By Dan E. Way

dway@heraldsun.com; 918-1035

CHAPEL HILL — For five weeks each year, Debbie Meyer and husband, Eric Brantley, open their wallets and home to a small army of artisans who create larger-than-life spectacles in a gee-whiz event that blankets their 17-acre horse farm and draws hundreds of devotees and crowds of the curious.

“It’s amazing because our place gets transformed. I come home from work every day and there’s another piece for five weeks,” Meyer said. “There’s art everywhere you look — in trees, in the house, on the roof, in the pond, along the driveway, everywhere you look. It’s absolutely amazing.”

Meyer, whose real job is at Duke University working with a scientist who is one of the editors of The Journal of Biological Chemistry, finds herself plugging away rather exhaustively at home leading up to this annual arts extravaganza, known as Come Out and Play and now in its eighth rendition. Its opening party kicks off on Saturday.

“I love doing it. It’s a lot of work. I’ve been shopping for food for five months,” Meyer said. Sharing the landscape with 47 sculptors for five weeks while providing free food and drinks to visitors seems, to her, like a natural way to give back to the community, and especially to the creative class that keeps life zesty.

“They’re almost all local, Chatham, Orange and Durham,” Meyer said of those who exhibit at her JimJin Farm between Carrboro and Pittsboro.

Because there are so few places for sculptors to exhibit large pieces, Come Out and Play “provides artists a place to get a start,” she said. “Several of the artists have gone on to do bigger and better things, but this is the show they started in, and it gave them a platform to jump off of.”

Some can get a jump into a ready market of buyers at the show.

“We had almost 800 people come last year. All year long my husband and I run into people saying, ‘We’ve been to your house,’ ” Meyer said.

Equally important to the exposure is the “gallery” arrangement.

“Anything that the artists sell, they get to keep all the money. It’s commission free,” Meyer said.

There’s a definite learning aspect, as well.

“For a lot of people, it’s the first time their kids have been to an art show. They’re getting exposed to it in a really fun setting,” with horses roaming about a backdrop of bucolic fields and forest, Meyer said. “They come out and there’s a pond, and they just get to run around and have a great time while they’re looking at the art. They don’t have to be quiet.”

Forrest C. Greenslade, president of the Chatham Artists Guild and one of the artists who displays his work at the show, says it can be equally educational for the sculptors.

“Come Out and Play is a really enjoyable opportunity to see art work from a number of area sculptors, and just spend time talking with them,” Greenslade said. “Come Out and Play is a valuable gift to our cultural community. I love to exchange ideas and techniques with the other artists who come out to play.”

Meyer, who confesses with a cheerful laugh to being a bit challenged in the arts skills department, said she is always intrigued by what shows up on her property, from a full-scale tent house to enormous nudes to a petroleum tank suspended from a tripod that required a Bobcat to create.

Then there are the thought-provoking works of Chapel Hill’s Hunter Levinsohn.

“She always has amazing pieces that are just very alternative,” Meyer said. “She’s always making political statements.”

This year, Levinsohn crafted a colossal sculpture that has serpents slithering from either end. It is made of mesh and shredded editions of the New York Times, prominently displaying a photo of Ruth Madoff, wife of the billionaire Ponzi scheme ripoff architect Bernard Madoff.

“You see, it’s about snakes on Wall Street,” Meyer said. “It was just a nod to all the crap that’s going on.”