A rough-hewn sign on Brodie Kay Trail, found off of Hwy. 11 in Port Sydney, reads, “Spirits of Muskoka.” It’s easy to miss if you’re not paying attention — and a thrilling fi nd if you stumble across it by accident. Further exploring will lead one to the “spirits,” who sit tucked in amongst the trees: beside a clump of angel hair fern is a huge stump carving of an old man’s face refl ecting the wisdom of the ages, and there are more fi gures, all different, all unique. All carved by Huntsville’s Dennis Payne.
In fact, Payne’s Port Sydney cottage is the repository for dozens of carvings of all shapes and sizes. Payne started carving seriously a little more than a decade ago, and he doesn’t mind when people stop by to see the “spirits.”
“I had an interest in wood carving even as a child. Maybe it came from my grandfather, who often carved beautiful wood handles for various practical objects,” says Payne. A demonstration of intarsia, a form of wood inlaying somewhat similar to marquetry, inspired him for awhile, until “I saw that everyone was using pretty much the same patterns. I wanted to do something unique and decided to work with large-scale blocks of wood instead.”
And he certainly meant large-scale. Many of the wood blocks come from fallen trees which, after years of exposure to the elements, are twisted and sculpted to a certain degree by nature. Some pieces he carves weigh 400 to 500 pounds, and he uses a winch system on his truck to wrestle them into place before roughcutting the behemoths with a chain saw. Payne has an ability to see uniqueness in each piece of weathered wood and a talent for revealing a character from the graceful curves and contrasting wood tones.
“I want my work to have personality,” he says. “So I’ll give a face a glancing look or carve a beard blowing in the breeze. Suggested movement makes the work more interesting.”
Payne is entirely self taught and doesn’t work from sketches. “I just start it and I often don’t know how it will turn out until the end,” he jokes. “There’s a saying with carvers that if you are carving a horse, you just keep cutting away everything that isn’t a horse and then you’ve got it.”
After roughly shaping the large pieces he continues with varying sizes of ordinary wood-carving chisels. For very detailed work he uses a Dremel. A weekend artist, it’s hard to determine how much time goes into the larger cowboy figures and eagle carvings, but Payne’s best estimate is two full days. The spirit faces are each carved from a single block of softwood. He often uses local basswood but really prefers butternut hailing from the Ottawa Valley. Pine he finds “stringy and knotty” but allows that sometimes you have to “work with what you’ve got.”
Payne’s wife Bonnie is his best critic. “She isn’t interested in carving but she has a good eye. I’ll invite her to the woods or into the workshop where I do the smaller pieces and ask her opinion.” Payne sells many of his works and currently has some pieces at Huntsville’s Caterpillar Heart Gift Shop, but carving for him isn’t about the money. “It’s my hobby and I can take my time — that’s what keeps it such a pleasure for me.”
And should he ever move, the “spirits” will stay with the property. “They’re cemented into the ground,” he explains. “And they’re made from trees that fell on this property, so it makes sense they’d remain here.”