Jerry Simpson:  

Castoff Character Rocky Mountain News Castoff Character By Betsy Lehndorff, Rocky Mountain News, October 17, 2003 In the darkness, Jerry Simpson parks his old Volkswagen bug behind a home-furnishings store and nudges the driver-side door open with his foot. The 62-year-old slips out of the car and flips open the lid of a lone trash bin. After surveying the contents, he vaults inside, landing among the baskets, pillows and bags of trash almost soundlessly. "Some people are embarrassed to go through dumpsters, because they don't want to be down with all those things people throw away," Simpson says. "But every time I go out, it's like Christmas. I just can't believe it. Whatever I want, I can find." For more than 15 years, the artist has combed commercial garbage bins for art supplies - doll heads, paint, wiring, toys, fabric, beads. The trash of others becomes his treasure, as he recycles materials into the artwork he has exhibited in more than 100 galleries, including the Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities, the Museum of Outdoor Art and Pirate. But plenty of his finds also have gone into building and decorating the unusual home he lives in at the edge of Interstate 25, where T-REX has eaten away the Emerson Street bridge. In 1978, he moved into a run-down home on weed-strewn property after a divorce. The place consists of a brick home and several detached sheds encircled by a high fence. Every surface has been put to work raising culture's throwaways to the status of high art. One wall is enameled with old Colorado license plates. Another pops with rusting wrenches hung from rusting nails. A gable is filled with old ceiling-light globes. Piles of marble slabs, old pots and pans and antique machinery add texture to a maze of narrow walkways. Surprises in each shed Simpson even has managed to pull a rooftop garden out of the trash, using discarded planks for decking, old pipes for railing and cast-off lawn furniture for seating. "Yeah, a lot of people are surprised when they come in here," Simpson says. "They don't expect it." The biggest surprises are inside each shed. They pop with the color of thousands of mass-produced toys, lunchboxes and tin advertising signs he culled from thrift shops in the 1980s. Even in his kitchen, hundreds of worn pots and pans and other wares form a heavy iron fringe over the small space. "It's an overload really, like my artwork," he says. "You have to study it really to see it." After years of shopping thrift stores, Simpson began going through industrial trash bins in 1988, when he quit a career as a graphic artist to become a fine artist. Knowing money would be tight, he needed a cheaper source of sculpture supplies. Waste not ... "If everybody did what I do, we might get along with the world much better," says Simpson, dressed in his standard uniform: a worn snap-brim hat, Hawaiian print shirt, jeans and running shoes from thrift stores, another fertile ground for goods. "Besides wasting energy, we're wasting the world's raw materials. If we were environmentally responsible to the Earth, there wouldn't be anything in the dumpsters." Some might question the legality - if not the sanity - of Simpson's pursuit. But he does follow the rules. He avoids locked or fenced-in trash bins, instead working those whose owners have granted him permission to explore. He also avoids residential trash bins. A tour of Simpson's live-in work-in-progress begins with a tug at the pair of cow-bone handles on his gate. A narrow wood walkway threads between the brick home and a sturdy-looking shed that supports the rooftop garden. Against ...Expand for more