Artist carves antlers and artifacts thousands of years old into works of beauty

Standing midstream in the river, a glistening fish hanging from her mouth, the grizzly keeps a watchful eye on her cubs as they tumble about the riverbank. Downstream, the heron peers below the water’s surface, watching an otter dart playfully about, while an eagle perches above, surveying the panorama stretched before it.

A scene straight out of the Northern wilderness – captured forever – carved in a caribou antler by artist Lenny Puzewicz, a combination Vincent Van Gogh and Indiana Jones who still wonders how he got here from there.

“If you would have told me 10 years ago that I would be going to art shows and carving for a living, I would have have told you, ‘No way,’” said Puzewicz, 51.

But that was then – when the Detroit-area native was living in the Alaskan bush, building log cabins for a living. Today, Puzewicz works from his backroom studio at AuSable Lighting Center and Electrical Supply, in Oscoda.

Shadowed by antlers that cover the walls and shrouded in a cloud of dust, Puzewicz hunches over a tiny bench, bringing last year’s antlers – and 12,000-year-old fossilized mammoth tusks – back to life in works of art that can earn him thousands of dollars.

In fact, Puzewicz carves nearly anything animal-related – from antlers and horns to whale bones and baleen, from the tusks of hippos and walrus to the teeth of nearly any creature.

With each piece focused on a central theme, Puzewicz’s larger carvings often tell stories and legends.

An ivory carving entitled “Night Moves” portrays a dog-sled, with lynx, fox, wolves, moose and owls peering from the shadows. “Everything you would see if you were mushing at night,” said Puzewicz.

Sometimes inspiration comes from the piece itself.

A three-inch-long polar bear fang acquires the likeness of the animal that wore it.

The outside of an enormous, black horn depicts stalking lions, while inside the horn’s open cavity, a cape buffalo – the same animal the horn once adorned – charges from the underbrush.

It is an art he learned at the hands of masters – the Inuit and Eskimo natives he resided with in Alaska. And while they struggled to keep their traditions alive, Puzewicz joined them – whittling away the long Alaskan winters.

Geri Gillespie, owner of Alaskan Fur Exchange in Anchorage, deals in ivory and antler carvings for a living. She commissions Puzewicz to carve her own materials and carries what she calls “high-end collector pieces” in her shop.

“Lenny is an incredible artist, one of the best I have ever seen,” Gillespie said. “He makes an old piece of ivory come alive. His detail is amazing, right down to the rings on fingers, the eyes and feathers. It is the detail of his work that makes it stand out against others.”

Closer to home, Nancy Smith, owner of Wind River Gallery in the Detroit suburb of Milford, carries smaller Puzewicz carvings and jewelry.

“It is very unique, very original, what he does,” said Smith. “What is most unique is he learned it in Alaska and he brought it back here. There is no one else in Michigan doing what he does.”

Much of what Puzewicz carves is “fossilized ivory,” newly uncovered tusks of long-dead walrus and woolly mammoth. But he also carves “artifact ivory,” the cast-off, broken hand tools used in daily life by primitive man.

“It wasn’t originally done as art, thousands of years ago,” explains Puzewicz. “There was no wood up there. If they needed anything, it had to be made from bone or ivory. At first I was more interested in the archaeology.

“I was finding stuff thousands of years old. I was finding tools, I was finding horses’ teeth from the Pleistocene age. I was finding camel bones – and I was no big-time archaeologist. It is crazy stuff like Indiana Jones.”

Among his biggest discoveries? A pair of

7-foot mammoth tusks, buried 12,000 years in the frozen tundra.

“That was like winning the lottery – finding those things. I spent a whole summer digging them out of the frozen ground and fighting off bears,” said Puzewicz.

Weathered from centuries of exposure, the ivory absorbs the minerals it was exposed to – its off-white interior hidden below a surface stained golden or rusty brown, red, black or blue.

A Puzewicz specialty is carving pieces with the discoloration intact. In doing so, the bluish exterior of a prehistoric tusk becomes the hair and headdress of a Native American; the dark brown of a fossilized walrus tusk becomes the feathered breast of a bald eagle.

It is an art Puzewicz learned as much through necessity as he did by desire.

During 20 years of Alaskan adventure, Puzewicz counts his years spent at Point Lay, 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle, as his most memorable. Like the natives he lived among, Puzewicz said he never wanted for much – aside from lantern fuel, ammo and a plane ticket now and then. To get those, he bartered the carvings he made.

“There are no jobs there. It’s, ‘What season is it? What are we doing to stay alive?’ The whales are in, or it’s berry-picking time,” said Puzewicz.

“When I first started, I would sand on a piece forever. I was doing it with no electricity. I’m up there with my Coleman lantern sanding on a piece of tusk, listening to the radio all day,” he recalled. “It taught me patience. Horn? No big deal. We lived with moose and caribou. We picked that stuff up all the time.

“But if you are carving a 12,000-year-old piece of mammoth, or a 5,000-year-old walrus, you don’t just toss that in the corner when you make a mistake. This is brain surgery, man. You are making some real premeditated moves.”

And patience was not all he learned. Living hand-in-hand with Alaskan natives and carving primitive tools prompted admiration of other cultures.

“I have to have respect for the medium. People used this stuff to stay alive. I’ll be getting ready to carve an old hand tool and think, ‘I wonder how this person lived every day with this tool?’” said Puzewicz. “I have old pieces of artifact I’ll never carve because they are too perfect.”

It is a decision that will likely cost him several thousand dollars.

While prices for small trinkets and simple ivory jewelry start around $50, a full-sized moose or caribou antler can fetch anywhere from $500 up to $2,500. A cribbage board of fossilized ivory – each peg carved in the shape of an animal – earns him more than $4,000.

“I have to admit, my stuff isn’t for everybody,” said Puzewicz. “People tell me I should raise my prices but I am just like any artist. I want to see my stuff out there. What did van Gogh get for his first painting? The rent, some cheese and a bottle of wine?”

– Jerry Nunn writes from Lupton. Contact him at nunn@m33access.com.