Carving Became a Niche

Until four years ago, avid scuba diver Dan “Red” Whiteman made his living setting up elaborate fish tanks in homes and businesses. But one evening a drunk driver changed all of that.

No, Whiteman wasn’t hit by the intoxicated motorist. An inebriated young lady rammed her car into a palm tree in Whiteman’s Davie yard, and his wife asked him to carve the disfigured tree into a Hawaiian tiki pole.

“So I took a chisel and mallet to it, and I just kept going,” recalls Whiteman. “When I first did that, of course all of my friends wanted me to make them one.”

The tiki became a backyard ornament, and Whiteman moved on to more carving with bigger tools. “Instead of beating my knuckles with the mallet and chisel, I started picking up the chain saw to carve out the bigger pieces.”

Within a year of firing up the saw, Whiteman shuttered his aquarium business to carve full-time. He began chopping manatees, dolphins, and mermaids out of wood and now specializes in Northwest Indian totem poles.

“You get to watch as each piece comes out of the wood,” says Whiteman, whose work quickly earned him a national reputation. Last summer an Alaskan cruise ship company set him up in a Ketchikan storefront, where his carving demonstrations became a tourist attraction.

He also entered chain saw-carving competitions, during which artists typically go into a tent and create their entries in private. “You never have somebody next to you while you are carving,” Whiteman explains. “You don’t share ideas.”

But he and other top carvers have taken to hosting friendly demonstrations, and at this weekend’s Saws in the Swamp exhibition and charity auction, some 30 carvers will buzz wildlife-, nature-, and sports-themed sculptures from Florida cypress as the distinctive smell of chain saw exhaust mingles with the scent of fresh wood shavings. Each artist will create a piece for the auction, proceeds of which will benefit the Make-A-Wish Foundation and local 4-H club chapters.

“It’s just wonderful to see what a great group of people we have,” says Whiteman. “Every one of them is coming down here at their own expense.”