Wednesday, July 11, 2007 1:10 AM CDT
Carving out a living
Craftsman hits on the right combination of his skill and Mother Nature's raw material
By TONY REID, Staff Writer
treid@herald-review.com
You never know where art will rear its bony head.
Professional horn carver Mike Brown finds it gleaming back at him atop the white rictus of a deer skull, framed by a set of atypical antlers where the sides don’t match. “There is people that will kill to get hold of these things,” he says, no pun intended.
At least they do in Brown’s world of rustic artisans, who peddle their wares at gun shows and specialist sales all over the country, horning in on the naturalistic craze to accessorize your home — or yourself — with crafts that never saw a factory.
Brown will take those antlers, minus most of the skull, and turn them into a lamp that looks like a slice of the forest floor: the antlers curving their atypical way up either side of a bark-covered sassafras branch that holds the light. The wood base of the lamp will be decorated with real leaf litter, and then little morels — each wrought painstakingly from horn — will poke through here and there. The lamp pull will be an acorn, carved from horn and colored realistically by being steeped in cold tea.
The Teutopolis carver’s full repertoire includes wooden canes topped with horn-carved Indian heads, feathers and other designs. His horn knife handles, adorned with similar images or whatever else trips your noble savage trigger, also are superb examples of form following function, the horn’s graceful curves a gentle embrace of the hand.
He knows his marketplace, too. One knife has a pitted, broad blade that looks old and is old — crafted from one-half of a set of antique sheep shears. It’s aimed at the primitive camping, frontier-recreation types who’d look on chromed steel as glinting blasphemy.
“The primitive people won’t buy shiny knives, no matter how nice the carved handle,” said Brown, 56. “Because on the real frontier, they didn’t have anything like that.”
But he’s got glittery knives, too, for the less fastidious, and knocks out a steady stream of carved jewelry, horn knife stands (the perfect complement for your deer-horned knife), and he even offers little feather, turkey, deer, Indian head and tomahawk lamp chain pulls, all fashioned from the always-versatile horn.
Brown has had a flair for art since he was a child but has no idea where the talent came from. He just found it coursing through his fingers like an enriched blood supply, but his artistic pulse wasn’t quickened much by indifferent high school teachers, for whom art as a career was no part of their philosophy.
They packed him off to be a dental technician when he was 16. Eventually extracting himself from that, he would bounce around among jobs ranging from railroad work to laboring in a quarry.
For a while, he did well as an itinerant antiques dealer before the markets got saturated with well-heeled seniors supplementing their retirements with merchandise hauled around in motor homes.
“So there I am, an older guy with no college education,” he said, recalling his dilemma. “I can’t do a lot of the jobs I used to do when I was younger, and I need something I can do which doesn’t have much competition and the Chinese don’t do; and then I finally found it: horn carving.”
He started in earnest about three years ago and discovered he was not only good at it, but fast, too. Armed with a laserlike focus and a Dremel tool in warp drive, the transmutation of horn into art happens at giddy speeds. “How about 26 knives in one day?” says Brown. “I can do it.”
Home-based production is enhanced by the assistance of his great-nephew Kyle Thornton, who, at the tender age of 12, is an accomplished lamp cord threader and wirer.
“One day, he asked me if I could do it, and I said, ‘I’ll try,’ and I just ended up pretty good at it,” Kyle said. He’s even branching out into Dremel maintenance but isn’t so sure about tackling carving: “I don’t know about that,” he says cautiously. “My great-uncle has got a lot of talent.”
He’s also got a sharp set of eyes and has noticed his stuff selling for far more than he ever got for it in places such as that ultimate happy hunting ground, eBay. With Kyle as technical adviser, Brown is contemplating his own sales foray into cyberspace and says selling online would free him from the show circuit and give the fastest carver in the West the opportunity to slow down and deep-mine his creativity.
“How about these?” he says, showing off pictures of things he’s done when there has been more time: One is an elaborate miniature turkey carved from horn, the other a largemouth bass hooked on a lure, its iridescent body fluidly alive and kicking.
“If I could just get more time to carve and not have to worry so much about the selling, I could blow people’s minds,” Brown said.
Contact Tony Reid at treid@herald-review.com or 421-7977.
Add your comments
Not already registered?
Then click Here.
Comment policy:
JG-TC.com encourages readers to engage in civil conversation with their neighbors. Comments that are submitted are not posted to the site immediately. They go into a queue to be moderated and may take several hours to be reviewed. Comments posted on Saturday may not be reviewed until Sunday afternoon.
In order to keep the page a set width, long lines (mostly long links) will be chopped. Try putting spaces in your links or consider using tinyurl.com to make a smaller link that you can include.
We will never edit or alter your comments, but we do reserve the right to remove comments that violate our code of conduct.
No comment may contain:
* Potentially libelous statements; such as accusing somebody of a crime, defamation of character, or statements that can harm somebody's reputation.
* Obscene, explicit, or racist language.
* Personal attacks, insults, threats, harassment or inciting violence.
* Commercial product promotions.
If you have any questions, please contact our moderator.
|
|
CLICK TO ENLARGE
|
1 cav wrote on Jul 11, 2007 10:51 AM: