Spin doctor Deer Isle artist’s workshop devoted to creation of whimsical whirligigs

One of the television ads over the past holiday season showed Santa on the rounds of his North Pole workshop getting gruff when he encounters elves trying to make digital cameras out of wood and “pixel dust.” He gives his pointy-eared assistant the go-ahead to purchase everything at a big-box store to save time. How disillusioning! For those of us who believe in Mr. Claus more than intelligent design, the ad delivered a mighty blow.

This writer’s faith was restored by Ray Bradley, a semiretired advertising man who divides his time between Deer Isle and St. Petersburg, Fla. Off and on for the past 20 years or so, Bradley, who once posed as Santa Claus for several Christmas cards, has been making whirligigs, those fanciful contraptions that come alive by way of the wind.

Bradley traces his desire to make whirligigs to an interest in folk art. Initially, he wanted to collect antique examples of whirlies, as they’re sometimes called, but found the cost prohibitive. For the fun of it, he bought a how-to book, learned the mechanics, and made a few replicas of museum pieces. Eventually, he turned to his own designs.

“Whirligigs are handicapped by the fact that they’re considered yard ornaments by many people,” Bradley explains, “but to me they really are an art form, a means of expression.” He describes his own whirlies as “more sculptural” than the traditional ones, although they work in the same way.

Bradley loves coming up with the subjects. At one point he began a series based on New England legends, including Ichabod Crane and the headless horseman. (Washington Irving actually describes a whirligig in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”) He also has a fondness for marine themes.

Among the standouts in a show Bradley had with his artist daughter Rebekah Raye at Handworks Gallery in Blue Hill last summer was a lobster boat with a mermaid perched on the bow. When the propeller catches wind, the boat goes up and down as if over waves, with the lobsterman in his cabin grinning delightfully at his naked company. (Bradley wanted to make the mermaid’s arm wave with the boat’s motion, but it proved a bit too complicated.)

When Bradley’s buckin’ bronco whirligig gets going, the horse’s legs fly out behind it. His stately great blue heron doubles as a roadrunner when the wind picks up. Another piece based on the traditional bluegrass song “Froggy Went a Courtin'” features the frog, Miss Mousie and Uncle Rat balanced on a horse.

The whirligigs are time-consuming to manufacture – about a week to produce one. “I don’t know that it has to take that long; it just does,” Bradley says. He starts by making thumbnail sketches of an idea, working out the proportions and the shapes he wants. He then does a layout of the piece in its actual size, fine-tuning the patterns he will end up cutting and carving. In the beginning he used found wood lying around the yard or at construction sites, but nowadays the whirligigs are made from standard-size lumber, one-by-fours, one-by-sixes and the like.

In addition to conventional power tools, including a variety of saws, Bradley uses knives and chisels to work out the details and figures. There is minimal carving; he is more concerned about the silhouette of the shapes than he is in the details. The pieces are painted in acrylic. “It probably takes more time to paint them than to make them,” notes Bradley, who is also an accomplished watercolorist.

“Anything mathematical,” the artist says, “is a disturbance to me,” but he acknowledges that his whirligigs must be aerodynamic, with proper weight and balance critical to their success. Someone once suggested he add motors so that the apparatus could work without the wind. That would defeat the idea of it, Bradley believes. “The fun of it,” he says, “is the natural propulsion.”

Bradley is interested in the Civil War, although he acknowledges that this subject tends to restrict one to a specific market, catering to people interested in historical pieces. “The problem I have,” he admits, “is that I’m more interested in what I want to do than whether it’s practical or not.”

At the same time, Bradley’s modes of artistic expression continue to expand. He had his first sculpture cast into bronze this winter, a vignette of two Civil War soldiers stopping to drink from a stream. He has found working in clay the most enjoyable means of making art. “I can now understand why it would bring peace of mind to troubled people,” he says.

Bradley was born in Georgia and attended the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. He worked his way through school doing artwork (posters and the like) and then went into advertising, first in Chattanooga, then in Oakland, Calif., and finally in Florida. All the while he carried an obsession to move to Maine, about which he knew little beyond some knowledge of its history. He went so far as to send for information from the Chamber of Commerce in Portland.

Finally, in the early 1970s, Bradley and his wife, Frankie, a retired medical technologist who is also a painter, took a vacation to Camden, and they loved it. As a result of their raving about Maine, the Bradleys’ daughter Rebekah enrolled at the University of Maine. (She now lives in East Blue Hill with her husband, Ken Woisard, a fine art photographer.)

The Bradleys came to visit Rebekah and ended up buying a place on Deer Isle, where they lived in a semiretired situation. They opened a family gallery, showing paintings and other work by Raye, Frankie, Rebekah and the Bradleys’ other daughter, Patricia Alison, a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design.

The Bradley Gallery was in business for five or so years before the children went off on their own, Rebekah to show her work more broadly and Patti to join the corporate world. (Today she designs toys.) Bradley got a real kick out of showing with Rebekah again last summer. “I was flattered because I have such admiration for her,” he says.

Bradley maintains workshop studio spaces in Maine and Florida, working on the whirligigs in the former and sculpture and painting in the latter. He will begin showing his work on Deer Isle again this summer. He and his wife recently had a small cape house moved onto their property and plan to restore it and turn it into a gallery, open “by chance or by appointment.” The whirligigs, which now fetch about $1,000 each, will be featured.

“Maine is a great place to hibernate, and you can really get work done,” Bradley says, having spent three winters on Deer Isle. In the same breath, however, he acknowledges that Florida offers a good escape from the chill and snow. Nowadays, he’s happy to arrive in Maine in late April and stay through December – enough time to create more of his marvelous whirligigs, which fulfill not only his artistic inclinations but also the aspirations of the wind.

Carl Little can be reached at little@acadia.net.