Conway man sees animals in tree trunks

CONWAY Ask most people and they’ll tell you a chainsaw is an item of destruction, meant for whacking down unwanted tree limbs or clearing up debris that’s toppled in their yards during a hurricane.

Ask Thomas Penney of Conway, and he’ll say it’s as much a tool of creation as a brush is to a portraitist or a pen to a writer.

Penney, 68, uses his chainsaw to fashion bears and eagles and other things from tree trunks and branches on land he owns along U.S. 501 Bypass.

Penney has been a South Carolinian for 19 years, but before that he was a Canadian.

He learned to make chainsaw sculptures when he worked in a logging camp in British Columbia. The loggers would be dropped into the area to be logged for three months at a time, and pretty much all there was to do was cut trees and gamble, he said.

It was hard work, and Penney didn’t want to finish his stint in the woods owing someone else his paycheck. He got the idea for chainsaw wood sculpting from another man in the camp who would carve art pieces from scratch and send them home to his wife to sell.

One thing led to another, and Penney was commissioned by the Catholic Church to do an 11-foot sculpture of Pope John Paul when the latter visited Canada in 1984.

“I had the whole Vatican helping me to do it,” he said.

He used to go to Florida each winter to sculpt wood at a friend’s art gallery, and then drive north on U.S. 17 so he could stop at a son’s New Jersey woodcarving shop on the way home.

He was in Myrtle Beach on one of those trips and was given the name of an Ocean Boulevard bar where he should go to meet women. While he was there, of course, a woman came in and he was instantly smitten.

The two are still married.

Penney bought 5 acres along the bypass between the S.C. 544 overpass and the Waccamaw River bridge where he opened an art studio and transformed tree trunks into works of art. People would stop and talk, he said, but most of what he sells is ordered by people who know him and his work. He carved the actor Charles Bronson in a bathtub that’s in a Five Points nightspot in Columbia, he said.

Penney’s use of his 501 land changed with the times as did the Horry County, and now Conway, that surrounds it. His art gallery was rented for several years to an economic development group and then turned into a privately-owned visitor’s center that burned up on Feb. 3.

At one time, he said, he rented out some space to a repo man, but kicked him out after he saw the way the man treated a young mother whose vehicle he was repossessing.

Penney had a heart attack in 2002, that led to bypass surgery, that led to the need for a calmer state of mind.

His chainsaw drones the chant that transports him into Zen, a calm place where the world’s noise can be forgotten.

Penney says the nearly-finished bear standing on its hind legs at one edge of his property was carved from a tree that was 3 feet in diameter.

He’s heard of a tree recently felled in Conway that was 5 feet from side to side, and his mind plays with thoughts of what he could make of it.

To some extent, he says, carving wood is just as marble sculptors describe their art. Mentally, pieces fall from the raw wood, or block of marble, so the process is of knowing what to take away rather than what to build up.

“At this stage of the game,” he said, “I look at a log and I see the major blocking cuts.”

Musical meditation

Billy Fallaw, music director and organist at First United Methodist Church in downtown Conway, said the pieces he plays during the upcoming weekly Lenten Organ Meditations will be a variety of selections chosen from pieces he has played before to pieces he has heard.

The church will host this year’s half-hour sessions beginning at noon every Wednesday from Feb. 29 to March 28 in the church sanctuary at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Laurel Street. All are invited and there is no charge.

The church offers the respites in the hope that people will take a quiet, mid-week break to consider what God has done for mankind through Jesus Christ.

Fallaw said he will play works by Mendelssohn, Bach, Gerald Near and others.

“Of course there’ll be hymns as well,” he said.

A bit of the Gullah

No doubt you’ve heard about the Gullah culture but perhaps you don’t really know what it is or, more likely, how it has affected modern life in the South.

If you want to learn, go to Ultimate Gullah on Third Avenue on Thursday at 10 a.m. or 2 p.m. for the first in a four-film series to help out. That day, the business will be showing – free – “God’s Gonna Trouble the Water,” a one-hour film narrated by famed African-American actress Ruby Dee.

Veronica Gerald, the store’s owner, was a consultant for the film, said Dayo White, the store’s manager.

Another film in the series will be shown at the same times each succeeding Thursday.

“A lot of people have heard of (the Gullah culture),” White said, “but they don’t know exactly what it is.”

Gullah is the name given to the society built by and from African slaves brought to the Southeast coast beginning in the 1500s. They dominated the rice and cotton agriculture of the white plantation society between Jacksonville, Fla., and Wilmington, N.C., provided much of the labor that helped the South survive Reconstruction and the Great Depression and left a mark on many white families as the people who raised their children.

Today, the culture is known for the art and music that grew from slave roots.

White said that those who want a deeper, more hands-on immersion into the culture can sign up for one of the upcoming sweetgrass basketweaving sessions with Vera Manigault of Mt. Pleasant, who is among those who sell the baskets on the side of U.S. 17 headed into Charleston.

Each session will cost $75 – the first is Saturday -- and White promised attendees would take home more than the baskets they create.

Manigault will color the sessions with her own Gullah recollections as well as teach the attendees how to weave.