larry moved to Hickory last fall. So far, his work has been well-received, and has been shown in exhibits at the Carolina Inn in Chapel Hill and the Hickory Art Museum.
“Larry truly does think in three dimensions, while working with a flat, two dimensional surface,” says Lise Swensson, director of the Hickory Art Museum. “I love watching visitors interact visually with his pieces — moving from side to side, looking over and under the installations, whether large or small. He’s an amazing person who makes amazing objects.” Larry is also working on getting his work shown in Asheville and Charlotte this summer.
More importantly, he’s enjoying his ninth year of marriage to wife number three, Betty, whom he met while he was running the antique store in Swansboro. And although he doesn’t have regular contact with all five of his kids, he’s working on salvaging and nurturing the relationships he can, including the one with his mother. “The funny thing is we get along fine today,” he says. “But we never bring up the past. Sometimes you just have to move on.”
Larry turned 60 in June, and says that age and the move to Hickory have taken a toll on his health and energy level. While he used to spend upwards of 70 to 80 hours a week working on his various sculptures, his spinal injuries have slowed him down. Nonetheless, he says he’s more at peace today than he’s ever been. “This art is my gift,” he says. “It’s given me a direction and a purpose that I really needed.”
And while not as prolific as he once was, most days you can still find Larry sitting at his drafting table drawing rough sketches of his sculptures, or tinkering around in his dusty basement workshop, using his worn and weathered tools to bring his ideas to life. His current project — the one he works on in his front yard — is perhaps his most ambitious piece yet. He worries about it constantly. Sometimes he’ll wake up in the middle of the night and just stare inside his little metal world — fretting over the details of the barn, the cottonfield, and most importantly, the people. But if he’s careful, and purposeful, and nurturing, and makes no mistakes, he’ll get it right. He’ll make it whole. He’ll make it perfect.
Contact Sam Boykin at sam.boykin@cln.com.
This article appears in Jul 21-27, 2004.
