Doors
as windows to one’s personality
Photography: Mark Oliver
(page 1 of 3)
“I see a red door and I want it painted black,” sang Mick Jagger, seemingly relating to a time when The Rolling Stones looked at all things colorful and could see only darkness. Your mood, your mantra, your bent, your passion, your door says so much about those behind it without uttering a single word. Here are some of the craftsmen who help reveal your story to the world without making a sound.
Jack Burgess lets the chips fall where they may. . .
Then he stands back and admires his work. The rams’ heads, the trout, exotic birds . . . they all emerge from beneath those wood chips.
“At the end of the day I’m standing in 70,000 to 80,000 chips—some no bigger than a splinter,” says the Ketchum artist. “I love working with wood.”
Burgess, a resident of Ketchum for more than 30 years, carves everything from human figures to trout to coffee table legs featuring life-sized heads of bighorn rams. But some of the largest pieces in his portfolio feature carved wooden doors that stage the entry to his clients’ homes.
Burgess carved a pair of oversized doors with three swans on each door in a composition butterflied up the middle. Another door features an aspen bent by years of heavy snow. Still others include complex African motifs—one with exotic birds a client had seen while on an African safari.
“You want a showpiece—a work of art—not just a door,” he says. “The entry to a home sets the stage for your home and your sense of place. It’s the first thing someone sees when he or she walks up to your house. It’s the first thing they touch upon entering your home.”
The first step in creating a door is considering the motif and composing a design, which can take up to a week, since Burgess rarely goes with the first design that comes to mind.
One homeowner, for instance, wanted something indigenous to this area, so Burgess came up with a design reflecting the beadwork displayed on Shoshoni Indian moccasins and Indian blankets.
In another case, Burgess wanted something graceful, yet tied to nature. So he studied images of dancers and then carved a bristle cone pine tree twisting in the wind reminiscent of a dancer with her arms held gracefully in the air.
“You can go anywhere in your head and imagination, and I like that,” says Burgess.
Burgess carves his doors from basswood, which he says is a reliably stable wood. Known as linden wood in Europe and lime wood in Britain, it’s less apt to crack or warp, it sports few knots and it readily accepts stains and dyes.
Burgess creates his designs using Photoshop on a computer. He then enlarges the image to full scale, printing it on vellum to transfer it to the surface of the door.
He then removes the area around the image, leaving a raised image that he hand carves from a selection of 200 “very sharp” chisels and gouges ranging in size from inch-wide blades to tools the size of dental picks.
Burgess’ affinity for detail comes in part from the premed anatomy classes he took in college at California State University in Sacramento. He switched to art and printing design only after he tired of spending hours and hours in lab learning to identify microscopic cells.
It was on a trip through Europe at age 29 that he discovered his true calling.
He was walking through a German village when he spotted several carved wooden figures in a store window. The store was closed, but he knocked on the door and convinced the shopkeeper through sign language that he had to meet the carvers.
The shopkeeper pointed to his watch, telling him to return at six in the morning and then took him to an atelier on a mountainside where he got to observe a master carver and his five apprentices at work.
As Burgess sat listening to them tapping their mallets in time to the classical music that was playing, he knew he had to be one of them.
“I like the focus, the fact that every movement has to be precise,” he says. “Once you remove a sliver, you can’t replace it. It’s not like clay, where you can take away and add back.”
Burgess returned home to Ketchum where he had been building log homes and immediately set about teaching himself to carve. Now he spends endless hours shaping and chiseling detail—all in search of an exceptional door.
“At the end of the day you know you’ve been working,” he says. “And it’s very satisfying.” >>>
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