A master carver of walking sticks, canes, and guitars.
About Me
Hi, I’m Terry Murphy, welcome to my wood carving website! I’m an artist, poet, photographer, storyteller, writer, project manager and risk manager. I live about 20 miles west of Chicago with my wife of 32 years.
Stick carving is a hobby that I just started doing and sort of learned as I
went along.
As I indicated on my home page I use only naturally fallen wood for my stick
carving, this is for two reasons the first is practical, fallen wood is
already dried and the bark will come off easier, the second while less
practical is just as important in that it would just be wrong to kill or
damage a tree solely to carve a walking stick.
I call the style I carve in Northwest Primitive. It may be considered a
fusion of the Iconoclastic art style brought to the Americas by French and
Spanish Missionaries and the totem art practiced by the Northwestern Native
American Tribes.
It may sound funny but a lot of what I carve is dictated by the nature of
the wood I am working with, its grain, hardness, the branches and knots all
influence what I carve and how I carve it. I call this the spirit of the
wood. When possible I incorporate what I know about the future bearer of the
stick into the overall pattern of the stick. Each element of a stick has
meaning and I may use Celtic, Native American, and Norse or in one case
Tibetan images and symbols to convey that meaning. As the pattern develops
the stick will develop a name. Sometimes that name will reflect the nature
of the stick such as “Comes Lightly to Earth” which is the name of a stick
that has an overall theme of light, floating things about it, while some
stick’s names are more indicative of the person who will carry it such as
“Bone Man Dancing” which was meant to depict the emotional exposure of a
poet on stage.
Thank you for visiting, I hope you enjoy your visit to my website.
Warmest regards,
Terry C. Murphy
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