ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, April 17, 1996 TAG: 9604170019
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: ST. JOHNSBURY, VT.
SOURCE: NANCY SHULINS ASSOCIATED PRESS
FOLK ARTIST Stephen Huneck's life, like tiger maple, was junky and distressed. Now, as museum-goers know, it has the gilt of an angel's wing. This shows the power of prayer, if uttered in wood, and of hard work - but never after sunset.
Stephen Huneck is a big man with a lumberjack's moustache and an 8-year-old's grin, a modest man with modest needs: fresh air, strong coffee, faithful dogs, old jeans.
He has been many things - cab driver, junk dealer, millworker - but in 47 years he has yet to have need of a tie. He doesn't fancy himself a deep thinker. His motto is, ``Life is a ball.''
But his plain talk turns poetic when he talks about wood. He touches it gently, speaking of mystery and magic and art.
``Art is not just an idea, it is magic,'' says Huneck, who is part Blackfoot Indian and considers himself ``a shaman of sorts.''
He is also one of the premier folk artists of his generation, with his own gallery, six assistants and pieces on permanent display at the Smithsonian Institution and the Museum of American Folk Art.
The Coca-Cola Corp. will welcome the world to the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta this summer with a 10-foot-high Coke bottle Huneck is carving from basswood.
Wood is to Huneck what ballet is to Baryshnikov: It's both his medium and his message. He calls it ``my little buddy. It's my greeting card to the world.''
The message is simple: Love nature. Laugh often. Wonder. Imagine. Believe.
No one expected Stephen Huneck to become a great artist.
No one expected him to become much of anything.
Not his father, who predicted he'd wind up digging ditches.
Not the nuns at his parochial school in Sudbury, Mass., who labeled him a slow learner and put him in ``special'' class.
Certainly not Stephen, who drew pictures on his test papers and did poorly at everything, even shop. ``I wasn't a right-angle sort of guy,'' he says. ``I could never make anything square.''
At 17, Huneck hitchhiked to Vermont, where he did odd jobs and lived seven years with an artist and writer who befriended him. He decided to become an artist, too.
He moved to Boston and enrolled at the Massachusetts College of Art where, of the 30 students in his sculpture class, he alone flunked.
``I found it so frightening it made my heart race,'' he says. ``I could only do it alone, in the privacy of my apartment. Art is like prayer; to be effective, you've got to be alone.''
He quit school and drove a cab. One day between passengers, he talked his way into an antiques show on the pretense of collecting a fare. He couldn't afford the $2 admission, much less the $400 hand-carved 17th-century chair in the lobby, the sight of which moved him to tears. ``All the circuits in my brain started firing. I couldn't believe anyone could make anything so beautiful.''
It took him eight months to pay off the chair and bring it to his one-room apartment. It was his only furniture - that and a mattress on the floor.
In 1979, Stephen Huneck had two assets: his $400 chair and his girlfriend, a fellow art student named Gwen Ide, a petite blonde with delicate features that belied an adventurous streak.
Each night, when she finished her shift waiting tables, he drove her home in his cab. She had to lie on the floor so as not to set off the meter.
They moved to Vermont, where 31-year-old Stephen started a new career, picking through trash and knocking on doors for broken furniture to repair and resell.
He and Gwen bought the remains of a house that had been gutted in a fire. ``It was like the town dump; we paid $6,000,'' he says.
They restored the house, resold it and traded up, this time paying $9,000. Meanwhile, ``I kept buying junk and fixing it,'' Huneck says. ``I was trying to do stuff. I wanted to be an antiques dealer. Actually, I wanted to be an artist, but that was ridiculous.''
He compromised, fixing broken antiques and adding his own decorative details, trying to make them look authentic.
In the antiques business this is called forgery, and Huneck was good at it. Some dealers still get mad when you mention his name. Huneck says the people he sold to knew what they were buying, although he acknowledges that wasn't necessarily true down the line.
He became a familiar figure around town: a big, husky man smelling of woodsmoke, selling junk from a beat-up old truck.
One day on his rounds, Huneck came across a 200-year-old pink plank salvaged from an old barn. ``I'd love to carve that,'' he thought.
Then he remembered. He didn't know how.
Actually, he did, he just didn't know it. That Sunday, he retreated into his shop and re-emerged hours later with his first original work: a black man with angel wings.
A week later, he walked out of a store to find a man peering into his truck. He'd spotted the carving. ``He asked me how much I wanted for it, and like a wiseguy, I said, `A thousand bucks.' He pulled a wad of bills from his pocket and counted them out.''
That may have been the end of that, except that the buyer resold the carving to the late Jay Johnson, a leading folk art dealer in New York.
``Johnson started calling me for more. I said, `There's this old guy in town who carves this stuff. I'll go see if he has anything else.' I couldn't bring myself to admit it was mine.''
Huneck went back into his workshop and carved like a madman. Dogs. Angels. Cats. Within two weeks, he had 10 finished pieces. He and Gwen loaded them into the truck and headed for New York.
Inside of a week, Johnson had sold every piece. Huneck says, ``He called me up and said, `Make me something great.' I made three life-size girls jumping rope double-dutch. Johnson sold it for $10,000. I got half.''
That day, in August of '84, Huneck promised himself: No more antiques. ``We'd only live off the art.''
There were three other rules:
Make it to last. Make it something you want. Never work after sunset.
Within a year, Huneck had had his first one-man show. Over the next eight years, he had eight more, along with 20 museum exhibitions. His list of private collectors grew and grew.
His mind bubbled over with ideas. To keep up, he worked every day, starting at 5 a.m. His carvings became increasingly elaborate. He played with color, perspective and form. As his skills improved and his ideas matured, traditional furniture became a canvas for contemporary notions of spirituality, whimsy and wit.
Four begging dachshunds awaiting leftovers formed the base for a dining-room table. Pairs of shaking hands replaced ladderback slats in Huneck's version of Shaker-style chairs.
Other chairbacks were fashioned of leaping trout, black-habited nuns, regal retrievers. A golden sun on the pediment of a cupboard shone down on flowers and leaves carved in wood.
In 1993, the Hunecks opened their own gallery in well-heeled Woodstock, a Mecca for wealthy tourists in southern Vermont. Unlike most galleries, The Stephen Huneck Gallery has all the reverence of a kid's birthday party. People wander in, laugh out loud, talk to strangers. The sign says ``Dogs Welcome.''
Gold leaf is everywhere, transforming chairs into trophies, cupboards into treasures, dogs into angels. ``To me, gold is energy. It is life-giving,'' Huneck says.
It was 1994, a rainy day in November, raw and dismal, perfect for carving. Alone in his studio, Huneck worked steadily. By the time he looked up, it was dark.
He was pleased with the project, a huge bearded collie he'd been carving from basswood. It was coming along, though still far from finished. He hadn't bled on it yet. If a piece didn't have his blood on it, he figured it wasn't much good.
The blood would come later, when he used his hand chisels to make the hundreds of tiny cuts that would give the dog's fur the texture that sets his work apart. First, he'd move it down to his workshop where he'd hack at it with axes, refining its shape. He headed for the stairs, cradling the dog in his arms.
He doesn't remember much after that.
Gwen came home from the gallery to a house that seemed strangely quiet. Where were the dogs? She found them at the foot of the stairs guarding Stephen, who lay unconscious in a puddle of blood.
From there, things went downhill in a hurry. A broken rib punctured a lung and the lung collapsed. Huneck's breathing grew shallow. He developed pneumonia. Huneck's doctors didn't think he would make it. At one point, his heart beat so slowly, they told Gwen to tell him goodbye.
Instead, she played his favorite music and gave him foot massages. She hung his art on the walls and talked to him endlessly about a series of prints he'd been wanting to make.
Then his heart stopped.
As he lay in a coma, his lungs filled with fluid and his breathing consigned to a respirator, Stephen Huneck saw not a white light summoning him to the next world, but an elaborate carving beckoning him back to this one.
``You're going to get better,'' Gwen told him, ``and it's going to make your art better. It's going to make everything better.''
Four months after the accident, Huneck finally left the hospital. It took another four months for his strength to return.
No sooner had he recovered when an entire forest called out to him: 150 acres of first-growth sugar maples on the dark side of a mountain in northern Vermont.
These rare trees have been here longer than white men, so long that their flesh has grown mottled. Some are striped like a tiger. Others are ``spalted'' by fungus, resulting in a network of fine, swirly lines that describe abstract landscapes in the wood.
That most furniture manufacturers consider tiger maples defective only makes Huneck admire them more.
``Everything goes against them. You're taking something everyone says is junk and making something beautiful.''
He now has a new motto, one that would have served him well back in Sudbury, growing up with everything going against him:
``A bad tree can make a great board.''
LENGTH: Long : 181 linesby CNB