There's a lot of people out there that call themselves artists, but there's no bad art.
Beauty's in the eye of the beholder.
Chainsaw carving has a certain element of theater to it.
It's kind of a performance art.
If you're creating a sculpture in a short enough period of time, it's entertaining.
So I moved here when I was 16 from Lake Wenal, which is over on the Olympic Peninsula, which
is logging country, which is wood and chainsaws and growing up with that whole logger culture.
I bought this place that was a functioning sawmill, and then it kind of came a hillbilly
research and development artistic center.
I'm a voracious reader.
Sometimes I'll read a book and then I'll go out and carve the characters out of my head.
The chainsaw has such a, you know, Texas massacre, tearing down the rainforest, destruction
type of tool.
Well, here you are creating a thing of beauty with a tool that's known for, you know, making
bone and flesh into a fine red mist.
I'm a second generation to my mom and her brothers, who were some of the first people
to do it and, you know, grew up with it and became a carver because it seemed normal.
And then I started doing the chainsaw carving competitions.
So I threw myself into them when I was in my early 20s and got involved with anything
to do with this.
Any show that came up, that's what I would do and go.
Entrepreneurship is the last refuge of the troublemaker.
What I like to do is I find out how much money you have and then I don't charge a pinball.
The competitions, of course, are where everyone gathers together.
A lot of us are drifters or itinerant or people like me that live on back roads.
A handful of us, we had a guild and a club and we created a nucleus of a group of chainsaw
carvers dedicated to making the art form more well-known and respected, which is the hardest
part.
It's hard to make a living out of it and raise kids and pay your bills.
Anyone's an artist and the kids start out as artists until someone tells them they're
not.
And if someone has enough guts to get alongside the road and set up and do it, it takes a
tremendous amount of courage to make something and then go out and try to sell it.
There's a lot of different ways of making a living out of it.
The best way to make a good living out of it is to have a wife with a good job.
It's probably something that could pass us through their digestive system and that we
can mock them.
I'm guessing.
