“I worked on some of the masks over at the Field Museum. They pay attention to the restoration that has to be done to protect, the correct type of wood, and the grain running in the right direction. Right down to the scratches of the individual tools. If you look close and see little scratches because there were little nicks, then I do that to my chisels, so they look just like the other guy’s work.
I’ll show you here in just a second. Here, this is a piece I made to match exactly. This is a chair rail to go in a dining room about 3 and a half feet off the ground, so the chairs, when they move back, don’t damage the wall. They run this strip of wood in old Victorian houses – well, they needed four feet of it to look just like that. You can’t buy it anywhere, so I made it. See I take measurements, get the wood the exact size, thickness. Then I put points, where the very center of each zero is. So it looks hard, but there are steps you take to make it easy. So that’s what I do. I really enjoy it.
I mean, you get day-to-day passions. Writing a letter, I get very excited about something. But yeah, carving – I like most kinds of art. I draw on Monday mornings. On Friday mornings, for three hours, I do figure drawing, and I really enjoy that. I like it more and more all the time. I’m getting better. And it helps my wood carving. It’s like going to the gym. Absolutely have to exercise. I was thirty years out of school, and I hadn’t drawn, except to the precise drawings on my carvings. To get back to figure drawing was really, like a whole, I didn’t feel like I knew how to do that anymore! It was a very good thing to do.
When I was in school – I was in college getting a degree in art. I had an opportunity to work with a German woodcarver who was really fantastically good. I whittled and carved things when I was a kid, but I never thought about woodcarving. And as soon as I got my hands on the tools, I knew this was the kind of art I wanted to do.
I went to school in Minnesota, and another school in the same town hired this German-born Master Carver. Every four years, he would teach a class, one semester long, in woodcarving. That meant that anyone who went to the school would be able to take it. I found out about it and really wanted to take the class and had to pull strings. But I talked to all the right people – did it all just by the book – that was hard for me back then, to do everything just. But I did it, and I was really happy.
Then, I ended up working for the man for almost two years, but he was very hard. Had to be just so! And I wanted to watch him work on the face – he did almost all work for churches. So he did these crucifixes behind the altar. He would do these faces of dying Jesus that were so good, and I wanted to watch him work just once on one of these. He shouted at me to get back to work. I was just doing tracery, stupid stuff for him. And he said he worked ten years before he even got to watch the masters do that kind of work. So not to waste my time, just do what he told me to do – that was it for me.
Then, I worked for an American woodcarver. Then, I worked for a furniture maker who reproduced furniture – people primarily would buy a dining room set. They’d get a table, a buffet, and a breakfront, but only five chairs. And there would be no leaf for the table. So he would make the leaf for the table and maybe four chairs that matched their chairs exactly, right? And refinish everything. It would look like a brand new set, only three of the chairs were new, and it never had the leaves. So I would carve for him. And I worked for him for three years, and then I went to work for myself. I’ve done that for 25 years.
[Business] is very good. I got in a very bad car accident two years ago. I broke 8 bones, all at once. I’m okay, I walk with a limp. If I sit long, I can barely walk. But it’s just my knee and my hip, but that slowed me way down, and I still haven’t started taking commissions just from anybody since the accident. I still take very specific jobs that I want to do that don’t involve a heavy mallet because this arm is still – I got a plate in that arm, metal around there, and it’s still healing right there. They don’t want me using a mallet, so I carve shallow things.”
Excerpt may be edited for clarity.