Everybody seems to know the old man down the road. Can't miss it, they say. Down the road lies a strange yet beautiful building put together with wood, cement and one man's vast imagination. In his front yard, Stephenson has built a fanciful little lodge that the Brothers Grimm would appreciate. Instead of sugarplums, the walls are speckled in colorful stones, shells, leaves and fossils.
Cypress knees hang from above like icicles.
For the past nine years, he has been using the fossils and petrified wood he finds to make pieces that people in the art world deem both playful and puzzling. Folk and outsider art is what they call it. Then there are the more common sights in nature, the ones etched in his memory. Although he lives well off the beaten path, his work doesn't go unnoticed. Q.J. is the real thing,' says David Steel, curator of European art at the N.C. Museum of Art.