See How Chainsaw Art Keeps This Guy Out of Trouble | Short Film Showcase

[Applause] There's a lot of people out there that call themselves artists, but there's no bad art. The beauty's in the eye of the beholder. [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] Chainsaw carving has a certain element of theater to it; it's kind of a performance art. 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 Quinault, which is over on the Olympic Peninsula, which is logging country, which is wood and chainsaws. Growing up with that whole logger culture, I bought this place. It was a functioning sawmill, and then it kind of came a hillbilly research and development artistic center. [Laughter] [Music] 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.

[Music] 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. [Music] I'm a second generation to my mom and her brothers, who were some of the first people to do it. You know, I grew up with it and became a carver because it seemed normal.

[Music] And then I started doing the chainsaw carving competitions, so I threw myself into them when I was in my early twenties and got involved with anything to do with this. Any show that came up, that's what I would do and go. I wheel a deal; 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 anymore. [Laughter]

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 right part.

It's, uh, hard to make a living at it, raise kids, and pay your bills. Anyone's an artist; I mean, 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 at it.

[Music] The best way to make a good living out of it is to have a wife with a good job. [Music] I wonder what it is; it's probably something that could pass us through their digestive system, and now we can mock them, I'm guessing. [Music] You