InFocus Magazine

A dolphin, arcing gracefully on a silver rod mount, seems to have been magically turned to wood in the act of leaping out the ocean. The glowing red cedar invites touching of its curved belly as it flattens out to its flanged tail.

This piece of sculpture is the result of the passion of Wes Seeley. The dolphin is mounted on a shelf at the top of the stairwell in Seeley’s Comox home and swivels in its rod casing, supporting the illusion of being alive.

“When I get a piece of wood I look at it, turn it around, this way and that,” says Seeley. “I spend a lot of time holding it and observing it and feeling it. After a while, whatever is captured inside the wood comes to my mind and I see it. Then I start the carving.”

Seeley’s clean cut and compact being seems to vibrate with an inner delight, particularly when he speaks of his art. “Even as a kid I was always whittling at a piece of wood, making little boats for the creek and other things. I often seemed to have a piece of wood in my hands.” Perhaps in another time and place Seeley would have been able to pursue his art in a more formal fashion. As it was, however, like his father before him, he went into the logging industry when he finished high school at the age of 18.

“They were the options for boys like me,” he says with a shrug. “It was either fishing or logging.”

Seeley grew up on Quadra Island until he was 13, when he moved to nearby Campbell River with his mom and sister. “Quadra was a wonderful place for kids,” he remembers. “There was tons of bush to play in and rove about. It’s where I learned to love Mother Nature, I’m sure. Wildlife was abundant, much more than now, and we were living among it. Deer were everywhere; orcas went by frequently in those days.”

Andrew’s latest work is very ambitious—an eagle caught in the moment of take-off with a salmon in its talons. “I had to build this—it was calling to me,” he says. The body of the bird is about a foot long, its wings will be approximately five feet and they are curving downwards as the bird thrusts skyward. “The wings will support the sculpture on either side, and the salmon’s tail will form the third point of a triangle,” Seeley explains. “The whole piece will be free standing.” At the moment, the body of the eagle stands on a frame in the driveway of his home where he is working on it.

“Each feather-tip is cut with a band-saw,” he says as he turns a delicate two-inch piece of wood over in his capable fingers. The wood blends from a swirling ashy color to a slightly darker brown and is aromatic cedar. “I’m not too sure where it comes from—I must find out, it’s not from BC,” Seeley says.

“But once the varnish goes on, the colors really come alive.” He holds the piece down on top of another, showing how the small pieces overlap to give the image of feather tips. “When I go against the grain of the wood, the colors seem to all mesh together; with the grain gives two distinct colors with a line separating them. I experimented quite a bit before being satisfied with the way I was working the wood.”

Like most works of art, countless hours of painstaking work go into its creation. “I’m anticipating, oh, maybe 1,000 hours on this one,” Seeley says with a grin. “Time just flies for me when I’m working though. I come down to my workshop after supper and when I look at the clock, it’s two in the morning!”

The body of the bird is made of red cedar; the beak is also red cedar, but with a darker hue. The wing feathers are fir, before having the aromatic cedar glued on to them. “I’m going to have feathers on the underside of the wings too, as well as the tail,” Seeley says. “Because it’s free-standing, people will be able to see the underside of the eagle. I’m going to encourage people to really look closely, walk all around it, you know?”

Seeley is hoping to sell his work and make the transition from woodworking as a hobby to a full time career. “At the moment, I’m laid off—like many people in the logging industry,” he says wryly. “So it suits me well. I’m able to spend more time with my woodworking. Plus, I get to be at home with my family, which I cherish. Working away from home for two or three weeks at a time—I don’t like it. I’d much rather be here.”

Seeley still works as a boom-man. “I’m 50 years old now and I’ve worked all around the province on various contracts since I started as a teenager,” he says. “Of course there’s been some change in the logging industry during that time.

“Probably the biggest change has been in the way camps are run. There’s zero tolerance for drugs and being drunk. Accidents have gone down a lot because of that,” he adds, proudly noting that he has been sober for 23 years. “Best thing I ever did. I know that my life wouldn’t be the delight it is now if I were still drinking. I have a wonderful wife and two great children. I’m sure none of that would be possible if I still drank.

“I’d like to be able to say that logging practices have changed too,” he continues “but they haven’t. It’s still the same mentality. It can’t go on for ever, taking and taking.”

He shakes his head, then smiles, happy to have found a different way to work with wood. “I’m just so grateful I have this hobby,” he says. “It brings me into contact with other creative people, apart from bringing me lots of satisfaction for myself. I find other artists full of interesting ideas, talking about alternative ways of being, it brings inspiration.”

Seeley points to one of his earliest pieces, a one-dimensional feeding orca with a calf. The piece is about five feet long. “I did that piece about 10 years ago,” he says, noting the differences between this and his more current work. “Of course that’s what it’s all about—learning more about the woods and the creative process with each piece that I do. It’s one reason I’m so excited about the new eagle I’m currently working on.

“I did another eagle—they’re sort of a fixation with me,” he says. “But it was in flight, with its wings held aloft, unlike this one, where the wings are almost touching the ground as it takes off. That one had a wing span of over six feet and took about 400 hours of work to complete. It was bought by the owner of the airport in Port McNeil and his company is called Pacific Eagle Aviation. He thought it was perfect for the airport. It’s the first piece of art work I’ve sold, so it was very exciting for me.”

Giant eagles and leaping dolphins weren’t the first works Wes Seeley started with though. “I used to carve replicas of the boats I would see on the coast—fish boats and tug boats. The first commission I had was from my uncle, Brian McCabe of Quadra Island. He had a salmon troller fishing boat. I must have taken about 200 photographs of the inside and the outside before I started work on it,” Seeley remembers. He still has a photograph of the gaily painted replica, and even his boats seem to have a life about them.

“Other people on the coast saw my models and I did a replica of Jim Humphrey’s tug, ‘The Regent’. I probably sold about 10 of those replicas. It’s a funny thing, but I think my uncle liked the replica even more than his real boat!” He laughs, then adds: “Of course, there’s less work to do on it. The fishing boat looks a bit rusty and beat up now, but the model’s like brand new.”