A moment of inspiration after a life-changing accident led mill worker Clyde Jones to create his famous roadside menagerie.
By Bill Sasser
Raw Vision
January, 2024
“I wake up some mornings with a head full of stuff, and a lot of mine is handed down to me from up above,” Clyde Jones told author Robert Peacock. “Whatever my mind’s got on it, that’s what I’m gonna do. Welcome to my world with fish, whales, dolphins, butterflies, snakes, turtles, penguins, and all that.”
Clyde Jones in 2022, photo: Bill Sasser
Often a man of few words, the prolific North Carolina artist opened up to Peacock and photographer Karekin Goekjian for their 1998 book Light of the Spirit: Portraits of Southern Outsiders. A former mill worker and logger in Chatham County, North Carolina, Jones was already well on his way to becoming perhaps the state’s most well known artist. In the small community of Bynum, his little millhouse with its yard full of “chainsaw critters” has attracted thousands of visitors over the decades.
“I drove over five hundred miles to see your critters,” a pilgrim wrote in one of many guest books kept over the years, recording visitors from dozens of nations and every U.S. state. “Clyde, you are a treasure!”
Aged 86, Jones now lives in a nursing home and has mostly retired as an artist. During his heyday, he made a staggering number of his wood animal sculptures, in all shapes and colors—polka-dotted giraffes, hot-pink piggies, purple trumpeting storks, to name but a few. On the clapboards of his house, hand-painted dolphins jump and penguins dance, as curvy white snakes slide up the chimney. He could often be found on his porch, covered in sawdust and paint.
“Never seen some of these animals, but that doesn’t really matter,” Jones was once quoted in The Chatham Record. “I just see a piece of wood and they come out. You can’t buy one, but I like it when people come up and take a look.”
Indeed, his belief that his artwork should be for his own and others enjoyment, and not a moneymaker, is almost as a big a part of his legend as the roadside menagerie. While his art has been shown at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (Here and There: Travels, Part I: Outside Insight: 1988) and individual pieces have gone for $8,000 at charity auctions, Jones rarely sells his art. Over the decades, he gave most of his sculptures away.
Jones' yard in Bynum, NC, 2012, photo: Chatham County Arts Council
“Clyde’s not given to long introspection, he makes critters and they speak for themselves, and it’s all about the joy of creation,” say Stephan Meyers, a musician, artist, and handyman who moved from New York City to Bynum and was Jones’ neighbor. “At least half the homes here have one of his critters standing in the yard or on the front porch, and those were all gifts from Clyde.”
Jones started his critter-making at age 45 and his mid-life rebirth as an artist closely parallels the fortunes of the former mill town. Lying along the Haw River, the community’s few hundred residents faced hard times in the late 1970s, when the textile factory that owned all the local property shut down. The county government bought the old millhouses, paved the roads, and offered low cost mortgages to the former mill workers. Located on the edge of a booming metro area, Chatham County’s rural charm was attracting newcomers. In Bynum, longtime residents were joined by a younger generation yearning for a slower, more creative way of life.
Clyde Jones at home in Bynum, N.C., 1984. Photo by Roger Manley
“Clyde and his art really helped give this place a new identity and put it on the map,” says Meyers. “He’s like the unofficial mayor around here.” Jones has been honored with a namesake arts festival, ClydeFEST, and last summer attended the annual event’s twentieth anniversary. Living up to his reputation as a colorful character, for years he could been seen riding around Bynum on his purple-painted lawnmower, out on errand runs or just to say hello to his neighbors.
His life as an artist and local celebrity followed a near-tragedy over forty years ago. Jones grew up close to the land and was never much of a non-conformist. He attended the local school and then got a job at the textile mill, as did nearly everyone in Bynum. After the mill closed, he went to work as a pulpwood logger, and was badly injured in 1979 when a tree trunk rolled over one of his legs. Doctors told him he would never walk again and he fell into a deep depression. A lifelong bachelor, he was suddenly home alone, living on disability benefits. Determined to get back on his feet, he soon did, but never fully recovered from his injuries.
During his long recuperation, he gardened to keep busy and began adding interesting objects around his plant beds—river driftwood, junk car parts, crumbling lawn ornaments, castoff children’s toys—as well as making his own concrete statuary. Jones was creating an environment. Some of his neighbors were aghast but he was undeterred. One day he noticed a piece of wood that he thought looked like an animal’s head. With closer study, he saw a pig. He fired up his chainsaw, cut wood for a body and legs, hammered it all together and added bottle caps for eyes—his first critter. He was soon making art all day everyday.
Within a year or so, Jones’ yard was filled with so many animal sculptures that he started giving them away. He makes the rough hewn figures quickly, leaving some bare with tree bark showing, painting others with inspired randomness. Some are a few feet long; his giraffes are ten feet tall. He used cedar for his work because the wood is plentiful, tough, and naturally deters termites. When visitors came to his house, he would sometimes give them cedar shavings to take home. “Best smell in the world,” he once told a pilgrim, holding a handful of sawdust.
“People respond because his art is happy, playful, joyful,” says Roger Manley, curator of the Gregg Museum of Art and Design at North Carolina State University. “Unlike pondering the remote bronze sculptures you find in some museums, you can see yourself making art like Clyde. He gives you hope that your own life can flower the same way, that you have the same potential.”
Snake, 1993; River Critter, 1995. Paint on wood
Manley, who met Jones in the early 1980s while earning a master’s degree in folklore, understands outsider art as a spiritual search, as self-taught artists use their creativity to work through a loss, and to find new meaning. In turn, their fans and followers find resonance not only with the art but the artists’ personal stories, which often reflect the art lovers’ own longings and life experiences.
“I think of Clyde as someone like a saint, someone who 500 years ago, after their death, would have been enshrined in the local church, because there’s such a vortex of good feeling that comes out of him and the place he’s created,” Manley says. Jones is featured in two books by Manley: Signs and Wonders: Outsider Art Inside North Carolina (1989) and Self-Made Worlds: Visionary Folk Art Environments (2005). He says that Jones’ story follows a path similar to many Southern self-taught artists—a seemingly everyday individual living a workaday life, often in their middle-to-later years, has some precipitous change in circumstances. With newfound time on their hands, searching for a way to fit into the world, they start making art.
Clyde Jones, 2005, photos: Chatham County Arts Council
And as with other well known outsider artists, after Jones found his art, the world soon found Jones. Strangers started showing up at his house. Some visitors brought him piles of their castoffs—tennis balls, wine corks, plastic fruit and flowers—which he often put to use as eyes and noses for his critters. During the dark winter months, he moved his work indoors and started painting on old boards. He proved to be as talented with a brush as he was with a chainsaw.
Throughout, he gave his work away, to children and friends, and later to schools, hospitals, and charity events. Sometimes he bartered with acquaintances, taking summertime vegetables, or a well-loved banjo, in trade for artwork. All along, admirers were putting his art on display in Chapel Hill and Durham, the bustling metros half an hour north of Bynum—on front porches and in art galleries, in organic food stores, on the roof of a trendy restaurant. For many years, Jones did critter-making presentations at elementary schools across the state. “Young’uns, they make the world,” he once said, when asked what makes him happy.
With no effort on Jones’ part, major art institutions began requesting his work to exhibit and to add to their permanent collections. Jones obliged. His art has been shown at museums nationwide and around the world. Before his retirement, he frequently traveled across the U.S. to demonstrate his art making at exhibition openings.
Manley says that as with many Southern Outsiders, Jones’ art speaks of elemental truths, and has a strong nostalgic pull, recalling a rural past that valued community, craftsmanship, hard work, and ritual. In a modern world where many feel disconnected from work, politics, and family, the joy of creativity makes up for other losses.
Penguin, paint on wood, Small Museum of Folk Art
“There’s an unspoken message in the love that so many people give to Clyde and his art, and that’s a need for something that feels honest and real,” says Manley. On what inspires him to create, Jones says in Light of the Spirit:
“You walk through the woods and you see how the wind blows the trees, some of them dying, making all kind of animals,” said the artist. “I see the way the wind turns angles in limbs, the way trees grow. It’s pretty nature. It’s just like us—it’s got life to it.”