Lessons from a carving ‘wizard’

Sugarbush woodworker creates magic in five minutes

By Jak Krouse

The left third of my wizard’s nose fell to the ground. Woodcarver Mark Paul took the unsightly piece of wood out of my hands and with three strokes restored the wizard’s face, his bulbous nose now long and pointy. 

At the Saranac Art Walk earlier, Paul, in a green fedora hat and mushroom-adorned suspenders, promised he could teach me how to carve. 

“The five-minute wizard,” he said. “I guarantee you can carve one in under an hour.”

I showed up to his Mountain Farm Studio in Sugarbush two weeks later. Paul ushered me past the display of life-sized birds to his workbench, covered with discarded scraps of cottonwood bark and an extensive collection of carving instruments. A “Mr. Nice Guy” blue ribbon, pictures of his children, and a “Make America Green Again” sticker hung up by a mirror on the wall.

Paul, 77, a forestry and conservation teacher for 34 years, retiring from the Adirondack Educational Center, explained how he first began sculpting birds from wood. 

“I used to make canoe paddles,” Paul said. “A guy that I met at the Adirondack Museum a year before was offering a bird carving class in Tupper Lake. I haven’t made a canoe paddle since.” 

Paul traced the outline of a hat, a nose and a beard on a triangular block of basswood for me and took up his own bit of wood. He pressed the knife into the side and flicked away the first chip. “The hardest thing to do is to know how far the knife goes in. Once you learn that, everything else is easy.”

Paul has made thousands of five-minute wizards over his 22 years of serious carving. He borrowed the design from a Woodcarving Illustrated Magazine. Now, he gives these crafted sorcerers away at events and uses them as a tool to teach beginners like me. 

“We call that a stop cut,” he said as he continued pushing the knife a quarter inch deep into the wood with his thumb. “Then when your next cut goes up to that line, the piece will just break off.” A few more chips fell to the floor and Paul had the outlines of a hat and nose.

He began to shape the beard. “You want to carve with the grain,” he said. “If you carve against the grain, it chips out, you don’t get a clear cut.”

I was hacking away at the smile lines when I cut too deep and lopped off my wizard’s nostril. 

“Let’s see. Do you mind if I fix it?” Paul said.  “I always tell everybody there’s no mistakes in woodcarving. You just redesign.” 

He gestured to some of his unfinished birds. “If you make a mistake, if you cut off the whole tail of a bird, I guess you could glue it back on, but I usually don’t.”

More to Explore: A decoy carver

Meet Bob Jones, of Cranberry Lake. He’s been carving and manufacturing bird and fish decoys since he was a teenager. Tom French wrote this profile of Jones at the end of 2021.

Then Tom and his daughter, Emma, returned to the Jones’ home and studio and produced this video.

In it, you can see Bob at work in his Cranberry Lake studio and learn about the process and skills that go into carving and creating wooden decoys.

Paul took off the other side of my wizard’s nose, leaving a narrow point. Two marks with a pen and a lateral cut for a smile and I had finished my first five-minute wizard. It took just under an hour and my hand was already cramping. 

Some of Paul’s creations take up to 65 hours to make. Life-sized snowy owls all the way down to chickadees are well within his repertoire. Paul wakes up every morning around five to get a good four hours of undisturbed carving in.

He tries to charge based on materials and the amount of hours he works. He said he rarely gets out much for the time he puts in, but he isn’t complaining. He and his wife, Mary, live on the 25-acre Mountain Farm Studio lot and he said they couldn’t be happier. 

“My wife and I were married when we were 18. We put ourselves through college and put two kids through college,” he said. “We have no plan. We had no major plan. We just kept on going. It couldn’t get any better to tell you the truth.”