BREEZY FOLK ART FLYING HIGH
WEATHERVANES DON'T JUST SHOW WHICH WAY THE WIND BLOWS -- THEY REFLECT OWNERS' PERSONALITIES
Hartford Courant - Hartford, Conn.
Author: ANNE FARROW; Special to The Courant
Date: Sep 14, 2007
Start Page: H.1
Section: AT HOME
Text Word Count: 1710
Document Text
.A Folk-Art Bull Market
The prices antique weather-vanes are commanding are certainly no joke, with several exceptional examples selling in 2006 for more than $1 million. Art & Antiques reported in January that a molded copper weathervane of an American Indian chief, 60 inches high and standing atop a 67-inch arrow, had a pre-auction estimate of $150,000 but sold at Sotheby's New York for more than $5.8 million. In separate auctions, weathervanes of the Goddess of Liberty and a locomotive also broke the $1 million mark. The previous record auction price for an antique weathervane -- $770,000 -- had stood unbroken for 16 years.
The barn on the property of the Phelps-Hatheway House & Garden in Suffield holds a collection of old weathervanes that illuminate the diverse and remarkable forms taken by this icon of 19th-century agricultural life. As the collection in the Antiquarian and Landmarks Society barn makes clear, a weathervane can be beautiful, whimsical, patriotic, or simply a tribute to the animals housed in a barn below.
"Today a lot of people consider [weathervanes] folk art," says curator Beverly Lucas. The society's collection of assertive roosters, trotting horses, fish, Native Americans and other forms runs the gamut: Some are elaborately machine-made and hand-assembled, while others are roughly carved from wood or sheet iron. Henry M. Clark of Suffield gave the collection to the society, the state's largest private historic preservation agency, in 1975. Most of the more than 100 weathervanes in it are from New England.
"This is a great collection, and we're very fortunate," says Lucas, who chose an extremely stout pig manufactured by Cushing & White, of Waltham, Mass., for display with several others in the museum's visitors' center. "It's one of my favorites," she says.
King Kong In Copper
Pablo Picasso said the ideal form for a rooster is on an American weathervane. Had he lived to visit the Meriden workshop of SkyArt Studio & Gallery, his opinion would been confirmed. Paula Caretti and Lori Rob craft weathervanes of glorious roosters, prancing terriers, fierce raptors, gentle retrievers and anything that tradition or their custom clients dictate.
A woman in New Jersey wanted a weathervane of King Kong, and they hand-formed the beast from sheet copper, complete with an airplane in one mighty paw and a lissome female in the other.
Caretti was a banking administrator in New York and Rob had just taken an early retirement from a tele-communications company when they met playing tennis more than a decade ago. They quickly became friends, knew they could be good co-workers, and began to look for a craftsman-based business they could run together. After a brief foray into woodturning, Caretti and Rob started making weathervanes, in part because Rob wanted a weathervane for her barn and couldn't find one she liked.
"This was a hard trade to learn," says Caretti, who does much of the design work, communicating with clients, and managing of sales and commissions. Both women took classes and workshops to learn how to work with metal, though Rob does more of the weathervane building. "She's fantastic with a torch," Caretti says.
"When you get into the metal sphere of life, everything opens up," she adds.
In their 2,700-square-foot workshop in an old factory not far from Route 691, there are long tables where Rob builds new weathervanes and restores old ones -- a rather diminutive antique eagle now is in pieces on one of her workbenches -- and a table where Caretti works on designs.
On one of the benches are neat canisters of metalworking awls and chisels in dozens of different sizes, a legacy of Meriden's long history with silverworking. Rob, explaining that she and Caretti had jumped at the chance to buy them, produces a tiny chisel with a carved flower on its tip, the flower perhaps the size of a pencil's lead tip.
The women of SkyArt receive commissions from private clients, businesses and even civic groups. They recreated the weathervane of the flying witch that once topped the Dickinson Witch Hazel factory in Essex after it was stolen, and they made a vane of a ferry for the State Pier in New London.
At last count, they say, their work was flying in 47 states. Current commissions include a 6-foot horse on a 9-foot arrow for a horse farm in Vermont, a guernsey cow for a woman in Wisconsin, a giant apple for an orchard, and a sailboat for a bank in coastal Massachusetts.
The two women love what they're doing. "The IRS calls us `light manufacturing,' but we think of ourselves as artists," Rob says. "I am able to express myself in my work. We're having fun, and we have our independence."
The bodies of their sculptures are formed by hand from sheet copper, and the design is then hammered into the form using a traditional technique called repousse. They do not use molds, and while many of their weathervanes are dimensional, they also make flat ones in aluminum and copper. The compass portion of their weathervane is usually cast bronze.
"We over-build and over-engineer," Rob says, "because you can't have spinning metal 50 feet in the air that's going to come apart." SkyArt received a note from a Florida client who said her weathervane -- a tarpon -- had gone through last year's hurricanes just fine.
For more information:
* Phelps-Hatheway House & Garden in Suffield and the Antiquarian and Landmarks Society: www.ctlandmarks.org, 860-668-0055.
* SkyArt Studio & Gallery in Meriden: www.skyartstudio.com, 203-630-9171. Prices start at $1,295.
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