A native of South Louisiana and being an avid outdoorsman allowed me a chance to get “up close and personal” with many of the furry and the feathered friends of the forest.  I often found, rehabilitated, and raised some of the injured or abandoned.  This gave me insight into their feelings, personalities, and expressions. This later gave way to inspiration when I began to wood carve.

 

One of my favorites was a great horned owl. When I found him, he was a tiny puffball with legs and feet that looked too long for his body. He looked so funny, rocking back and forth, screeching his needs and wants to his new “daddy”. “Take me home and feed me”, he said. Later the school bus would stop and stay a minute after I got off. For all I had to do was to hold out my arm and he’d glide down to join me, perching there as the bus drove away. All too soon, “Ollie” left me to find his “true love” in the trees.

 

It would be a ninth grade final exam that would reunite us in spirit. I called upon Ollie’s facial expressions to please Mrs. Irene Tucker, my art teacher, at Woodlawn High School, in Baton Rouge, where I grew up. With my owl as my first sculpture, in clay, I scored an “A+”!

 

Some years later, while watching a movie, “The Dollmaker”, with Jane Fonda, the character that she played was forced to abandon her sculpture of Jesus to move on to a more lucrative project, leaving me wanting to finish what she’d started. As it happened, I also had a block of cherry wood about the same size as hers. As I stared at my future Jesus figure, I thought about the only chisel I had. It was the same chainsaw I used every day in my career as an arborist. I thought, “how am I going to carve a face, especially that face, with a chainsaw?”  I decided not to and instead I carved what I knew that I could an owl, my owl, Ollie. Before I finished carving it, in one afternoon, in my front yard, a passerby claimed it for her Cajun restaurant, allowing me to purchase a few, much needed tools and chisels. This would be the start of my new career as a woodcarver.

 

Because I sold my first piece, I was never allowed to compete or show as an amateur artist. By my seventh piece, I was asked to speak and demonstrate my skills by a Mississippi college art class instructor. She felt a self-taught artist would give her students confidence to challenge them to think “outside the box”.

 

After carving at different festivals I settled in as a demonstrating woodcarver at Baton Rouge’s annual “Fest-For-All” with the Baton Rouge Pelican Woodcarver’s Guild.  This would lead to my discovery by the Louisiana Department of Tourism. Two local artists and I were invited to represent Louisiana at the “Taste of the South Festival” in Stone Mountain, Ga.  I was honored to be invited back again the next year. Carving in front of 350,000 people, in a three day period, allowed me to stop taking orders that would take longer than a year to fill. The next year was the same. As I started to travel, my sculptures found homes in many different states. I still receive pictures of my pieces as they travel the country.

 

My most recent works can be seen at Iberville parish’s beautiful new welcome center, located in Grosse Tete, La. just 15 minutes west of Baton Rouge, on I-10, at exit 139 and highway 77. These pieces were commissioned by Iberville parish president, J. Mitchell Ourso Jr.  He wanted to honor one of the magnificent centuries old live oak trees on the property that died as a result of being struck by lightning.  Carving the sculptures from the trunk and branches of this tree reflect the culture and flavor of South Louisiana.

         

I did four carvings for the Tourist Center.  The first a 4 foot brown pelican (the state bird) on dock pilings. The second is the shape of Iberville parish.  One side shows towns in the parish and the other side reflects the parish’s diverse agricultural products and industry.  This sculpture is mounted on a beautiful metal stand shadowing the shape of the parish. The third is a crawfish that any self-respecting Cajun would love to have in his boiling pot and the fourth, (a time piece), a cross-section cut from the trunk that shows us changes in the parish over the past few centuries.  Thank you old tree!