Carving a Slice of Desert Life : Self-Taught Artist’s Work Mirrors Background
Gene Woods carves figures of the toughest desert animals he knows from the toughest desert wood he can find. But if he ever did a self-portrait, the stubborn ironwood from which he whittles eagle talons wouldn’t provide a strong enough image for the 59-year-old desert native.
Or maybe it would.
The same man who says his favorite subjects are “mostly predators” can fine-tune a feather until it’s as close to transparent as wood can get. He has nursed injured birds back to health and says he wishes most of all that he could carve a deer.
From ironwood logs that most carvers would pass over for softer pine or mesquite, he has conjured up swooping eagles and unmoving Indians in full headdress. He has built off-road racing cars from plywood and fiberglass--and raced in them. He once tried to carve a nude woman but says he got embarrassed and threw the half-shaped wood in the fireplace. “I’m not one of those fancy artists,” Woods said, his voice dry and flat. “I just do ‘em.”
Even Woods’ carefully combed silver hair has a sculpted look, resting over a face colored hickory from a lifetime under the sun. From his checked shirt to his leather boots, he looks as much a product of the West as the figures he carves from memory.
“I never studied it,” he said. “It’s in your mind. The grain of the wood will guide you through it kind of like a map.”
But with ironwood, the map itself can be hard to find, so the garage workshop behind Woods’ Jacumba home near the Mexican border resembles a machine shop more than a craftsman’s studio. With his two dogs and a duck looking on, Woods uses an imposing array of electric saws, chain saws and chisels to cut his rock-hard material down to size.
Standing out among the piles of metal machine parts are a motorbike belonging to one of Woods’ grandsons, a can of Lemon Pledge that Woods calls the best product ever made for polishing wood sculpture, and a straw hat that carries a beer ad on the brim.
“I usually have a Budweiser out here, too,” Woods said. “You’re missin’ it.”
It takes Woods up to four months to complete an ironwood sculpture, and he carved all of eight last year. Henry Wolcott, who has sold most of Woods’ carvings in the last few months from his Alpine Frontier Gallery, said Woods can barely keep up with the demand for good Western-style art.
That doesn’t bother Woods much. Though he says he likes the 100-degree temperatures of summertime Jacumba, he restricts most of his work to the winter and refuses to rush himself.
“I don’t do it for the profit, I do it for myself,” Woods said. “You don’t finish every one you start. That’s how you keep the fire going in the winter--the mistakes.”
Woods sets high standards for his work, but he sometimes comes up against standards that are even higher. Though his carvings have won awards from fellow woodcarvers, he once lost a blue ribbon because he had overlapped an eagle’s wing-tip feathers from front to back instead of back to front.
“You’d be surprised at the people who count the feathers,” he said.
Woods started carving as a child growing up during the Depression on a ranch in Lyons Valley near Tecate. He and his brothers picked up the knack of carving their own toys from their father.
“The old man never taught you anything,” Woods said. “You had to watch him. He was a pretty sharp guy. He could do just about anything he wanted.”
Woods has done a few different things himself. During World War II he saddle-broke mules at Army camps in Colorado and Oklahoma. He helped lay some of the first long-distance telephone lines and television cables and worked for AT&T; for 37 years before retiring in 1982. He always opted for outdoor duties, and the company moved him all around the western half of the country.
“I liked New Mexico best,” he said. “Less people. More country.”
Woods competed in off-road racing until it became a corporate-sponsored sport in the mid-’70s, and a snapshot on the wall of his workshop shows him passing 1985 Indy 500 champion Rick Mears in a 1975 race in Carlsbad.
A year later he started whittling hood ornaments from wax, but realized that carving larger figures from wood would present a bigger challenge. The first time he offered one for sale, one of his daughters secretly bought it for $75. Now, most of his works fetch $300 to $500, sold in the Alpine gallery alongside sand-cast sculptures of Western scenes and a leather bas-relief of John Wayne.
But Woods insists it’s not the challenge or the money that keeps him whittling away. He just likes finishing what he starts, and he likes to do work that relaxes him.
“Whether you’re buildin’ a house or whittlin’ a bird, it’s the same thing,” he said. “Do what pleases you. If you don’t please yourself, you don’t do a good job.”
