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 farmer from Monarch, Montana. But he doesn't consider himself an artist and says he makes these wonderful 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 the wood himself from the forest near his farm. He uses the colour of different species of wood to form the images. He says he finds all colours in the forest except black. Unfortunately, there are no ebony trees in the nearby forest so he has to do without black or colour the wood when he needs dark colour.

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

Although he puts some effort into making them, Gary sees his work more as a personal diversion and relaxation than as an art form. In fact, he even turned down an offer to make such a work permanent 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 a lot of them.

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

The life of each work is less than a year. Each winter the firewood, so patiently and skilfully stacked, is consumed and in spring a new, equally ephemeral project begins.

(source: womansday.com)