What some are calling an unfortunate event and others are calling a fortuitous twist of fate occurred at the Boothbay dump one day in mid-June.

Local physician and artist Andre Benoit happened to be there looking for discarded cabinet drawers that day. When a pickup truck backed up to the junk wood pile and two men started throwing pieces of wood of all shapes and sizes on to the pile, he kept an eye out for drawers.

One of the men threw a drawer on the pile and Benoit noticed that there was something painted on it.

“At first glance I thought the painting was kids' stuff,” Benoit said.

As more pieces of plywood and particle board were thrown into the pile, Benoit began to realize that the paintings on them were far from kids’ stuff.

“I asked him if I could have the drawer,” Benoit said. Then as they unloaded more, he asked if he could have several more of the pieces.

He snapped some photos of the pieces he had taken and showed them to Gold/Smith Gallery owners Karen and John Vander. The Vanders immediately recognized the talent behind the paintings that they called “outsider art.”

Karen Vander came into the Boothbay Register offices and told Editor Kevin Burnham that he should send a reporter, with a camera, to the dump.

Rena Smith, assistant foreman at the Boothbay Region Refuse Disposal District, was there that fateful day, overseeing the wood pile.

“Two men brought four or five truckloads of paintings on boards,” Smith said. Most of them, by now, were buried deep in the 20-foot-high pile. Smith wasn't allowing anyone to climb up the pile to look for discarded paintings, but after some shameless begging, she consented to pulling out a few pieces that were sticking out of the pile. Thus, several pieces of outsider art were saved from being demolished by the excavator that plows into the pile several times daily.

Since that day in June, a lot has been learned about the “dump artist.”

Virginia Green, a dealer of modern and contemporary art, had sold her home in Boothbay. There was a shed on the property where she had been storing nearly 100 paintings, on all manner of flotsam and jetsam, done by Douglas Desjardins.

She had called Desjardins, who was living in New Hampshire, and asked him to move them.

He arrived with a van, and as he was loading it, he noticed a lot of what he thought was mouse and rat droppings. Knowing that they carried the possibility of disease, he decided to discard most of the paintings.

Green called her friend and neighbor, Tom Fogarty, and asked for his help in loading the paintings onto his pickup truck to haul to the dump.

Fogarty made four trips to the dump that day.

Desjardins now regrets having thrown so many away.

“After I dumped most of it I realized that the droppings weren't from rats or mice, but from squirrels,” he said. “And all the ones I kept, and scrubbed down, I've sold.”

Desjardins is a nationally recognized “outsider artist.”

Outsider art is a term used for art that is outside the mainstream. John Vander defines an outsider artist as “someone who is not working in, or been trained in the formal tradition.”

John Wissemann, whose work is being shown at Gold/Smith Gallery now, called it “sophisticated primitive.”

Desjardins, who lives in Lee, New Hampshire, is not a typical outsider artist. He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Plymouth State College in the 90s.

He was in Manhattan one day in 2004 or 2005 peddling some of his paintings when Green's daughter, Rebecca Sgan-Cohen, happened to be walking by.

“My daughter saw him selling his paintings out of a van in SoHo,” Green said. “She called me and said there was someone selling his art on a street and that I should come see it.”

Green saw it and liked it.

“I bought a couple pieces,” she said. “Then I tracked him down a few years later and bought a lot of paintings from him.”

She featured his work at the 2009 Outsider Art Fair in Manhattan. Green and Desjardins were mentioned in a New York Times review of the show.

The article described his art as “exuberant, often tropical paintings, executed on found scraps of plywood.”

“People buy it because they love it,” Green said of Desjardins’ art. “You don't buy an outsider art piece because it's a Picasso, an investment. You look at it and you feel good.”

GALLERYESSTUDIO in Warren, Rhode Island showed Desjardins’ art in 2008. On the gallery's website he was described as “wildly carefree, incredibly inventive and ridiculously resourceful.”

Karen Vander described his art this way: “His work is painterly and full of joy. He is a cosmic artist with a glorious vision of the better, happier side of life. If his paintings make you feel good, just know you’re not alone. That smile on your face is shared by everyone fortunate enough to own one of his paintings.”

What began as an unfortunate incident at the dump one day in June ends on a high note.

“The happy ending to this story is that he will be having an exhibit at Gold/Smith Gallery in September,” Vander said.

The exhibit featuring Desjardins’ outsider art will run from Sept. 4 through Oct. 15, with an opening for the artist on Sept. 5.

See more of Desjardins’ work at www.duggart.com.