About Artist

Hello,

Thanks for checking out my website!

If you are interested to learn a little about my background and how I became a professional artist, please read on.

Biography:

Growing up in rural Northwestern Wisconsin(where I still reside) and spending most of my time outside in nature, I developed a deep love for the outdoors early on.  I also realized that I had an artistic gift at a very early age. My mother still has stacks of my childhood drawings, and I think the earliest ones I was age four. I loved to draw anything, but especially wildlife. One memory I have, is sitting at my Grandparent's house at the age of five, with family members gathered around, watching me draw animals and other things.

  It was not until much later in life, however, that I would finally merge my love for wildlife and my love for creating art into something more than a hobby. In the 1990's I started thinking about different ways and mediums to use to express my art with the hopes of making a living at it. Up until that point, I had mainly only done pencil drawings. I started dabbling with wood and created some scroll saw designs and cutouts, and even tried a little glass etching. However, the two main art forms that always intrigued and inspired me, and still do, are sculpture and painting. I would eventually branch off into wood carving, but painting is still in the back of my mind. I started out wood carving on a very small scale with an old dremel grinder that my Grandfather gave me. I wanted to carve larger sculptures of wildlife, but didn't know where or how to start.

  I stopped at a local fair in 1999 and saw a chainsaw carver who was carving out animals from logs. That was all the inspiration I needed. I went to a local shop that very same day and bought a small chainsaw. I carved my first chainsaw carving(a five foot black bear) out of a fallen tree. I used one small picture of a bear for reference, and spent over a week carving to complete the bear. I sold it, and that bear still stands in a nearby home. About a year later I started carving full-time, and now it has been over two decades.

  Alongside my sculptures, in about 2008, I started making relief wood carvings of wildlife to hang on the wall. This wall art became so popular, that I set my chainsaws down, and picked up my smaller power tools. Now, wall carvings are all that I currently make. I live with my wife and daughter in beautiful Northwest Wisconsin where I work in my studio almost every day. Our home is surrounded by forests and countryside and we are visited often by many of the animals that I carve. It is a blessing to be able to make a living doing what I Iove; creating art that portrays some of the beauty of God's creation.

I hope you enjoy my artwork!

       - Clint Wickman