Art Collecting Spotlight > This auto mechanic’s favorite holiday is Halloween and he is always seeking things that might decorate the haunted houses he constructs. He was lucky then, when …
By Daniel Grant
“There is an army of people looking through dumpsters, searching for something of value. Ninety-nine point nine percent of the time, there is nothing,” says Lark Mason, owner of an auction house in New Braunfels, Texas, and a regular expert on the PBS television series Antiques Roadshow.
Except, sometimes, they do find something. Jared Whipple, for instance, found hundreds of paintings, drawings, and a few bronze sculptures by Francis Hines (1920–2016) in a dumpster outside a barn the artist had rented in Waterbury, Connecticut. After his death, the barn’s owner no longer received rent payments and wanted the space cleared so he could sell the property on which the barn was sited.
Hines was survived by two sons, both in their 70s, who lived in small New York City apartments and had no room for more of their father’s artworks. They didn’t want them, or want to pay to store them somewhere else. Hines had enjoyed a moderately successful career, but his heyday occurred in the 1970s and ’80s; by the time of his death, no more exhibitions and sales were occurring. It looked like a career’s worth of creativity was destined for the landfill.
The owner of the company charged with emptying that barn happened to know Jared Whipple, a part-time auto mechanic whose principal job is buildings maintenance for several churches in Waterbury. He asked Whipple if he was interested in any of the items being discarded.
This seemed probable, as Whipple’s favorite holiday is Halloween and he is always seeking things that might decorate the haunted houses he constructs. Many of Hines’s paintings lend themselves to this theme, as “they look eerie,” Whipple recalls. “Some are three-dimensional, with fabric and animal hides [possibly real] attached to them. Some look like animals were torn apart and reassembled on a canvas, and the painted images themselves look like car crashes.” The sculptures, 15 or so of them, reflect the same theme, as they were formed from smashed car doors and fenders.
Whipple took possession of all of this art, storing it in his 6,000-square-foot warehouse alongside his 14 cars. He was intrigued and began researching Hines, who clearly had been influenced by the sculptor John Chamberlain (thus the smashed cars) and the conceptualist Christo. (In the 1980s Hines had been commissioned to wrap the arch in New York City’s Washington Square Park.) There was no published biography to consult, so Whipple contacted a former dealer whose San Francisco gallery had shown Hines’s work, as well as a local appraiser and historian, who convinced him that the art had merit.
Continue reading this article on art collecting in the January/February 2024 issue of Fine Art Connoisseur magazine.
View more artist and collector profiles here at FineArtConnoisseur.com.
