LIMA, OH (WLIO) - An Indiana group with a unique artistic talent and focus traveled to Lima for the Allen County Fair to carve sculptures out of wood for a great cause. Conner Prince shares their story.
The 173rd Allen County Fair has arrived and is in full swing with fairgoers enjoying plenty of food, fun, and festivities. However, one special, talented group of artists from French Lick, Indiana, traveled to Lima with chainsaws, carving tools, and enormous tree logs to craft large, wooden sculptures in front of a live audience: meet the Bear Hollow Wood Carvers!
"We take chainsaws and carve logs into sculptures, so I got two pieces here so far. Each show is about an hour, an hour-and-a-half long. I do four shows a day, and I'll be here for five days. And I will do one show on Saturday as well," explained Jason Stoner, chainsaw carver at Bear Hollow Wood Carvers.
As fairgoers walk by and observe Stoner's elaborate sculptures, his passion for carving an ordinary log into extraordinary real-life sculptures is palpable.
"I started as a little kid just drawing, you know, just kept at it and then got into sculptures as I got older just doing stuff around the house, got a chainsaw, had a stump, and decided to carve it... And then before long, you're doing more stumps and more chunks of wood and get bit by the carving bug, and you just kept going with it," stated Stoner.
And with the Allen County Fair, highlighting area livestock animals will be the theme of Stoner's work.
"Being it's the county fair, you got to do animals. You got to do farm animals, so I'll probably be making, you know, cattle, pigs, goats, things like that," said Stoner.
Watching Stoner bring tree logs to life is a mesmerizing process that the public loves, and once Stoner completes his animal sculptures, his elegant pieces of art could make a tremendous difference in someone's life.
"The really cool part about these carvings is that on the very last day of the fair on the Nutrien Plaza stage at 2:30 p.m., we actually auction these wood carvings off to where the general public has an opportunity to buy them, and then, the proceeds and monies made off of the auction actually go back into the Allen County Agricultural Society Scholarship Fund that we give out each and every year," said Troy Elwer, Allen County Fair manager.
And lives have already been impacted by a record-breaking auction last year.
"Last year, I believe we did eight scholarships total, and last year's auction actually broke a record out of all the auctions we've ever had with these wood carvings in it tallied a total of $32,000 which we are very proud of," added Elwer.
You can learn more about the Bear Hollow Wood Carvers by visiting their website at http://www.bearhollowwoodcarvers.com/.
