Carving a character

What attracted Randy Flowers to carving wasn’t the woodwork itself. He wanted to collect chess sets, and some friends who carved had a pattern for a “hillbilly chess set.”

“I’ve always liked piddling with stuff and making stuff with my hands, so I said, ‘I can do that!’” Flowers said.

Nearly 40 years and hundreds of carvings later, the Trussville resident never got around to making the chess set. His talent and love for carving, however, has only gotten stronger.

“Anybody can carve,” Flowers said. “Really it just takes the willingness to want to do it, to try. You’re going to make mistakes, use that as a learning experience and all, and over time you’d be surprised what any individual can do.”

Flowers’ day job is working with security systems for Southern Company’s nuclear power plants. He travels a lot, so carving is just a hobby for his downtime. He gives many away as gifts to friends and family, but the time and effort of carving makes each one special.

“Everything becomes a piece of the family,” Flowers said.

Because of that, the Flowers home is dotted with wood carvings. There are a number of Santa Clauses and cowboys, which were some of Flowers’ first projects, as well as more unique carvings such as an igloo with its resident’s feet sticking out of the entrance.

Flowers enjoys carving a lot of caricatures because he can tell a story and have some fun without worrying too much about accuracy. If the ears are lopsided or the nose turns out too big, that’s no problem. He said sometimes people see a resemblance to real faces in his carvings, but he is rarely working from a pattern.

“I generally just start with a block of wood and whatever comes out, comes out,” Flowers said.

Some of his carvings are more memorable. When Flowers’ sons were in the HTHS Husky Band, Flowers remembers the band booster club president trying to demonstrate how the color guard’s capes would look. When the president posed to show how the capes would look, a fellow parent joked that he practiced that pose in front of the mirror. At the Christmas concert that year, Flowers gave the booster president a gift -— a carving of himself, standing in front of a mirror with the color guard cape.

In 2012, Auburn University had a particularly bad football season and a fan gained local fame for attending games with a paper bag on his head. To tease an Auburn fan friend, Flowers carved the paper bag fan as a Christmas gift.

Many times, Flowers said any mistakes he makes while carving can be adapted to fit the overall goal. There’s only been one carving he gave up on entirely: an attempted statue of his oldest son and his wife.

“I tried to practice on a woman’s face and it was the ugliest man I’ve ever seen, much less the woman. So I just kind of pushed it aside,” Flowers said.

Since then, he mostly sticks with male faces. Flowers said he enjoys adding wrinkles and other elements to his caricatures to give them character.

As Flowers describes it, he has two big problems in carving: procrastination and not knowing when to quit. He said he has carved gifts on Christmas Eve more than once. He also recalled a class where he couldn’t get the face of a carving quite right, and the instructor finally told him to stop carving and paint it.

“It’s one of my favorite ones now,” Flowers said. “You can do a great carving and then a bad paint job and ruin it, or you can take an OK carving and do a great paint job and it’ll look great.”

Giving away his creations, he said, is a lot of fun. Flowers has also taught a Sunday school class at First Baptist Trussville based on carving and has held Christmas parties for Independence Place, which provides social and recreational opportunities for adults with special needs. Flowers’ wife, Cindy, volunteers there. Each person at the party gets a small wood carving at the end.

“That’s just the thrill. To see the look on their face, it makes me feel good,” Flowers said.

Flowers meets with the Tannehill Woodcarvers each month, which he said is a nice chance to take a break and clear his head. He has also taught classes for about five years. In his first class, only one person got injured. Unfortunately, that person was Flowers.

“Give it a try. Just have a lot of Band-Aids around,” Flowers said. “You can have fun even with little stuff… but it’s something that’s really relaxing.”

Above all, Flowers said that he has kept up wood carving because he enjoys the calm feeling of focusing on his work, and seeing the finished product look better than he had hoped.

“When I actually sit down and carve, the world kind of goes away during that period of time,” Flowers said, then continued in his characteristic joking manner, “until she [Cindy] starts complaining about all the chips on the floor.”