While she’s drawn, painted, created stained-glass, and fired ceramics over the years, local resident Penny Logan’s newest artistic interest—carving whimsical faces in wood—has brought her to a new level of exposure as the most recent member of the Fine Line Art Gallery co-op.
“I mostly sold my work through people at work, but then I decided I should try something new,” Logan said Saturday at the gallery on Mowat Avenue.
Logan, whose work is now on display there, said she currently works exclusively with cottonwood bark when carving.
“It’s nice and soft—it’s easy to carve,” she noted. “But it also crumbles. I carve away and see what I find.
“You just don’t know what is going to happen. It’s a little trickier [than hard wood],” Logan added, noting that sometimes a nose may fall off and the piece ruined, while at other times, the cracks in the bark can serve as distinctive “scars” in the wooden faces.
“There’s such a feeling of satisfaction when a piece is done. It’s the unpredictability that makes it worth it,” Logan remarked, noting she has tried to carve cottonwood bark with a specific face in mind, but wasn’t satisfied when she ended up seeing her original vision realized before her.
Logan said she started carving cottonwood bark steadily only last fall and has since made 23, including a small one she just finished Saturday during her first shift at the Fine Line.
“You get focused on it, and do it for four or five hours without realizing how much time has passed,” she noted.
On average, her carvings are done in three sittings. During the first, she’ll “block out” where the face is on the wood.
She’ll then “pick out” the features during a second sitting and add the final details to it during the third. “That’s when the personality really comes out,” said Logan, who will use some paint for the eyes and hair on the finished product.
“Every time you carve another one, you get a little more detailed,” she remarked.
Logan said she first started dabbling in woodworking in 2002 after she attended a workshop led by Wally Golab, who also has his wood carvings on display at the Fine Line Art Gallery.
“Once I did that, I knew I wanted to work in wood,” she remarked.
After that, she briefly attended some meetings of the Whiskey Jack Carvers, but stopped after a friend she had been going with to their meetings got ill.
“That’s where I got the cottonwood bark for my first one,” she noted.
But Logan said her carving output increased greatly only last year after she added a workshop to her home—giving her a space specifically for her craft.
“It makes a big difference,” she remarked, noting she spends a good deal of her spare time there now when she’s not working full-time as an accountant in the Woodlands department at Abitibi-Consolidated here.
While she’s excited about having her wood carvings at the Fine Line Art Gallery, Logan admitted that, just as she went from mediums like oil painting to ceramics to woodworking, works of a totally different sort may be adorning the wall of the gallery in the future.
“A year from now, I could be doing something totally different,” she laughed.
Fort Frances Times
Local News from Across the Rainy River District
