Decatur man makes art from wood
HARRISTOWN, Ill. — You can’t go home again, but sometimes you can cut a tree down and resurrect it as a bear.
Such is the experience of Decatur chain saw carver Jesse Beeson. He spent a lot of years growing up at the former Harristown Depot Amish furniture store, which has been closed since 2006. When Beeson heard it was reopening as Harristown Depot Antiques, he called up and asked if he could sell some of his log carvings there.
John Willis, one of the new owners, was more than happy to get a call from Beeson, who also makes a living trimming trees. Willis told him there was a more than 30-foot oak out front that was brushing power lines and needed to be chopped down; just the job for a man who knows his way around saws.
The tree, however, turned out to be one Beeson had planted with his late father, Paul, in 1986 and had a root ball sunk deep in emotional memory. Cutting it down would be like taking a metaphorical ax to family history.
“So then we talked and stuff, and I said, `Well, how about carving it into something?”’ Willis said. “He said, `Yeah, I could do that.”’
Beeson arrived recently to reshape the past and was backed up by his able assistant and wife, Tiffany, and very busy assistant and 15-month-old son, Kaydin. His other son, Kyle, 9, was in school but there in spirit: He got an electric chain saw for Christmas and had spent part of the Yule season carving logs in the garage with his dad while cooking steaks on a propane heater, a special treat.
Beeson and Willis agreed on turning the oak into a 5-foot-tall bear holding a “Welcome” sign, and it didn’t take the carver long to make it happen. “He’d been out there about 45 minutes with wood shavings just a-flyin’, and you could see the bear,” Willis said. “I couldn’t even draw it on a piece of paper, let alone carve it.”
Beeson, who stands 6 feet 2, weighs 250 pounds and looks like he was hewed from something impervious himself, said ending the family oak’s ring cycle was still kind of sad, but its embrace of power lines was always going to be a death sentence. “I got to kill the tree, but then I resuscitated it and brought it back to life as a bear,” he said.
A self-taught chain saw artist who has been carving for three years, he runs a business called Clever Carvings, with a motto that reflects his wistful Harristown philosophy: “Bringing the dead back to life, one stump at a time.”
He travels around fulfilling carving commissions and has an ability that will let him branch out into reproducing almost anything: Previous resurrections have included eagles, a particularly clever bear-eagle that changes form depending on how it’s viewed, American Indians, catfish and even, once, a Komodo dragon.
He’s just added subtle airbrush highlights to his repertoire and perfected them on a 200-pound Siberian elm bald eagle, where every outlined feather is a masterpiece. Beeson said the carving part goes better if doesn’t try to analyze it too much.
“If I am thinking about it and want to do a real good job, that is when I mess up,” he explained. “It has to be a subconscious thing to work. I tell people I just hold the tools and the good Lord does the carving.
“What I enjoy is making something out of nothing, taking an old log that is nothing and turning it into something that makes people drop their jaw.”
Beeson said he can teach pretty much anyone to carve and, while his divine hands got busy with finishing touches to the welcoming Harristown bear, insisted you can’t go wrong if you follow a simple plan of attack: “Just look at the log and take all the stuff away that don’t look like a bear,” he said. “And you’re done.”