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And Now For Something Completely Different

By Ginny Janzen

“Retiring can be traumatic,” shared Forrest Greenslade.“ In one day you go from making important decisions, having your name known, being invited to all the big meetings, and having authority and influence, to having all that gone. In one day. A lot of people don’t survive it. A post-retirement career is the best health change you can make. You have to find something you are passionate about and study, study, study, so that you can become the best you can be at it.”

Greenslade is one of a growing community in Chatham County of artists who are defined less by the successful careers they have retired from than by the new careers they have retired to.

Educated as a molecular biologist, Greenslade has become the best he can be at many things. Drawing from his career experiences, he wrote a successful book called The Simple-Minded Manager: Cutting Through Your Work-Life Chaos. After stints with Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer and the Population Council, Greenslade moved to North Carolina to head Ipas, a women’s health organization. Shortly after retiring from that position, Greenslade suffered a massive heart attack. That event caused him to take a new look at what he was doing.

“One day my wife dragged me to a studio tour here [in Chatham County ]. For the first time I was receptive to seeing things differently.”

Greenslade was taken with some of the whimsical wooden sculptures he saw on the tour. He and his wife returned home and while eating lunch, he saw Martha Stewart on TV making a garden pot out of cement and peat moss.

“I didn’t even finish my sandwich. I went out back to my shed and made a face out of cement and peat moss.”

And the next phase of Greenslade’s career was born. Kimberli Matin, an acquaintance of Greenslade’s, was starting a gallery. She liked his work and asked him to make more of it to sell in her gallery.

“In one day I was a professional sculptor,’’ he said

Greenslade’s garden at his home in Fearrington Village is a beautifully designed and maintained showplace for his garden sculptures. Most of his work is created from a combination of concrete and other materials. His biggest sellers are a series of spirits carved into wooden posts. Time Lapse is a stacked series of blue birds created from angle iron and concrete and welded to a twisting piece of pipe, creating the image of a bird rising into flight. Greenslade used a chopstick sharpened in a pencil sharpener to carve the concrete to suggest the form and feathers of the bird, resulting in a finish that looks like weathered wood. In other sculptures he used a slurry of burlap in a cement mixture to create the look of fabric.

A series of blue steel and concrete bird sculptures called Benu, after an Egyptian version of the phoenix, graces the grounds.

“It’s a marriage of metal and concrete,” says Greenslade. With metal you can’t get the facial expressions and with concrete you can’t get the delicate things like wings, feathers, grass. I try to portray motion and emotion.”

Greenslade has not finished becoming the best he can be. Not only does he sculpt, he writes poetry, and he is now portraying motion and emotion through painting. He and his wife welcome visitors to their home, where he does most of his sales now. Visitors there will be entertained by the names he gives his pieces: a frog with his chin resting on his hand is Re-thinker; the Rebird series is birds made of rebar; a pair of egrets are Greater and Lesser Regret; a pair of penguins are Aunt Arctica and Gil Opogos. Others include Not Quite First in Flight, Run Forrest Dweller Run and 50 Ways to Leaf Your Lover.

Greenslade’s favorite piece, Savannah Surprise, is a bifurcated wood structure with two painted concrete giraffe heads. He left the bark on the original wood and painted it with artists’ acrylics. Over time the bark has begun to exfoliate and the paint has faded. The surprised looks on the giraffes’ faces now blend in with the browns and grays of the garden much more than when they were originally painted with bright colors.

“I may repaint them with exterior house paint, which is designed to hold up to the sun. But sometimes you want things to change. When you look at this you are experiencing time. How long will it last? How has it changed? You’re looking at a snapshot in time. It’s about the vulnerability and the ephemeral nature of art, of us. Some people get it; others want things to stay the same. My work all comes with a lifetime guarantee, with one caveat — it’s my lifetime and I’m an old guy.”

Doug Trimble is another retired executive who appreciates the nature of change. In high school he was offered an art scholarship, but after finding out that what he could expect to earn as an artist was equivalent to two part-time jobs, he turned the scholarship down and got a degree in Business Management. Trimble spent 30 years as a manager in the telecommunications industry for Nortel before retiring to North Carolina to be near his sons. At his home in the Governor’s Club, he now indulges his creative passion —furniturebuilding

Trimble’s motto is, “It’s all in the curves.” His furniture features asymmetrical shapes and sinuous grains. Many of his pieces are on display in his home. Both inside and outside the house there are bowls of plants atop beautiful three-legged wooden stands.

“A woodworker never wants to give up any piece of wood, OK?” said Trimble, in his Canadian accent. “So I make plant stands out of the scraps.”

In Trimble’s bedroom there is a small, graceful table with bowed legs.

“I made it out of 2 x 4’s as an experiment in design, ground the legs into curves, then fauxed the color with mixed dyes. I keep it around to remind myself that there’s no such thing as an ugly piece of wood.”

There are certainly no ugly pieces of wood in Trimble’s house. There are several sets of stacking triangular tables with the sides of the tabletop indented to include “negative space,” a concept Trimble learned about in one of the many woodworking classes he has taken. One of these sets was purchased by Bev’s Fine Arts in Raleigh . Trimble assumed that they had been acquired for resale in the shop, and was proud to find out that they were destined for the owner’s home.

A two-tiered computer table features a kidney-shaped desk for a laptop with a smaller shelf in the same pattern above it. Trimble calls it his Laptop Lady, and says it took a lot of trial and error to get exactly the same curve in both layers.

“They all start with a basic design. When you grind, the wood rips out and your design changes. The wood talks.”

In Trimble’s garage is a pile of Brazilian mahogany with chalk squiggles tracing the grain. The pieces are enormous, nearly 2 feet wide and several inches thick. There are deep cuts in much of the wood. Trimble explained that this is $3,000 worth of wood. It is 150 years old, from a “green farm” in Brazil

Since wood can be so expensive, Trimble often trades his finished pieces for more wood. He also makes many of his own tools.

“I made a jig that can cut any angle for legs. It took me two or three hours to make it, and it would have cost $275. Besides, many of the tools available to make the job easier actually make it take longer by the time you figure out how to use them. I draw it by hand, band-saw it, mill it, and you’re done!”

Trimble enjoys the creative process, some different from his former career. “Grinding is the fun part. That’s where the creativity comes in. Curving is a real treat.”

Murry Handler did not have to stray far from his professional career to start a new one in retirement. Born in Bangor , Maine , he moved to New York when he got out of the Navy after World War II. He studied at several art schools, became a graphic designer and attempted to start his own business. The first two attempts failed, but the third try was the charm.

Landy Handler, his 14-man firm, operated out of a penthouse on the corner of 38th and 3rd in New York City and created ads, models and brochures for the pharmaceutical industry. Handler quit doing the design work and handled the sales.

“I became a luncheonette. I was doing more entertaining than anything else. I did great for a kid out of Bangor .”

At age 62 Handler retired to Fearrington Village , but found retirement boring, so he started up a business doing graphic design, going back to his original trade. He also started displaying and selling the paintings he had done over the years.

“I was always painting at night, squeezing it in on weekends,” he said of his days in New York . days in New York . In the 1960s he had created a group of minimalist paintings and made 50 prints of each. His graphic design background is evident in these paintings, which convey groups of people in varying attitudes with a few strokes. His painting “Arm in Arm” portrays a boy and girl walking together, arms around each other. The closeness and tenderness jump off the page, although their bodies are painted with only three strokes.

. Other paintings are less comforting. “Genocide,” another black and white minimalist piece, suggests a harrowing image of a mass of bodies.

“It’s not a peaceful world,” said Handler. Handler’s paintings are on display at the Tuscany Ridge development in Hillsborough, in two of the model homes there. Handler and his wife, Enid, also welcome visitors to their home to see his prints and paintings. 

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Captions from the top: "A Little Night Music", "Savannah Surprise" and "The Re-Thinker" by Forrest Greenslade; "Laptop Lady" and other tables by Doug Trimble; "Arm In Arm" by Murry Handler.

Reformatted from Southern Neighbor