In darkness, Beverly McIver sees and paints by the light and voice of truth — and amazing grace

By Jim Moriarty

When I was much younger and more rambunctious my mother used to caution me that nothing good ever happens after midnight. My mother never knew Beverly McIver.

Working into the solitary small hours of the night, McIver often begins a canvas by projecting a face onto it. She underlines the eyes, the nose, the mouth, getting the drawing to her liking as if she were setting a table with the bare essentials before the feast. Then, when the light goes out, the paint goes on. And, oh my, does she paint. With a kaleidoscopic palette and audacious, yet economical, brush strokes, she steps into her subject — often not once, but over and over again, creating in the sweep of time a riveting series of canvases. Works can be built around a doll or a coil of black rope. They can be portraits of her mentally disabled sister, Renee, her father, Cardrew Davis, or even herself.

“The fact that she works in series is such a strength. And what I’m so moved by is the freshness, the fluency,” says Anne Brennan, the executive director of the Cameron Art Museum in Wilmington, North Carolina. “She must have a pact with herself about keeping it moving, keeping it fresh and not second-guessing. And, boy, she knows when to step back, when to get out. I think she trusts her intuition or subconscious. She’s paying attention. That is so brave. So brave and true to herself.”  The Cameron is one of several museums  — including the Mint Museum, the Crocker Art Museum, the Nasher Museum Art, the North Carolina Museum of Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art — that hold McIver’s work in their permanent collections.

“Imagine if you were painting a series of self-portraits,” says Brennan. “Think how you might become formulaic in your choice of the passage of light against this plane of your face — and she is so not. Every painting is as fresh and innovative and original and spontaneous as the next.”

McIver’s magnetic laugh and her purring Persian cats — Clydie, Bona, Bella and Gracie — roam freely in her Hillsborough condo in the daytime. But, at night, she pays attention to the voice in her head. “They talk about artists needing natural light but when I’m painting I like for it to be dark,” says McIver, whose dreadlocks have fallen victim to a bit of pandemic-induced self-barbering.

“It’s quiet. My brain cuts on. That’s my authentic self. That’s the voice that I have no control over but to listen to it because it’s always right, even if I don’t really understand. My teacher in college said, ‘Just keep doing it. Don’t worry about what it is. Just keep walking.’ I said, ‘I don’t know what to do next.’  She’s like, ‘Just go there and wait for that voice. It’ll show up.’ I’ve always let that govern what comes out. It’s always way, way honest. Painfully honest.”

McIver grew up in Morningside Homes, barracks-style public housing a couple of miles east of downtown Greensboro, long since razed. It was the site of the 1979 “Greensboro Massacre” when members of the Klu Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party exchanged gunfire with protesters organized by the Communist Workers’ Party who had come to Greensboro in support of the region’s predominantly black textile workers. The “Death to the Klan” march was supposed to go all the way to city hall but the two groups clashed at the beginning of the march. Both sides exchanged gunfire. Five people were killed, four members of the CWP and Dr. Michael Nathan, the chief of pediatrics at Lincoln Community Health Center in Durham. The violent confrontation was captured on video, a slice of  ‘70s history that plays on an eternal YouTube loop. McIver’s mother, Ethel, watched the shooting from her kitchen window. The family car, a lime-green Pinto, was shot in the gas cap, the bullet passing into the trunk. Ethel McIver testified at the trial of six members of the Klan, five charged with murder. All were acquitted. Beverly was 17. Though she was not a witness that Saturday morning — “I was working at McDonald’s on Battleground Avenue,” she says — she keeps a copy of her mother’s testimony.

The man who lent McIver her surname is barely a footnote in her life. “I have some tiny, tiny flashbacks of him putting us [Renee, the eldest, Roni, the middle sister, and Beverly, the baby] in a hot tub of water,” she says. “We were all crying because it was too hot. But that’s it.” He was gone by the time she was 3. When he passed away in New Jersey a decade or more later, the McIver family didn’t attend the funeral. A child of desegregation, Beverly was bussed across town to predominantly white schools. “In order just to exist I had to learn to straddle both of those worlds,” she says. One of the coping mechanisms she found was a clowning club at Grimsley High School. “As a clown,” McIver once told Kim Curry-Evans, now the director for Scottsdale Public Art in Arizona, “I was transformed, and in many ways more acceptable to society. No one cared that I was black or poor.” It was the seed of a theme featuring both whiteface and blackface that inhabits many of her canvases, particularly in her early works.

“I needed to not repeat living in the projects and being poor,” McIver says. “Whatever I do, I’m not interested in being poor again.” Her inner voice got louder when she squeezed her first tube of oil paint as an undergraduate at North Carolina Central University. “I had a great teacher who said to me, ‘You know, you have enough talent that if you work hard, you can make it.’ That’s all I needed to hear. I can make it.” The teacher’s name was Elizabeth “Libby” Lentz. She passed away in 2003. “I was in New York and got a call saying she’d driven up into the woods of North Carolina and left her car running and ran a hose from the exhaust into the car and the police had found her,” McIver says. “I flew back down to attend her service. It was horrible. It was really, really horrible. She was one of the first people that really believed in me, that I could have a voice to make a difference in the world. She was a painter and she taught me to paint. So, yeah, that was pretty sad.”

McIver’s degree from North Carolina Central was followed by a Master of Fine Arts from Penn State University and enough residencies, exhibitions (solo and group) and awards to make the curriculum vitae Hall of Fame. She’s held teaching positions at Arizona State University, NCCU and, for the last six years, Duke University. Though she’s set up her easel in places as disparate as an art colony in Saratoga Springs, New York, a studio in Brooklyn or an academy in Rome, her subjects are inevitably close to home.

McIver began painting her mentally disabled and epileptic older sister, Renee, 25 years ago and has never stopped. “I can paint Renee over and over again because she looks different. She looks like a little girl; she looks like she’s 70. Sometimes she looks fragile, like she’ll fall over. Renee is 60 now but has the mindset of a third grader,” says McIver. They talk on the phone every day. “I just ordered Renee a purple comforter. I saw her yesterday. She called me this morning. I said, ‘Renee, don’t call me before 11 o’clock.’ She called me at 10:15. I listened to the message. ‘Hey, I want you to know I really enjoyed that quiche you brought me yesterday. It was so good I ate two pieces this morning. I just wanted to let you know. I know you’re busy. I’m busy, too. I’m making potholders.’”

In 2002 when McIver was a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University, filmmaker Jeanne Jordan was a fellow at the same time — a fellow fellow, one supposes. “We were like across the hall from each other,” says McIver. One day Jordan told McIver that she and her husband, Steven Ascher, wanted to make a film about her. The result was the Emmy-nominated film Raising Renee. The initial idea for the project was to focus on McIver, her life and her art. But when her mother, Ethel McIver, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, “that changed everything,” says Beverly.

Ethel McMaster McIver grew up in Staley, North Carolina, near Liberty. “I think they went to Asheboro to shop at the Walmart,” says McIver. Ethel began cleaning houses when she was 10 years old, substituting for her mother one day when Beverly’s grandmother was too sick to go herself. Closeted in the Morningside Homes, it was a trade that lasted a lifetime. “When I got my first house I copied the furniture, all the things that were in one of the houses my mother cleaned, winged-back chairs and drop-leaf tables,” says Beverly. When Ethel passed away in March of 2004, Beverly became Renee’s primary caregiver. The film, six years in the making, began before Ethel’s death and ends when Renee is able to move into her own apartment. It tracks — in an unvarnished, authentic way — the complicated relationship between the artist and the sister who knits potholders by the bushel and is eternally enamored of the pinks and purples of a third grader. “I’m not going to pretend like it was easy or that I’m honored to be Renee’s legal guardian,” says Beverly. “I love Renee dearly but some people wanted a film more like glorifying caretaking in a way that’s just not true. Caretaking is hard. I don’t care who it is.”

One of the works McIver painted during that period was Family Praying, a powerful image of five family members, holding hands around the hospital bed of their deceased mother, their own flesh whitened to the point where some features disappear completely. “They are in mourning, sort of life draining away, the way color might drain from someone’s face,” says Jennifer Dasal, the curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the North Carolina Museum of Art and the host and creator of the acclaimed podcast ArtCurious. Seven years later, artistically admired and commercially comfortable, McIver made Truly Grateful, a self-portrait that’s currently paired in the NCMA exhibit “Interchanges: Cross-Collection Conversations” with The Virgin in Prayer by Giovanni Battista Salvi da Sassoferrato and Jesse Burke’s photo Blessed. McIver’s painting is described as exuding “a calming, almost spiritual atmosphere.” Even as color explodes on the surface of her canvases, McIver holds back nothing in revealing her subjects, including herself. “Maybe facial elements, things that might be blurred over by some artists trying to, perhaps, beautify somebody — she doesn’t do that,” says Dasal. “And I love that about her work. She’s aiming to show the truth about somebody.”

William Paul Thomas, a portrait painter himself and an adjunct professor of art at Guilford College, covered McIver’s classes at Duke while she was at the American Academy in Rome. “Her attention to the way light reflects off the surface of someone’s face is really fascinating,” says Thomas. “She achieves these really emotive, thoughtful, beautiful likenesses of her subjects with a kind of grace and economy. There’s a vibrancy and textural quality of paint that’s totally apparent when you see the work in person.”

And there is no telling where McIver’s voice might lead her. During her Covid confinement, it led to a piece of thick, black rope. “I have pictures of everybody with rope,” she says and laughs. What started out as a series about being stuck in the house turned into something more. “My intuition said to me, you need to buy rope. What do I need rope for? What am I going to do with rope? Then I said, ‘Well, let me see what rope costs on Amazon.’ The rope was, like, $30. If it had been a hundred I would have been, like, I’m not buying a hundred dollars worth of rope,” she says.

“I had no idea what I was going to do with it. So, thirty bucks, I ordered the rope. It was all coiled up and I pulled it apart and I was, like, I want to see what that looks like around my head,” she says, wrapping her arms around herself in the air. “It can look like an octopus. It can look like my hair before I had the Covid. My cousin, Lonnie, who lives in Greensboro was, like, ‘I got stopped by the cops again.’ He’s a tall black man, dark skinned. They pulled him over. They showed him a picture of the suspect.” She pauses. “OK, that does not make me feel better. I never thought of him as Black Lives Matter, I just think of him as my cousin Lonnie. I asked him if he would pose for me and I made this painting Lonnie Can’t Breathe.”

In August McIver joined a group of artists contributing works for the People For the American Way’s “Enough” campaign. The organization was founded by Norman Lear, someone McIver met once in New York at a party given by Maya Angelou in honor of Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize. “I think I know Oprah, too, though I never met her,” Beverly jokes. McIver is simultaneously working on a solo exhibition for the Betty Cuningham Gallery, her New York affiliation, and curating an exhibit of African American artists for the Craven Allen Gallery in Durham, where she’ll also have a showing of her new paintings beginning Nov. 17. In 2022, she’ll have a traveling career “survey” that will begin at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art and travel to the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem before going to the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, South Carolina, among other possible locations. And she has long range plans to build a house on 11 acres in Chapel Hill where she’ll create an artist-in-residence program, aimed foremost at advancing artists of color. “I made some of my best work under those circumstances — when somebody is actually taking care of you and all you have to do is just paint. I want to be able to give that back,” she says.

The painting Taxi Driver is a relatively recent acquisition of the Cameron Art Museum. It’s among the paintings in what McIver calls her “Daddy Series.” She met her natural father, Cardrew Davis, when she was 16. “We were standing in the kitchen, me and my mother. ‘I have something to tell you.’ I said, ‘What?’ She said, ‘Yeah, your dad’s at the door.’ And there was this big guy standing there,” says McIver.

“I don’t know what the real story is. I know my mother wanted him to pull her out of that marriage. If you met my father you’d know that he’s incapable of that. He barely loves himself. When my mother died, he did attend the funeral. And that’s when I said, you know, I’m going to get to know this man.” She gave him one of her early portraits of him. When he found out it might be valuable he put it in the closet.

Another of McIver’s series features a tiny blackface, button-eyed doll. “She’s just a little black doll that my friend found online in an auction and purchased for me,” says McIver. “She’s been in a lot of my paintings.”

Actually, she’s been in all of them, from the ones painted in Rome to the ones created in Brooklyn to the ones that were not yet imagined by a little girl in hot water in Morningside Homes, who grew up working a 6 a.m. shift at Biscuitville and a cash register at McDonald’s. “There’s such a separation in my head from that little girl and who I am today,” says McIver, “to the point where I don’t think they recognize each other. So, Gracie — that’s my doll I’ve created — is sort of that little girl. I paint her.”

Oh my, does she paint.  OH

When not spending time with his grandprincesses, Jim Moriarty is the senior editor of our sister publication, PineStraw magazine, in Southern Pines.

Designer Larry Richardson pulls straight from nature to color his home magnificent

By Cynthia Adams   •   Photographs by Amy Freeman

Floral designer Larry Richardson is just as prone to brake for newly-fallen hedge apples he spied along a city street as he is to pluck a seed pod and incorporate it into fall décor. Varying living and dried elements, he creates a moody tableau that resembles a Dutch still life, where you might find a ripened piece of fruit or cut pomegranate or exotica. Richardson avidly shops Mother Nature as freely as he does cultivated plants in his greenhouse. Summer’s end brings its rewards, Richardson says. But he considers autumn a welcome prelude — a time of harvest and found beauty.

As one season opens the door onto the next, each of us yearns to welcome Nature’s changing mood and shifting palette into our own homes. Richardson, with two floral shops, a greenhouse and years of experience, is an expert at condensing the landscape’s kaleidoscopic transformation into stunning arrangements. In late September, he was way too busy to sit down for a long interview, but he did take the time to share some hints and creative insights into how he does what he does so well.

Richardson recommends opening the eye to what is beautiful in the “quiet season” as vivid summer hues dim to duller shades of gold. He appreciates the restful muting of the natural color palette before the extravagant riot of hues and tones homeowners gravitate toward in the winter holidays.  As an example, Richardson stands before a display he created, a sumptuous mix of intensities in plants and objects: amethyst, cinnamon, terra cotta and golden browns.

An orange bromeliad blooms midst ferns and angel-wing begonias, not to mention a cornucopia of gourds, dusky pumpkins, golden and green foliage, ornamental peppers, flowers, fruit, nuts, ornamental seed pods and branches of bittersweet. Many of those colors are drawn from a real still life hung nearby.

Think like a painter, he teaches. Contrast and surprise are key to a pleasing fall arrangement.

“When you think of fall, you think of cooler temperatures,” he says on an afternoon at the greenhouse, where workers are unpacking boxes and the interior of his showrooms are filling with fall-themed organics and an assortment of decorative objects. It is one of those rare September days, cool yet not cold, after record-breaking weeks of scorching heat.

By autumn, we face the reality of months of cold ahead, Richardson says. “The colors warm up. You want to feel the warmth,” he smiles, adding, “You want to be wrapped by the beauty, so that you remember to appreciate each day.”

In September, everyone is thinking autumn and autumnal colors, he says. His job is to help customers find a creative direction employing a mix of the vintage and natural world.

Yet in truth, watching Richardson as customers dart in and out, asking about plants and recommendations, autumn doesn’t seem as quiet as he suggests. The fall season looks more like a qualifying race for an all-out marathon, one that will occupy him, his partner, Clark Goodin, and the staff for months to come.

Richardson’s two businesses, Plants and Answers: The Big Greenhouse on Spring Garden Street and a floral shop downtown send him hunting and gathering new combinations of natural components, plants and organic finds each fall into the end of the year.

Any of us can do the same, no matter our budget, he insists.

Richardson admires millennials’ fondness for plants — noting a heightened interest in the unusual (from philodendron to air plants). He likes what he terms experimentality, whether in choosing a plant, composing a planter or preparing a table for a special meal.

Creativity is free, he stresses. To illustrate, he pops an ornamental cabbage plant into a tiny bag of water before tucking it into a centerpiece, where it will stay a few days before being transplanted into a planter.

Richardson describes how he decorates at home. Even a creative must seed his creativity.

So, he walks through his house like a visitor, “and I look for wood carved things, natural elements, old gourds, dipper gourds, apple gourds. At home, I will mix in fresh Granny Smith apples and red apples because those types of things will hold for a long time.”

He seeks out an object to inspire.

“I have a tendency to want to bring together lots of different elements. In the fall, I like to bring in natural elements. You may have a piece of pottery you want to bring in, and let that be your inspiration to start,” he suggests.

“Then, I want to make my fall showcase the bounty of the end of the season,” he says. The summer is when you grow things and then in the fall you harvest them. “So, harvest those things, whether they are by the side of the road, or old okra pods, different pieces, like bittersweet, which I harvested outside by the greenhouse.”

Draping bittersweet branches across a display adds tiny explosions of orange to a subdued arrangement.

“It was only branches of green pods yesterday, but it opened overnight to give me the orange that we like.” He will use those branches yearlong, as they dry and colors intensify.

“I like for the outside to flow into what you do decoratively on the inside,” he says. “You use the same color palette, and it keeps growing. I do that at home; you want the outside to be a reflection of what you would imagine is on the inside.”

Richardson says he approaches seasonal decorating methodically — the exterior first. “I have a tendency to do my front door. Then the side and back doors.” As for the front door, it should introduce the foyer and interior concepts for cohesion.

He contemplates decorative accents for mantle and dining room table. Even ordinary work spaces might get embellishment.

“Then, don’t forget the kitchen island,” he reminds.

Late year, Richardson appreciates the impact of orange — not garish orange but a persimmon orange. And blue. (More on the blue later, a bit of an obsession.) “I have a tendency to go with orange, reds, and golds . . .” Bright yellows are too intense.

“They command the eye.” He amends, “they demand the eye.”

For the table, Richardson composed an arrangement of fruits, berries, vines, gourds and plants with dark foliage — “anything that’s more natural in the fall.” Then, he placed ornamental peppers in silver wine buckets.

“Branches are good with berries and fruits on them,” he suggests. If you’re entertaining, cut some branches off with the fruit attached. “Look for things you can use from your garden. Or dry hydrangea. Cut those blooms now and hang them upside down, and they will dry and have the fall colors.”

A painting was the inspiration point for another autumnal display.

“Pansies were the start. The ‘wow factor’ was the crabapple branches. Which is what you expect this time of year. And it will (still) be beautiful at Christmas.”

He used pottery pieces, building upon tonalities and textures — from clay to brass and copper.

“If you look, notice the pottery is there giving a grounding,” he says as he explains the display. “I brought in the carved bear pushing the wheel barrow. I had carved owls and used the wooden elements of the bowls.” These he filled with (faux) fruits. “Copper was my inspiration. Then, where I used dark foliage, it looks like velvet.” He points to a velvety, purply-colored leaf — “It’s a Rex begonia.”

Richardson usually avoids standard oranges and greens, even in autumn. Instead, he chose a bromeliad for an unexpected accent. Adding in dried pods to the display summoned a cinnamon color.

“I have a tendency to use the French style and clump things. Rather than spread something throughout an arrangement, clump it. You get much more impact,” he explains. And strive for dimension.

The finishing touch to an arrangement is the bittersweet.

“It gives that air and texture — if you took that away, it would be pretty, but this adds depth to the arrangement.”

Richardson has strewn leaves as if they fell there naturally; there are dried artichoke and cat tails.

He gives emphasis to the center of the table — not even the mantle takes precedence. “Anything else is auxiliary for the table.”

Richardson used a vintage goose tureen as the focal point of the centerpiece. Again, he cleverly tucked small cabbage plants into the display, which can later be transplanted outside.

“I placed brass tureens on the mantle to tie that in,” he explains, along with an elongated planter holding ferns. Indian corn and leaves serve as accents. “I can add berries, add dried bittersweet, and I might tuck in a pear that is fresh. I have a tendency to warm things up (color wise) in the winter, then cool them down in the spring and summer.”

Fall décor can extend into Thanksgiving and beyond, designing everything with that in mind.

“Even the goose on the table can stay till Christmas,” he indicates. “I would introduce more greens and evergreens.”

“Lots of times when I put together the elements of a table-scape, I think about what I want to get out of it. To make life a little easier, I do want to use the goose theme for Christmas as well.”

The table china is a Lenox white pattern rimmed in cobalt blue.

Over the mantle hangs a painting that inspired the arrangement below. An oval antique fish platter, in blue accented with orange, hangs above it.

Paintings are frequently moved, depending upon the season.

“Art can be moved,” he says. “I do that all the time. I change my art depending upon what I’m trying to achieve.” For instance, if he’s entertaining, a painting might take a place of honor in the dining room. Or, “It could be the lighting has changed throughout the year, and makes the art take on a whole different look.”

The buffet is set with serving pieces. Richardson likes to place pieces from his massive blue-and-white porcelain collection.

He marks the moment whether entertaining or not.  It’s very French to do this, he explains. “Their lives are built around eating and entertainment. And they pull out the stops for just two.”

So does Richardson. And he enjoys a sense of occasion.

Meanwhile, with autumn giving way to the intensive holiday season, Richardson mans the greenhouse as Goodin runs the florist. He also sells antiques at the Carriage House and the Shoppes on Patterson.

But plants are at the heart of his work.

Like many Triad businesses, Richardson got his start at Greensboro’s Super Flea, where he sold plants. (It was also a place where he scouted vintage treasures.)

“It was in July of 1975, the first Super Flea. I started Plants and Answers later that year.” Former teacher Pat Fogleman joined him becoming “my good man Friday. Now she’s much more than an assistant.” He built the greenhouse in 1976.

He told Fogleman that orchids would be good sellers. She fretted they were too expensive for a flea market. He told her buyers would value them if she did. He created combination baskets (“some call them European gardens”) and though she was initially uncertain, Richardson saw that she possessed an eye “and just had to develop it.”

Fogleman is a mainstay at the greenhouse, where she helps customers find the right touch of natural color to warm their home, he says. “She has a following,” he smiles.

Richardson started out thinking he would be an academic; he has so many interests, ranging from botany to antiquities. But he distills all of it down to this: “I love beauty.”

From early autumn till the ball drops on New Year’s Eve, he will be in a mad dash to beautify Triad homes and gardens. He and Goodin will watch Times Square via TV on the third floor of their Sunset Hills home.

The snowdrops and crocus will be nudging their way up, soon to appear.  OH

Cynthia Adams is a contributing editor to O.Henry.

Tips for Fall Décor:

• “Go big or go home,” he says when it comes to more appealing pots and container gardens.

• “Go for unusual.” Richardson is not a big fan of chrysantmums, which are ubiquitous.

• Visit garden centers and nurseries and seek out unusual foliage and colors.

• Go organic: get into the woods or your own yard.

• Dry your own flowers.

• Pick up dried pods and plants and use them. Be original and avoid trends: (“Ghost pumpkins are out,” he advises.)

A Nimble Deer

A doe that was, only a minute

before, quietly munching, leaps over

a wooden fence, nimble

as a goat. She rears up, after reaching

the other side, like a trick dog —

her front hooves dangling from her

useless forelegs, her hind legs

absorbing all the weight. She cranes

her soft, brown neck just far

enough to reach the succulent leaves

of a dogwood tree. But the younger 

deer — smaller, less sure —

stick to low-hanging branches,

their tails flicking like little propellers

that fail to lift them from the earth.

– Terri Kirby Erickson

Give Justin Stabb a problem and watch him delve into his palette of materials to solve it

By Ross Howell Jr.   •   Photographs by Amy Freeman

Architect Peter Freeman had a problem. While he was pleased with his ambitious design for a light fixture for a medical facility, he wasn’t sure how to build it. He wasn’t even sure it could be built.

So Freeman did what many architects, designers, museums, corporations, nonprofits and private individuals are doing these days. He reached out to Stabb Designs in High Point.

Thirty-something Justin Stabb founded his business in 2016 following a remarkably challenging career path. He’d designed and built manufacturing machines. He’d installed robotic-arm work stations and brought them online for major corporations. He’d developed processing and manufacturing systems on-site for big industry.

Yet the mechanical engineering — what Stabb calls the “function” side — of his creativity had always been driven by a love for artistic creation.

I was determined to learn more. So here I am, opening the door to a low-slung building on West Green Drive. I’m greeted by a tall man with a shaved head, short-clipped beard and dark brown eyes. In this age of Covid, I’m wearing a surgical mask, and we keep our distance, nodding greetings. Though we don’t shake hands, I see his are big, the hands of a man who makes things.

Sophisticated computer equipment is mingled among work benches and tool cabinets.

Stabb introduces me to Brittany Rankin, the office manager, his first employee. He hired her as a barista for ’83 Custom Coffee, originated in 2018, another Stabb enterprise.

His “coffee house” is a black pickup painted with the ’83 Custom Coffee logo and modified truck bed — I walked by it on West Green Drive as I entered the building. It provides fresh-brewed gourmet coffee and a pleasant place to gather to share ideas. While the truck café left some High Pointers scratching their heads, it’s now a fixture in town.

“I come from an unconventional background,” Stabb says. “My grandmother was a professional oil painter. My grandfather was a patent attorney.” So from the time he was a boy, Stabb’s imagination was shaped by both creation and construction.

Stabb tells me his father was a contractor in Oakland, California, who built and set up a small work bench in the back yard, where his son could glue together model airplanes and car kits while he worked on building projects.

“I remember sitting in that golden California sunshine, watching my Dad,” Stabb says. “It was great, getting to see the things he made.”

Later Stabb moved to Rochester, New York, and would study at the Rochester Institute of Technology, one of the leading universities in the nation for training in technology, the arts and design.

Along the way, Stabb started working at the age of 15 for Mahany Welding Supply, a company founded in Rochester in 1946. He continued for seven years, gaining more responsibility for larger projects as he proved his abilities and his experience grew.

There, Stabb learned welding and blacksmithing from Michael Krupnicki, the owner of the business. In 2001, Krupnicki had decided to start offering welder training classes not only for professional tradesmen, but also for the general public, through day clinics, night courses, collegiate and vocational classes, plus professional welder qualification programs.

His programs were so successful that in 2012 Krupnicki formed Rochester Arc + Flame Center, where experienced professionals and world-class artists now offer classes in welding, smithing, glasswork and jewelry.

“Mike’s a great teacher,” Stabb adds.

He walks me to the area of the shop where he finished the Freeman lighting piece.

“First we had to come up with the parts that would be assembled for the light,” Stabb says. “We needed to design something that would be strong, but relatively lightweight.”

Using his 3D printer, Stabb designed and made a prototype for the element, which could then be precisely reproduced in quantity.

Next was the colored glass for the light. Following Freeman’s design, an intricate shape had to be carved out of the centers of the small glass panes.

“One of our suppliers used water-jet technology to cut the holes,” Stabb says. “We didn’t know for sure that the water jet would work, but it did.” Stabb adds that he likes projects that test the limits of fabrication technology.

The problem with the etched-out panes was that the edges of cuts were sharp and brittle-looking.

“So we fired them again in the kiln,” he says, handing me one of the leftover panes to inspect. The edges are smooth to the touch, elegant-looking.

“Firing the glass again smoothed the edges, made them organic-looking,” Stabb says. “That’s what we were looking for.”

Stabb explains that pieces like Peter Freeman’s light fixture give him the opportunity to excel.

“I describe what I do as ‘dream-making,’” he says. “Give me a problem. Let me mix from a palette of materials to solve it.”

We move on to an element from a different lighting project. It’s bigger than a hollowed-out bass drum. Encircling its center is a ring of LEDs. Next Stabb shows me one of the fins that will be attached to the drum.

“Each one of these fixtures, when finished, will be about 12 feet in diameter,” he says.

“See the holes in the top?” he asks.

I nod.

“That’s way more than we need to suspend it,” Stabb continues. “But we’re using wire, and we wanted an industrial look.”

He opens a door and we move into a back area of the shop. Here the other drum light fixtures are stored, awaiting assembly, along with other projects.

He points to an impressive air-cleaning system that reaches from floor to ceiling. Calling on his machine design experience, Stabb reverse-engineered the system from diagrams and other systems he’d seen, making it himself and saving thousands of dollars from what he would’ve paid had he purchased one.

As we talk, another of Stabb’s employees walks in. He’s lanky, with blue eyes and sandy blond hair and looks to be college age. His name is Clayton Brewer. Stabb tells me his specialties are fabrication and installation of big displays.

“His grandmother wants him to go to college,” Stabb says. He explains that Brewer isn’t really interested, so they’re developing a special curriculum that will cover fabrication and design and art, along with management and accounting courses from different institutions so Brewer can one day run his own business.

Stabb tells me his other employee, craftsman Brad Grubb, is out of the office working on location.

Looking at the air cleaner, I ask Stabb if he’s ever considered going back to the industrial sector.

“Designing machines for manufacturing is something I used to do full-time,” he responds. “It’s lucrative, but it’s all function and no art.” He explains that the work he’s done for manufacturers will only be experienced by the employees who work in their facilities.

“I want to make things my kids will get to see,” Stabb adds. For that reason he’s keeping his focus on some artistic projects that can be viewed in commercial and public settings.

“But I like making big things,” he says. “That way I can leverage my industrial experience.”

Stabb Designs built a life-size wooden train locomotive that was installed at the Cincinnati Museum Center at Union Terminal. They’ve fabricated custom lighting fixtures made from wooden bats and made beer taps from old repurposed tools for a baseball stadium.

The magnificent light designed by Freeman? It’s ready for installation at Bethany Medical.

So what dreams does dream-maker Justin Stabb envision for himself?

Right now his company is designing a section of Plant 7 at Congdon Yards in High Point. The downtown facility will provide access for fabricators and designers to expensive, state-of-the-art equipment inaccessible to the budgets of small companies, especially start-ups.

“In November Stabb Designs will be moving into a 14,000-square-foot facility,” he says. That’s a big step up from the modest building I’m visiting now.

“And someday I want to have a product line,” Stabb continues. “Maybe I’ll downscale some of our big projects. I like repurposing. And I want to find ways to repurpose what I’ve learned.”

As I’m about to leave, I notice a little work bench made of wood near Stabb’s computer. The low bench has a vise, screwdrivers, child-size braces with auger bits and other tools scattered over its surface.

“For my kids,” Stabb says. He smiles.

As I leave, I think of that young boy sitting in the California sun, watching his father make something. I expect Stabb Designs will be making a world of dreams in the years ahead.  OH

Ross Howell Jr. is a novelist and freelance magazine writer in Greensboro.