Carving out a challenge

At his table in a clean, orderly room, August Birk quietly assembles a jigsaw puzzle. It's the big sort with small pieces; a Christmas gift from his family.

"I find it's a challenge," he says. He likes challenges.

Birk, it seems, is one of those people whose impressive -- and vaguely irksome -- natural aptitude lets them simply pick up a skill. Like using a chain saw to turn tree stumps into sculptures.

Many area residents know his work, even if they may not realize it. He's the one who carved the crossed-arm native watching over the intersection in uptown Jackson, and the life-size Benjamin Franklin inside Cape Girardeau's Franklin Elementary School. All but the finishing touches he did with a chain saw.

He didn't pick up the hobby until he'd retired from plumbing, but the work must have kept him young. He definitely doesn't seem 90. Tall and thin, he's got thick, graying hair -- and all his fingers still.

August W. Birk poses for a photo with his chainsaw carving of Jesus inside Trinity Lutheran Church on Wednesday.Laura Simon

"If I had a chain saw today, however, I don't know if I could do it or not anymore," he admits.

Birk doesn't know how many things he's carved in his more than three decades working with wood, but it's enough to fill two thick photo books showing hundreds of figurines, statues and trinkets.

"It seems like a lot now that I look back on it, but it wasn't that much," he says, one cheek cupped in his hand.

"Well, I had a workshop in my house," he says, motioning up to a frame on the wall. "That's my house there."

What first looks like a painting of a little white house is actually a carving, painted in living color. The house stands out in relief, with its lawn and row of tiny bushes. The corners of a small American flag curl toward the viewer.

August W. Birk poses for a photo, Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2016. Birk's chainsaw carvings, such as the Ben Franklin at Franklin Elementary, have been local landmarks for years.Laura Simon

"I did that one, too," he says, pointing at a carving of Bollinger Mill on another wall.

"You carve it out, and then after, I painted it," he explains.

As if it were that simple.

But to Birk it is. He's pithy but genial in describing his creative endeavors.

"I haven't had any special training," he says. Not past his one semester at an art school, where he received fundamental instruction in form and perspective. Everything else he says he just sort of figured out.

"I found out the good Lord gave me the ability to do [art]," he says. "I usually see someone doing something and just copy them. It's a strange thing."

Woodcarving came naturally to him during his time at Cape Central High School, but then again, so did most things.

"I played some football. Proud to say the year I played with 'em, they went undefeated," he says, pausing to grin so tightly his right eye winks. "And un-scored upon."

But after high school, he was an Air Force pilot for three years, during which he had little time for art. After his service, he asked his father for a year's time to decide whether or not he'd help him start a plumbing business.

"He said, 'It should either be A.E. Birk or A.E. Birk and Son. What shall it be?'" Birk recalls.

He eventually joined his father, but he spent the interim year at the University of Missouri-Columbia, interested in studying art but stymied by red tape. He did, however, meet his wife, Patricia, on the tennis courts outside nearby Stephens College.

She was from Detroit originally, and it was there that Birk first saw someone with a clean sawcarving a tree stump. The artist following loggers through a strip of woods caught Birk's eye.

"This guy came following along and carving these trees and he gave me an idea," Birk says. "It looked so easy and I thought, 'Aw, hell. I could do that.'"

So he did.

He started each project at the library, compiling photographs from which to model the piece. He'd enlarge the pictures in his basement and create a cardboard mock-up to help visualize the necessary dimensions.

"You don't want to over-cut," he says, later adding, with good humor, that he always did have trouble with noses. "On nine of 10 of these sculptures, I don't make the nose long enough."

He usually needed two weeks -- or 40 hours carving -- to complete a large piece, and said for most of that time, he'd be anxious about whether the piece would turn out well.

"I don't think I've ever made one of these carvings that I wasn't nervous that I'd be able to do it," he says.

And after the carving is completed, the statues still need work.

In his younger days, he saw to each piece, making sure they were sealed properly against cracking from the elements. Some, like the mid-swing golfer he did for a country club in Cape Girardeau, needed even more work than that.

"Somebody's always stealing the golf club out of the guy's hand," he says, offering the stink-eye to an unseen miscreant.

But as he got older, Birk says he started carving less, eventually just crafting things for his 13 great-grandchildren, such as rocking horses, toy pickup trucks and chunky jigsaw puzzles.

A voice comes across the nursing home's intercom inviting residents to come out for show and tell. Today, it's a pair of palm-sized sea turtles carved of dark walnut. A group of ladies once wanted to go on a bus tour of Birk's sculptures around town, so he carved dozens of the figurines to give them as keepsakes.

"Yeah, today they're going to have a show and tell," he explains with his typical aw-shucks humility. "So I'm going to take some of this crap out and show them about it."

tgraef@semissourian.com

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