1,220 words

Portrait Of A Chain Saw Artist As A Young Man

Wielding a chain saw, Old Fort's Chris Roth sculpts in the tradition of Michelangelo.

By Ralph Grizzle

Years ago, my dad and I went to the woods each morning to fell trees. We were in the logging business, cutting Alamance County timber for the furniture factories in High Point. The men who worked with us were burly fellows with surnames that could have come out of Robin Hood's Sherwood Forest--names like Red Tuck and Jeeter Thrift. They probably never knew it, but they were artists of a sort. They could dig the teeth of their chain saws into trees and pretty much throw them wherever they liked.

Like those men, Old Fort's Chris Roth does art with a chain saw. Confronted with a freshly felled cherry trunk or a piece of poplar or pine, he picks us his light-weight Poulan to carve elaborate totem poles, soaring eagles, bears, cigar store Indians, and even golfers, dressed in a traditional Scottish tartan and a golf cap.

Behind the buzzing engine and the whirling chain, Chris skillfully chips away layers of wood until images begin to appear, not unlike the way that Michelangelo might have done it. "When asked how he carved David," Chris says, "Michelangelo replied, 'I just took away everything that wasn't David.' That's how I approach it. I just take away everything that isn't an owl or a bear or a one-eyed pig."

Chris sees his role as "releasing" the images that are already there. He can look at a piece of wood and see faces or feathers or leaves or bears much like one can make out elephants or dragons from floating clouds on a summer day. He is an artist, and he sees the world through an artist's eyes.

Earlier this year, he carved a totem pole for a client in Banner Elk. Chris first boned up on totem poles and on American Indian mythology and symbolism. Among the wealth of knowledge he accumulated was the fact that some tribes believed the world was being carried on the back of a turtle.

And so Chris's totem pole includes the symbolically important turtle, which is supporting a bear on its back. True to tradition, the bear is hunched over, not standing upright or growling or groping for salmon. "I wanted the totem pole to be enough of my type of style to make it my piece of artwork," Chris says. "But I also wanted to stay in the basic tradition of totem poles and what the images were supposed to look like." The idea is to reflect reality, not to distort it.

After the carving is done, Chris comes back with a blow torch, scorching the wood in places to create shadows. "A lot of the skill in art is being able to reproduce shadows," he says. "You have to make the shadow cast a shape to make your image look realistic."

Other than the torch, though, Chris uses no other tools. Those who finish with hand tools aren't purists in Chris's book. "With wood-carving hand tools, the tools themselves do the work," Chris says. "But with a chain saw, you only have one tool with one shape. You have to turn it and maneuver it to get the same kinds of cuts you'd get with hand tools."

Chris can be cocky at times and admits he enjoys "showing off," especially around other carvers. After all, at 24, he's fairly young to be a chain-saw artist. The next youngest carver he can think of is in his late thirties. "I'm constantly trying to prove myself," he says, "maybe because of my age."

Chain, Chain, Change

Art and the idea of being an artist has always been important to Chris. Today, he can look back nearly two decades to when the idea of becoming an artist first appealed to him. The notion took shape in 1977, when the Roth family moved from Florida, where Chris's dad left a profession as a graphic designer, to Old Fort, in Western North Carolina.

There, the elder Roth built a log cabin on a large tract of land and generated electricity from a waterfall. He began carving, first with tools, then later with a chain saw. Chris watched his dad carve and was immediately enamored by the artistic process. Today, he looks back and says: "I have a dad who is an artist, always wanted to be an artist, and he had a son who wanted to be an artist."

Pretty soon, what Skip was carving began to be good, and he went around the country showing his wares. Chris accompanied his dad to shows and exhibitions. At age 10, he learned to use a chain saw himself and soon began carving under the supervision of his dad. At 18, the two paired up to carve with chain saws at Home Depots and summer street fairs.

It was right around that time that Chris dropped out of high school. He's still not quite sure why, but he was unable to cope with the structure of the educational system. He reminds me that ABC news anchor Peter Jennings also dropped out, getting his GED later on in life.

With no school schedule, Chris began to self-educate himself. "I started reading Descartes before I left high school," he says, adding that he now reads three to four books a week. Those books have included a dictionary, the Bible and Gray's Anatomy. "If you're going to carve animals or people, it helps to have some basic understanding of anatomy."

He studied artists of the Italian High Renaissance, particularly the Florentine sculptors Michelangelo and Leonardo Da Vinci. Inspired by the notion that they could take an idea in their heads and recreate it so that it was something that people could touch and feel and see, Chris immersed himself into carving realistic images.

Today, with 54 chain saws at his command, Chris often carves lifelike sculptures on commission. He gets an average of $100 a foot for his work, but it depends on how elaborate the design is. One piece fetched $2,400. It was a carving of a 6-foot-tall Indian, carved in cherry. It's the most elaborate piece he has ever done, with the Indian wielding a spear and dancing atop a set of drums.

In 1994, the Wall Street Journal touted chain-saw carvings as "America's newest collectibles." It's hard to say whether carvings are still in vogue, but one thing's for sure: Chris Roth intends to continue producing them. His hope is to be the best at what he does. "If I were the greatest chain saw artist alive or dead, that would make me happy," he says. "Of course, I'd prefer to be alive, but that's the bad thing about being an artist. Usually your fame comes after you're dead."

With several years to go, the young artist plans to be well-known by the time he's in his thirties. After all, it was at age 30 that Michelangelo, who had already carved David, moved to Rome, where he would immortalize himself by painting frescoes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

What wood carvings might Michelangelo have done had he had a chain saw? In Old Fort, Chris Roth is trying to show us.