Piedmont Wood Carvers share skills and stories
On a recent Tuesday, Gene Rivard gently presses a small knife and its seriously sharp blade into a blond wooden plank where he’s making an acanthus leaf appear. Said to be symbolic of immortality and resurrection, the flowering plant’s glossy, spiked leaves have inspired artists since fifth-century BCE Greece.
In Greenville a few millennia later, the onetime music professor recreates what is arguably the Western world’s most ubiquitous ornament. Tonight, he’s perched on a stool in the classroom at the rear of Woodcraft of Greenville, a store just off Woodruff Road.
“It’s a very quiet thing and you’re making something beautiful and you’re taking your time,” says Gene, a six-year member of the Piedmont Wood Carvers.
Lila Gilmer soon arrives. She took up woodcarving when she was a child in Alaska’s Matanuska Valley, near Anchorage, and moved to Simpsonville the week after the group started in 1988. Here she proffers a photo of a life-sized leopard she’d carved, its mouth is wide open, its teeth bared for the kill. “If I put my hand in there,” a visitor asks, “what would happen?” “You’d get bored in a hurry,” she says.
Earlier, when Gene mentioned that he also paints and once played trumpet in a symphony orchestra back in his native Minneapolis, the visitor asked where he got all his talent. “I think I won it on a game show,” he cracks. To which Gilmer chimes in: “There’s another factor about woodcarvers: We’re all smart alecks.”
Indeed, a sharp bunch, these folks.
Etching Memories and Miniatures
The club’s roughly 50 members carve everything from centuries-old iconography to lifelike miniatures and from four-inch gnomes to “whimsy houses” (think Shrek’s tree).
“I would say that woodcarvers are probably the most giving, the friendliest group,” says Dave Fisher, a retired IT guy who moved to Greenville in 1999 from Columbus, Ohio, and joined the club in 2011. “They trip over each other to share our methods and our techniques and our tools and our patterns. This club is really big on mentoring.”
And giving.
Three weeks earlier, Rivard donated a stunning gilded 11-by-14 carving of Christ to a church in Ecuador, where his son, Paul, an Anglican priest, serves indigenous Kichwa. And Gilmer shows a picture of a rabbit sculpture that she instructs children as young as 5 to carve from Ivory soap with a popsicle stick.
Sharon Haddox, who moved to Simpsonville in 1984 and is now in her second year as president of the group she joined in 2012, says she’s increasingly focused on bringing their work to the public—library show-and-tells, festivals, and the like—to attract members.
“If you get one person that’s interested to come by, it’s worth it,” she says.
That’s because the hobby is as easy to pick up as any of its many different tools. (Quick note: Woodworking involves power tools. Woodcarvers don’t build furniture.)
“You should come and try it,” says Fisher, whose previous hobby, incidentally, was clowning around as the Baseball Guy over nine seasons with the Greenville Drive. “I always say, ‘If you can carve a potato, you can carve wood.’”
Piedmont Wood Carvers presents 34th Annual Showcase of Sculptures and Designs in Wood
Theme: Farming and Rural Living
Saturday, Nov. 16, noon–4p.m.; on-site carving competition at 1:30p.m.
Simpsonville Senior Center, 310 W. Curtis St., Simpsonville
For more information, visit piedmontwoodcarvers.com
Weekly Gatherings
- 5–7 pm Tuesdays, Woodcraft of Greenville store, 1327 Miller Rd., Unit K, Greenville
- 1–7 pm Wednesday club carve-ins in the Artisan Room at the Mauldin Cultural Center, 101 E. Butler Rd., Mauldin
