Winged Art: Nature is captured in wood when Bob Guge carves his niche

Chicago Tribune

August 23, 1992

Author: Paula Lauer.

Edition: FINAL EDITION
Section: TEMPO NORTHWEST
Page: 1

Estimated printed pages: 8

Article Text:

The stillness of the summer morning is broken by the high-pitched whir of the small hand-held grinder. His head bent over the roundish lump in his hands, the man seems oblivious to the great blue heron just off his left shoulder, the three saw-whet owls gathered as if in conference behind him or the two willets perched directly in front of him.

The hesitant chipmunk in the doorway and the bright red cardinal, its head cocked in curiosity, might as well not even be there for all the attention they're getting.

The occasional visitor walking up the driveway to this cluttered garage/workshop at first glance might be taken aback by this sight. But those who are familiar with the work of Bob Guge know that the birds surrounding him are not of feathers, flesh and bone but of wood. The chipmunk, however, is real.

Guge (pronounced Goo-Jee) has been carving birds for a living for about 13 years. While this Sleepy Hollow resident would be hard pressed to tell you exactly how many prizes he's won for his work (he's got a box of ribbons somewhere), and he's somewhat reluctant to say just how long it takes him to carve a bird (anywhere from several minutes to many months), if you ask this nationally renowned artist to pinpoint the moment in time he decided to become a bird carver he'll probably tell you about a vacation he took on Virginia's Chincoteague Island in 1974.

It was a brief visit 18 years ago with one of Chincoteague's master carvers and living folk heroes, Cigar Daisy, that convinced Guge that he was destined to carve a niche for himself in the world of decorative wooden birds.

``We went to the information booth, and they had a list of all the carvers in the island,'' he recalled. ``There were five Daisies on this list, so we went to all these places, and finally the last one was way down this beaten path, and we pulled up in front of this house-the garage had been converted with a bunch of old storm windows nailed across the front, and here--now this was the middle of the week--here behind these windows is this guy sitting there with his feet up on a desk with a big cigar hanging out of his mouth and he's carving a duck. I said to my wife, `That's what I want to do.' I came home from that trip and immediately started carving.''

It was a decision that worked out well for Guge.

After taking first place in the very first show he entered, he went on to win first-place and best-of-show awards at bird carving and art shows coast to coast, including the Ward Foundation's coveted world championships in Ocean City, Md., not once but four times in the miniature division. And, his work has been accepted for 11 consecutive years at the prestigious "Birds in Art'' exhibition of the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum in Wausau, Wis. This show, which receives about 1,200 entries of painted, sculptured and carved birds from around the world each year, accepts only about half a dozen carvings.

His work looks so real he's been asked if he glues feathers to his birds, questioned about his taxidermy techniques and, on one occasion, accused by one irate woman of cutting the legs off of real birds to attach to his carvings.

Early in his career, he took a decoy he had carved and photographed it along the shore of the Fox River. He was followed home by a police officer who thought the duck tucked under Guge's arm was real. The officer wasn't convinced the duck was wood until he leaned over and knocked on it.

But it's not so much the realism Guge is concerned with nowadays as he is with the overall expression and design quality of his work.

In bird carving and wildlife-art circles, Guge, 40, is among the elite few who have contributed significantly to the slow but steady attitude change in the world of fine art. For decorative bird carving is a relatively new field (in fact, there were few songbird carvers until the 1970s, when the interest in decorative bird carving really took off), and it's not entirely accepted as a legitimate art form by many critics.

"The world championship artists like Bob are really on the cutting edge of the art form,'' said Joe Forsthoffer, public relations director for the Ward Foundation, the Salisbury, Md., organization that has held the world championships in Ocean City since 1968. [Decorative bird carving] developed out of the decoy only in the 1940s and '50s, so you're only on your second and third generation of artists. It's people at Bob's level who go beyond craftsmanship and really elevate this into a fine art.

"And they're the ones who are redefining this as an art form,'' he added. "The standard that artists like Bob set is the standard that everyone else follows and tries to surpass.''

Not entirely new to the field when he made the trip to Chincoteague, Guge had been exposed to carving when he was in high school through his father and a family friend, Harold Haertel, a renowned decoy carver from East Dundee who got his start carving hunting decoys in the 1920s. When the younger Guge started, everyone was still carving ducks, but his interest quickly turned to songbirds and miniatures-carvings that are perfectly proportioned but less than full size.

"It didn't take very long at all,'' said Haertel of Guge's ability to master his trade. "You could see it right off the bat. His dad and I, we worked on Bob.''

"He won ribbons in the first show that he ever entered,'' said Guge's father, Roy, with a hint of pride in his voice. "I'm very proud when I go to the shows because he's usually the center of attention, because he's been a judge and because he's so knowledgeable with birds--he's always studying them.''

Roy, who still lives in the Carpentersville home Bob was raised in, has won many awards for his decorative duck and shorebird decoys, but the suggestion of a double Guge award brought forth a burst of laughter: "Well I don't know about that. I'm afraid he's much better than I am.''

A commercial painter by trade, Bob Guge spent evenings with his birds until he had built enough business to make carving his full-time occupation in the late '70s. It wasn't easy to take the plunge and quit a good job, especially since his family was growing, the father of seven admitted.

But Guge developed a line of less-detailed, folk art-type birds he calls his primitives or smoothies, which quickly became popular among those in the folk art-antique circles. Added to that was a steady line of wholesale requests for both the primitives and the detailed birds from an art buyer and gallery owner from Missouri who had discovered Guge's work at a show. The popularity of both enabled him to take a deep breath and cut all ties to the 9-to-5 work world he had been a part of since high school.

Guge still has the first bird he carved, a green-winged teal, and the third piece, also a teal, ended up in his collection, too--a $10 price tag is still stuck on the bottom. Today, his primitive bird carvings begin at $30, while his more-detailed bird carvings go for thousands of dollars. Most of his business is word of mouth. His income is supplemented by teaching classes and seminars in carving.

Taking a break one rainy summer afternoon, Guge, dressed in shorts and a faded Ward Foundation T-shirt, sat in his living room and philosophized, a little reluctantly at first, about his work.

"In the arts, I really find myself talking down artists too much,'' he admitted. "I suffered from it a lot where the art critic--who in my eyes generally is a guy who can't do good art, that's why he's a critic--is saying, `No, this isn't art. You're just copying something that's already there.'

"Well, in fact, the first part of my career, that's what I was doing,'' he said talking faster, "but there was a point where--and it just happened all of a sudden--where I realized I don't have to worry about what kind of bird to carve, I don't have to think about how to carve a feather, how to make feet, how to make a branch. I can do all that.

"Now I can think about expressing myself through my carving, and that's what I do. That's been the trend through the evolution of bird carving: It was decoys; you make it like a real bird. Now it's expression, design and form, and I can think about those things now. I can use a bird in a design that doesn't even make the bird the important part of the design, if necessary. Rather than just worrying about carving a good bird, I can concentrate on trying to do a nice piece of art. So I don't want someone to say, `That's not art.'

"I don't want to be too serious ever,'' he said after a pause, "I've got a real serious philosophy of life and where I came from, and I believe a lot of my gifts are from God, but I don't have to close up. I love to share what I know and I love to have fun.''

Fun for Guge might be a day out on the secluded lake behind his house with a couple of his kids (Seth, 17; Josh, 14; Caleb, 11; Jordan, 9; Asher, 6; Gabriel, 5, and Hannah, 1 1/2) watching egrets, black-crowned night herons or king fishers. He might pause to watch a screech owl feed its young just before sunset or share his breakfast with the goldfinches, nuthatches, cardinals, purple finches and pine siskins that visit his feeders regularly.

"Besides just being his job, it's his love,'' said Guge's wife, Jody. "He's really an outdoor person. Everywhere he goes he's always noticing birds. . . . He's kind of a workaholic because that's all he does is work on his birds or watch them.''

Guge estimates that he will carve several hundred of the primitive, folk- art birds this year and 15 to 20 of the highly detailed birds.

In his garage, which doubles as a workshop, Guge deftly transforms blocks of basswood, tupelo (also known as sour gum, which comes from the Louisiana swamps) and jelutong (a wood from Malaysia and the Indonesian islands of Sumatra and Kalimantan) into breathtaking likenesses of songbirds, waterfowl and birds of prey. All of his birds are carved with power tools, many of which evolved out of the dental industry.

When he's in what he calls a primitive mode--that is, time blocks devoted to producing his line of folk-art birds--he and his brother Scott, 37, who also helps sand the primitives, will sit in front of a large fan and grind out the basic shapes of herons, egrets, owls, cardinals, sandpipers and cormorants, to name a few. By the end of the day, the entire garage will be covered in several inches of sawdust and wood chips, a mess Guge quickly dispatches with his leaf blower.

Switching to a smaller hand-held grinder with a padded tip (which makes it possible to carve rounded shapes), Guge further shapes and smooths, switching to smaller and smaller tips as he works toward wing tips and beaks.

A small red dot on the beak of a piping plover is Guge's first clue that he's nicked his thumb with the razor-sharp carbide tip. "Sometimes these attack me,'' he said continuing to work, "you get a little sawdust in there and they plug right up.''

After the birds are sanded, Guge seals and paints them with acrylics, and sometimes he'll distress the birds slightly to give them an antique feel. Each bird is different, but overall it's a process he's got almost down to a science.

What he refers to as his good birds, those he enters into shows or does on commission for private buyers, are at the other end of the spectrum. A single bird may take several months to complete. The tedious carving of muscle groups and feather tracts alone takes days, while burning individual feathers and tiny texture lines, Guge's least favorite task, take up a still larger chunk of time.

"I kind of think of it as four sections of time,'' Guge said. "One, roughing it, which doesn't take that long, but that's the fun part, that's the design, and there's the section of detailing, which is carving the feathers and all that, and then the third section is the texturing, and then fourth is painting. The first part is the best. That really is the most enjoyable.

"There's also a point when you're detailing--we refer to it as landscaping sometimes--when you're putting the feathers on, putting them in groups; you can create lines and flow. So there's a little section at the beginning that's fun, a little section in the middle that's fun, and then the last part of painting, the part where, like on an actual painting, where the artist highlights and shadows and creates form with color. But there's a lot of time that's just plain . . . eeaagh.''

Before Guge picks up a tool, he'll spend hours studying his subject in the wild. These competition birds are judged not only on craftsmanship, accuracy to species and artistry, but essence.

Birders call it jizz, psychologists call it gestalt. Guge refers to it as capturing an attitude in wood, and he views it as the most important feature of a good carving.

"I can look out and see the silhouette of a bird and tell you what it is just by the way it hops or moves, the way it cocks its head, its shape . . . that's the essence, that spark that says, 'I'm a cardinal,' '' Guge explained.

As a judge at bird shows, Guge said he sees a lot of entries that are well carved, but don't look like birds. "A lot of people don't want to practice, they don't want to study. They want to carve, they want to get in there and do it. Everything has to go together--the accuracy, the quality, and the design, but it has to project. That's something you can't learn to do, you just hit it once in awhile.''

Caption:
PHOTO (color): Bob Guge painstakingly applies the finishing touches.
PHOTO: Portraying an attitude or the essence of a moment in nature is as important to Bob Guge as is the accurate reproduction of the species. Photo by Hung T. Vu .
PHOTO: Robert Guge works on a bird under the critical eye of his sons. Tribune photo by Hung Vu.