GRAVESVILLE — The white winged horse catches the eye and draws admiration from many who pass by the statue as it rises into the trees beside the idyllic country road.
Travelers may encounter the fascinating sculpture on Arkansas 124, a few miles from heavily traveled U.S. 65. Some are lucky enough to know the artist who displays the 40-foot-high piece of art.
Betty Holland Henry looks for art in objects and in nature, relocating rare or interesting plants to her yard after stomping through the Ozark woods with an eye for trees with “a frosty look,” or anything else that strikes her fancy. By buying a train boxcar of bronze statues, she populated her yard with works of art, giving the green spaces an outdoor museum quality.
Then there’s the Pegasus, the flying white horse from Greek mythology. The Pegasus - perhaps originally painted red - had been the logo for the Mobile brand of gas and oil, marketed by the Exxon Mobil Corp., since the 1930s. Henry acquired the piece of cultural corporate art in a secondhand store. She said she believes the statue is one of only two of its kind in existence.
Demurely declining to give her age, Henry spent 38 years as a nurse and was a real estate agent in Texas before returning to her native Van Buren County and beginning her effort to use her 2-acre plot as a canvas for passersby to admire.
She has worked in various art mediums over five decades and is also a published poet.
A garden tour
Cradling her chocolate and brown toy poodle named Barack Obama, Henry gave a tour of her outdoor art displays.
“I respect Democrats’ thinking more than Republicans’,” Henry said in explanation of the dog’s name.
Henry has embedded in her front sidewalk the shapes of the 50 states in concrete, using meticulously hand-cut stained glass; the back walk contains the signs of the zodiac.
Near each walkway grows rabbit tobacco, chinquapin trees and granddaddy graybeard.
Baritone wind chimes lend a calming audio background to the scene.
“They call me ‘the little nymph of the forest,’” Henry said. “A nymph is a fairy who enjoys beauty, and that’s what I do. I bring it home and get it to grow.”
One bronze statue, The North Wind, sits in the northeast corner of her lot but could as easily grace an Italian plaza. Another statue, originally cast in 1883, according to its markings, shows a woman with birds on her arm similar to sculptures of St. Francis.
Feathers and grace
But inside Henry’s home are the true works of creativity produced by this self taught artist.
Using the German paper cutting method of scherenschnitte, Henry has produced two presentations that hang juxtaposed in the corner of a guest bedroom: two hummingbirds in irises and a portrayal of two all-white peacocks. Like the Pegasus in the front yard, the birds provide a glimpse into a world of feathers and grace.
In the hallway nearby hang two works using appliqué, composed of leftover cloth pieces but with an effect far different than the homemade quilts for which the hills of America are well-known. Instead, the asymmetrical scraps of scarves and jewelry are arranged to present an angel in all her lace and fancy. On the opposite wall is a similar piece of a woman with a Bible who is being touched lightly by the hand of God,which subtly appears on her left shoulder out of a ruffled blue sky.
Henry’s den is like a safari, with mounted animals everywhere: a red skunk, an albino raccoon, a giraffe, a wolf, a grizzly bear and a rattlesnake.
“I bought out a taxidermy shop,” Henry said.
Adventure and art
The 14th of 15 children, Henry learned the value of hard work in the Arkansas hills during and after World War II.
A photograph of the Holland family taken just before Henry was born and now displayed in the Van Buren County Museum shows the family gathered around a ’30s-era pickup with cotton sacks on display in the foreground.
“Never say you can’t,” Henry said of her view of finding and creating beauty in life. “When you say you can’t, it means you don’t want to try.”
Ar t is w here you f indit, and rearrange it, Henry said.
“Everything has a purpose on Earth,” she said. “A lot of things people throw away, but you can take it and create something beautiful from it.”
Known for looking in the woods for transplantable flora, Henry recently combined that hobby with a search for lost treasure. With three “elderly women,” as Henry described them, she headed overland to find a secret stash that originated with a well known outlaw.
“Jesse James and his gang would come through here and hide their horses in caves,” Henry said.
Henry retold a legend of how James gave a sealskin bag of gold to a local man who left to hide the booty, returning in only 20 minutes.
From those clues, Henry s aid, she knew where to look.
Her idea was, that because the area had been heavily searched for years, the man had put the loot in a hollow tree that had since grown up around the opening, leaving the gold hidden inside one of the area’s massive oaks.
“I’ll bet you anything in the world that’s where it is,” Henry said. “We hiked back in there to find it.”
Wearing boots and carrying sack lunches, walking sticks and a hoe to dig up interesting plants, the quartet made their way to the nearby site.
“You have to create your beauty if you don’t have any,” Henry said about looking for art. “Nature is beauty. God has put it on the Earth for us all to enjoy.”
And even sitting in a cave, eating her lunch, Henry found the work of a long dead artisan: There at her feet was a perfectly chiseled arrowhead.
River Valley Ozark, Pages 139 on 05/27/2012