Craftwork: Dedication for master carver pays dividends for Lucas

A swarm of bees now lines the main drag in Bridgeport. The quails aren't far away. These aren't literal creatures, but the creations of wood carver Jacob Lucas.

Lucas grew up with a father who was a cabinet maker, so woodwork was always deep in his bones. But Lucas was more in line with his grandfather, preferring more creative ways of crafting wood.

"My dad was a cabinet maker growing up, so I was always kind of dinking around in the wood shop," Lucas said. "My grandpa and I used to build things like skateboard ramps and stuff like that when I was just eight, nine years old. I always liked working with wood; never was into custom woodwork like cabinets or anything like that. The technical aspect wasn't really my thing. Everything being so precise isn't the way I like it."

Actually, it is the ability to combine ideas in his head with means born out of utility that Lucas enjoys most about his work.

"It pretty much comes to me as I go," Lucas explained. "I get a general idea of what I want to do. I knew I wanted to do bees, but I didn't know how I was going to do it."

At this point in the process, strategy helps shape the direction of the carving.

"I just get up there and go 'Where do I want my first bee to go? What's going to be a dynamic place for them?' So, I figured right on top," Lucas said. "'Where do I want my next one and my next one and what angles do I want them at and how many do I want?' If you do too many, you clutter it. If you do too little, it's not enough. I just carve until I'm happy with it and I think that it's pretty much complete."

The quail carving was unquestionably shaped out of necessity.

"How do you tie a quail into a skinny little tree like that? I just kind of figured I'd put him on some rock ledges with some grass and then kind of create a nice flow to it," Lucas said. "No matter what angle you're looking at, you're going to see something unique. It just ties it all in together with some flow and a little bit of abstract to it. I got down to the bottom and that's how it was. There was a big pocket of rot in that quail piece, so I ended up incorporating the rot. I cut it all out and I created that big spiral cut through, which mimics the spirals and cut throughs up at the top."

Part of Lucas' art is by working with his limitations. At first glance, one might not pick up on the rot Lucas referred to because he masterfully molded it into his carving.

Lucas estimates there are 23 sculptures he has created throughout Bridgeport with more on the way.

"These started about five, almost six years ago now," Lucas said. "I worked hard for three summers in between all my other stuff. There was a good two or three-year gap where the funding ran out and things changed and I wasn't sure if I would be back. I've done a couple of memorial pieces since then. The osprey I came back and did just last year. That was the first carving in two years that I had done.

Now, it's been a year, I'm back and I've got two done this year."

As it turns out, the latest completed carving-that of the bees-is directly across the street from Lucas' original Bridgeport carving, a collection of fish.

The carvings of bees and quails are his finished products this year with hopes to finish two more before snow covers the ground. He has been commissioned to complete as many as eight carvings, so the Bonney Lake artist anticipates spending a good portion of his spring and summer in the coming year in Bridgeport.

His craft has taken more than a decade to master.

"I thought I was just going to treat it like a little hobby," he said "A few years went by, I got better, and disliked my job more. So, I said forget it, packed up my job and just started doing this full-time. Now, I travel around the West coast and do stump jobs, fairs and competitions, sometimes taking first, sometimes second, sometimes not placing at all. There's a lot of competition out there, there's a lot of good carvers out there. Trying to be one of the best has taken me 11 years and a lot of hard work."

Lucas said it is interesting to visually observe the progress in his work.

"You can even see the difference in my carvings from where I started to where I am now here in Bridgeport," he said.

"It's just interesting; it's kind of like a timeline almost. They should be lasting for decades to come, really hearty trees and they'll hold up."