About the artist

Bryan's whittling journey started in a cold canyon in New Mexico when he was thirteen. He was at summer camp and wanted a better place to live than the boy's dorm, so he built a cabin with only his axe and saw. Similarly, because the cafeteria food was less then desirable to him, he began to hunt rabbits with spears cut from saplings. It didn't take long for the other kids to follow suit and make their own spears as well. Soon, carving them beautifully became a symbol of skill and status.

 

Not long after that, Bryan was carving all sorts of things. Then the day came that his knife bit into a wood that he had to hike miles to find. He began to carve a dagger and as he spiraled the hilt he saw beautiful purple underneath. He carved a jewel in the pommel and admired how it faded from purple to ruby red. He had discovered red cedar. A kid saw Bryan working on the dagger and asked to buy it for twenty dollars. Bryan's carving career had begun.

 

Throughout the years Bryan carved very little. It was only when he needed something like a hammer handle or a spur of the moment gift that he would use his whittling skill with a simple box cutter to make little odds and ends. Once, he even carved the inner workings of a toilet using square pegs and a pine knot handle.

 

He knew he had the ability to carve, and it gave him great pleasure, but life has its ways of taking up one's time.

 

Marriage and three kids later, his thirtieth birthday around the corner, Bryan grabbed a scrap of cedar and carved the most beautiful little spoon anyone in the family had ever seen. The spoon was durable and lightweight. It had the spirit of the high mountain desert and was hand carved of rare material, but Bryan just oiled it, set it aside, and proceeded to carve another one...then yet another. He carved hundreds of spoons and then decided to carve busts, flutes, large statues, intricate chip carvings and thousand-pound boulders. With the steady flick of his blade his imagination takes on physical form.

 

Now, with his full-fledged love of carving embedded within him, he fully intends to make this his life's work and passion and he aspires to one day be ranked among the greatest carvers in the world.