Chris Hammack’s latest creation is entitled “The Brawl”  which  is highlighted in a series of photographs of the progressive process of carving in a block of basswood.

Chris Hammack is known as a premier Western Caricature Carver who for many years designed, carved and manufactured for the gift shop and greeting card trade his line of Bottle Stoppers and other novelties.  In recent years he has returned to his first love of carving for his own artistic pursuit and conducting seminars to teach his method of caricature carving. Collectors, students and admirers of his own brand of caricature art are always thrilled to see his latest creation.  He is an inspiration to many woodcarvers who seek to improve their own carving skills by observing and studying his unique approach to the art.

Chris has raised the bar on his own creativity as he explains in his own words:

Not to sound too grandiose about whittling, but I do want to try and raise the bar a bit on caricature carving. I don’t know about everybody else’s bar, but I am really focused on trying to raise my own carving bar. I have been a professional artist, sculptor, whittler, for almost thirty years now. And when I look back at my work, I have to say in all honesty I’m a bit disappointed in how far I’ve been able to progress. I spent many years of my career producing carvings to be reproduced. They needed to be fairly simple to paint and cast so for several years there were a lot of constraints on what I was able to carve. It’s not that I’m not proud of the work I did, but I was many times focused on producing a product, not artwork. So now at this point in my life, I have some things I want to carve simply for the creative joy of seeing if I can do them.

This carving is one of my attempts at carving something simply for the joy of carving it. I had this fairly large piece of wood around my shop for a couple of years and had drawn about five different things on it at different times but none of them really caught my imagination.

Don’t remember why I settled on a giant pile of fighting cowboys, i just thought it would be a fun challenge to try and get as much into this one piece of wood as possible.

“The Brawl” is 6″x8″x14″ and all one piece, with the exception of a few cigarettes.

Here are a few more photos of more of Hammack’s creations and a visit to his web site  http://www.chrishammackart.com/ as well of doing a Google image search of Chris Hammack to see additional carving photographs.

Upon seeing “The Brawl”  for the first time, the Wood Bee Carver compared it to a pile of spaghetti and meat balls thinking that it is a true SPAGHETTI WESTERN.

Thank you Chris for your good humor shared through your art, your music and your friendship.  You are an inspiration.