When Aaron Hequembourg needs art supplies to create his mixed-media engraved paintings, he doesn't go to the Sam Flax store. He walks outside his 193-year-old plantation house near Monticello and begins dismantling the dilapidated buildings — sharecropper and slave quarters, gin mills and trading posts — that still stand on the 2,000-acre farm he calls home.

In addition to the aged, hand-hewn planks of wood that provide the canvases for his work, Hequembourg has uncovered old toys, newspapers, medicine bottles and a rotted peach in a Mason jar, evidence of a previous generation's recipe for peach brandy. These finds become the components in his artwork that is part art, part history.

Joey Ivansco/AJC (ENLARGE)

Folk artist Aaron Hequembourg demonstrates his working style in his studio in Monticello.

RELATED LINKS: • More photos • Decatur Arts Festival guide • Decatur Arts Festival official site • Memorial Day guide LIVING Latest Headlines: Secluded Georgia refuge takes in misfit gorillas  Decatur First Baptist keeps woman in the pulpit  Zoo Atlanta's gorillas include numerous old-timers  Atlanta conference examines institution of marriage  World's oldest polar bear dies at Canadian zoo  • More Living Stories • Living photo galleries • Georgia Aquarium news and photos • Zoo Atlanta news and photos

His salvage missions are not without peril. Last month he fell up to his waist in floor boards that collapsed under his weight, which led to a startling encounter with a family of nesting buzzards. He has thrown out his back in remote locations, been swarmed by bats and was nearly crushed by falling debris more than once.

But Hequembourg's art wouldn't be nearly so effective without the fruit of that risk. His intrepretative portraits of the old South are rendered with the physical remains of its past, and it requires patience, imagination and a tolerance for bruises to tell the stories the plantation inspires.

A "32-mule farm"

Hequembourg, 43, is a fit, self-possessed man with an easy-going demeanor and a wry sense of humor that is revealed gradually in a manner true to his Midwestern roots. The Missouri native trained in printmaking at the University of Iowa then moved in the late '80s to Atlanta, where he met his wife and married into a Southern dynasty.

Hope Hequembourg is a member of the influential Benton family of Jasper County. Her great-great-grandfather helped establish the Bank of Monticello in 1892. Her great-great-uncle Col. Sam Tate founded Georgia Marble Co. Her ancestor, Abba Benton, whose remains lie beneath a white marble monument in a family plot just off the Hequembourg's back porch, acquired the plantation during Georgia's second land lottery, in 1807.

Local lore holds that the land was a "32-mule farm," meaning that 32 sharecropper families lived and worked there, each one owning a single mule. Before that as many as 49 slaves worked the land, according to historical records on ancestry.com. Over the years, the land has produced peaches, pecans and cotton, and was once the site of a 70-cow dairy. Today the original glass and wood display case from the Benton Supply Co. in Monticello, built in 1903, occupies space among the rusting stanchions in the old dairy barn behind the main house.

After the Hequembourgs fell in love with each other, they fell in love with the plantation. They married in the front yard under the pecan trees in 1997 and moved into the Greek Revival house, which had been empty for a quarter century save a flock of peacocks, who still roam the property.

Last October the couple completed a 6-month renovation of the house, retaining its authenticity but adding 21st-century flourishes, such as closets and an indoor kitchen. In one room, patches of wallpaper from the mid-1800s remain. Where the paper ends, Aaron extended the patterns of meandering ivy and baroque line work by hand-painting them on the walls. It's indicative of the couple's playful creativity and their reverence for the past.

"The next generation of folk art"

When Aaron and Hope first moved into the house, neighboring farmers encouraged them to burn down the abandoned, kudzu-covered buildings on their land to make way for more pasture, which is leased to local cattle farmers. But Hequembourg had other plans. He began pulling apart the structures, layer by layer, and grew enchanted by them. He admired the work that went into crafting the hand-hewn boards made before the machine age, and marveled at how sturdy the buildings were to have survived weather and the threat of fire for 150 years.

"I've taken down nearly three sides of some of these structures before I can get the roof to fall," he said.

Once he moved to the farm, Hequembourg's art began to shift away from the abstract engravings that defined his work in Atlanta to figurative pieces with a Southern folk art sensibility. For the past five years, he has created artwork that begins with a piece of salvaged wood onto which he engraves and then paints images drawn from old photographs. Sometimes objects such as book pages, medicine bottles, clocks and other items found on the farm are added to the finished piece. He sells his work for $225-$625 through commissions and at arts and craft shows around the Southeast instead of through galleries, which typically get up to 50 percent of the proceeds.

"Aaron's art is what I consider the next generation of folk art," said Steve Slotin, founder of Folk Fest, an annual folk art show in Norcross that Hequembourg has participated in the last three years. "It has an appeal to the common folks who can remember warm thoughts of the best qualities of the Southern lifestyle."

As Hequembourg's reputation as an artist grew, so did his reputation as a scavenger among his neighbors. Farmers began postponing the demolition of their own abandoned buildings so Aaron could take what he wanted before they were razed.

"This farm, it's a special opportunity for us and a special place for us," Hequembourg said. "But I've been on other farms taking down houses and ... we're not all that special. There must be a handful of big-tract farms like this in most of the counties in Georgia."

Finding history

During the creative process, Hequembourg's thoughts eventually turn from the source of the materials to the people in the old photographs. Most collectors of his work are attracted to the hard, sometimes vacant looks in the faces, he said.

"My work is as much about the appeal of old photographs as they are about who was in them. You'll go through a drawer and you'll see an old picture, and you've lost the generation that remembers who it was. Even if [the person is] not related to you ... you'll stop and look at it and it makes you take pause."

Despite the hardship of life on the plantation, Hequembourg likes to imagine the moments of happiness that sustained the lives of those who inhabited the structures he dismantles.

"I sometimes picture children living and growing up [here]," he says. "When this house and this yard was their whole world."

Occasionally he finds doorjambs where children's heights were recorded in pencil, sometimes with names and ages. Beneath some houses, he's unearthed strange collections of things lost, hidden or forgotten by children. "I've found marbles, ... fragments of cloth dolls that dissolve in your hands and medicine bottles ... that are lined up on a beam, perhaps from playing house, or collected according to height."

But some look at the history of the plantation and see the sorrow and hardship in its legacy of slavery, a constant reminder of which is directly behind his house: a slave cemetery where the graves are crudely marked with hand-wrought gravestones and rocks that commemorate the lives of those who worked the land.

"I still don't believe I understand completely how hard life was in those different periods of time," said Hequembourg, "but to those people it was just life."

A story to be told

Hequembourg risks more than poison ivy, copperhead bites and pulled muscles for his art. As a Midwesterner, he is an outsider sleuthing through artifacts from the social strata of the old South. Standing back from a finished piece, he is often trepidatious about how it will be received in his adopted region, particularly among African-American art collectors.

"It's not my right. It's not my history, but sometimes my work speaks to someone else's history in its own way," he says.

And in the process, Hequembourg has inspired area farmers to appreciate their own abandoned buildings and the refuse from past generations that fill them. They've begun routinely dropping off items they think Hequembourg can use in his art. Some afternoons when he comes down to the Quonset hut that serves as his studio, he'll find cracked and dusty doors, window frames, moldings or old books deposited outside. Locals have come to know that Aaron will make good use of farmhouse scraps that would otherwise be burned or hauled to the dump. They know there is a story to be told from old objects. And that sometimes it takes an outsider to tell it.