SEQUIM — Ann Grover sees things in plain hunks of wood, and she’s not afraid to talk about it.
Her daughter pulled a charred piece out of a campfire pit, for example, and Grover saw in it a black bear. Then, using skills she’s polished over the past five years, she turned the piece into the beast’s face, complete with snarly teeth.
Grover’s bear will be among a forest of creatures and other images — alongside artists’ demonstrations — at the Pacific Northwest Wood Artisans Show and Sale this Saturday at the Sequim Elks Lodge.
One of the new attractions this year is pyrography, the burning of details into wood. Attendees will have the chance to try it along with expert pyrographer Jennifer Phillips, who’s coming from Monroe to the Sequim show to demonstrate the techniques.
Artists such as Phillips can infuse their wood with such intricate detail, Grover said, that the finished work looks like a photograph.
Chris Hansen of Sequim is another star of Saturday’s show. As featured artist, he’ll display about 25 of his intarsia creations — pictures made of various types of wood — that range from a cowboy on a horse to a rural landscape to scenes of birds and other animals.
Some of the show’s participants uncovered their talents for visualizing — and then realizing — images in wood after whole careers that had nothing to do with art.
Before retiring from management at AT&T, “I didn’t do a lick of anything,” with wood or tools, Grover said. “But I wish I would have carved that time out, because it’s such a healer of stress. It uses a different part of your brain.”
Out in Grover’s garage, she picked up a recently acquired hunk of wood that, to the uninitiated, would look like just that — a hunk of wood.
“This is mesquite,” she said. “It has great lines. It will probably become an abstract sculpture.”
Soon after she moved to Sequim, friends got Grover interested in driftwood sculpture. But they preferred the LuRon method of burnishing the wood, never carving it.
“That didn’t include horsing around with it in any way,” Grover said.
So she and four other women branched out to form the Pacific Northwest Wood Artisans. The group meets every month and welcomes newcomers and artists of all levels.
“The best part of the meetings,” Grover said, “is seeing what people did — and what didn’t work.”
Hansen, like Grover, decided to do something completely different after he retired from his job as fleet manager for the University of California at Santa Cruz. Entranced by intarsia, he built a home studio and now displays his work at Wild Birds Unlimited, 275953 U.S. Highway 101 in Gardiner.
This art form “is not real difficult if you’ve got a whole lot of patience,” he said. “You can’t be thinking about anything else” while wielding those power tools on your wooden canvas.
Also like Grover, Hansen has cultivated the ability to visualize whole scenes in pieces of wood. He’s been refining that ability for nearly a decade now and will answer questions about intarsia during Saturday’s show.
Also on display: Grover’s pelican and long-bearded man made from two cypress “knees” from the swamps of Florida. These are the parts of the tree that protrude from the roots, and Grover finds them ideal for long-faced characters.
Upon receiving a particular knee, she said, “I just saw that head of the pelican in it.”
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley reporter Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
