Stacked firewood art

I mentioned at one point in a Facebook post about this passion of some people to make art with firewood. I recently discovered one of these true artists. He is Gary Tillman, an 84-year-old rancher from Monarch, Montana. But he doesn't consider himself an artist and says he makes these beautiful firewood mosaics for the enjoyment of his grandchildren.

Ephemeral paintings with firewood

Gary started stacking wood representing various animals, birds, mountains, trees 7 years ago. He cuts his own wood from the forest near his farm. He uses the color of different wood species to form the images. He says he finds every color in the forest except black. Unfortunately, there are no ebony trees in the nearby forest, so he has to make do without black or color the wood when he needs dark color.

Tillman's wife, Marilyn, says there's a lot of color in cut wood, but people don't notice it. Her husband is someone who sees beauty in all kinds of things. Artistic firewood mosaics are already a Tillman family tradition. The first mosaic was made 7 years ago and since then, every year, another one is made because the previous one is consumed in winter.

Although he puts some effort into making them, Gary sees his work more as a personal diversion and recreation than an art form. In fact, he even turned down an offer to make such a permanent work in the plaza in front of the art museum in Great Falls, Montana. Tillman says he's even embarrassed by the attention people give him because he makes these works for his and his wife's enjoyment and to send photos of the woodpile to their grandchildren. Marilyn Tillman says they both like to admire the beautiful and interesting things on earth and that, fortunately, there are lots of them.

To create an artistic woodpile Tillman needs about 20 hours of actual labor. And that's not counting the time for sketching and cutting and sorting the wood by color. Almost all of his mosaics feature owls, the birds that inhabit the Little Belt Mountains forests where the farm is located.

The life of each work is less than a year. Each winter the firewood stacked with such skill and patience is consumed and in the spring a new, equally ephemeral project begins.

(source: womansday.com)