LOCALadk Magazine

20 Fall 2014 In October 2007, Kathy passed away from uterine cancer. Steve has since then purchased and renovated a six-bedroom Victorian house on Market Street, and opened RoosterComb Inn. The Inn is dog-friendly and has a full kitchen for the guests to use. Steve transformed the downstairs portion of the house into a store where he sells some of his own work – though most of what he does is commissioned and goes straight from workshop to client – and the work of about 30 other artists and craftsmen. Although the Inn and store are doing a brisk business, Steve would like to simplify. The Inn is up for sale, and Steve wants to return to focusing full-time on making furniture. Does the Westport Chair have further to evolve? Steve feels the chair has probably reached the heights of elaboration that he wants to pursue, but who knows what the future will bring. Certainly there are many directions to explore. The last time I visited, and got to sit under the fluttering flag, I admired a recently completed piece that included an intricate carving of birch trees and deer by wood carver Glen Bower (no relation). The chair was both beautiful and wonderfully comfortable. This is functional art, and in Steve Bowers's workshop, both sides of that equation are accomplished with equal skill and finesse. Mike Trivieri Mike Trivieri, of Tupper Lake, is a woodworking artist with a very different approach. The afternoon I visited him his workshop was dominated by an elegant railing that stretched from end to end. It looked like it was built of loosely interwoven branches, but closer examination revealed that the branches were in fact carved, each graceful limb hewn from what used to be a piece of lumber. Many were composed of smaller pieces fit together so perfectly the seam was nearly invisible. Slender twigs sprouted from the railing here and there, as well as bunches of acorns, and oak leaves that looked like they might rustle in the wind at any moment. A red squirrel perched on one branch, and Mike showed me where on another he'd place a little nest, in which rested a single feather carved from ochre- and mustard-colored sumac wood. Mike's workshop, which is on Rt 28 on the southern end of Tupper Lake – the building with the statuesque tree trunk out front – is like a gallery. Propped against or hung on the walls are panels where the flow of the wood grain has become the flow of water, or layers of clouds above a lake, or the roll of mountains. Through a combination of bas-relief carving and pyrography (wood burning), Mike transforms boards into canvases that depict the natural world in astonishing and precise detail. A keen observation of and respect for nature is evident in all his work. The trees he carves have whorls and twists, as they do in the wild.

• Cover