Today we’d like to introduce you to Justin Gordon.
Justin, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
I started carving in 1974 and week after graduating high school, I carved dozens 3-inch figures of little bearded men in a multitude of poses. This progressed to carving scenes with these little men that included the centerfold of Jethro Tull’s Aqualung album as a wall sconce. I got to present this sconse to the band leader, Ian Anderson, at a concert. [His next album was titled “Songs from the Wood”] During semester breaks in college, I tried my hand sculpting snow in the winter and in the summers, carving sand at Good Harbor Beach in Gloucester, Mass. At the beach, my sand castles reached good size and drew crowds and it seemed like early in the day many of the mothers would get frustrated with their kids and suggest that they “go see what that man is doing over there” just to get them out of their hair. I ended up with 5 to 25 kids helping to build a city of canals, bridges, sand trees and skull mountains around my castle. When the kids noticed the tide was rising to an impending doom for all our labors, the excitement grew to where they would scream when another sand works was lost to the waves. The inevitable included my castle which came down slowly, a roofed section or tower at a time, as each wave settled the sand at its base. With all the noise from these kids screaming and every castle section crashing into oblivion, the mothers eventually showed up and soon there would be 30 to 50 people watching this 4-foot castle and sand city crumble into the sea, wave after wave, piece by piece, with ear piercing screams from all these kids watching the demise of the day’s adventure.
A man approached me once and told me he found his daughter crying one night after a beach day because she couldn’t believe some guy would spend all day making a beautiful sand castle and loose it to the waves of Mother Nature. Such is life, little girl.
Appropriately, I found my company name in a book of names, “Elwin”, which means elf friend or friend of the little people – named after my little bearded men and the kids on the beach.
I finished my Mechanical Engineering degree from the University of Massachusetts in 1983 and worked for defense contractors in the Boston suburbs. During my nine years in the corporate world, I continued playing in the sand. The pieces got bigger and more public. Then I saw a tall sand sculpture in a mall that was done by a California company. This inspired me to pursue sculpture for an income. While trying to get vacation time from the missile business to do my first paying sand sculpture in a mall, the missile business laid me off. This proverbial “boot in the ass” gave me inspiration to pursue sculpting for a living. This was 1991. Since then I’ve done sand sculptures from the Caribbean to Canada and Arizona to Cape Cod and Oman and Kuwait to Taiwan. Now I’m also a regular attraction at the Topsfield Fair in Topsfield, Mass. where I do a modest 50 ton and 15-foot-high sand sculpture. The Hampton Beach Sand Sculpture event with GregGrady.com is also an event I attend regularly. He also hires me to help with his sculpture walk in Yarmouth in late June every year.
One day at a beach, a woman introduced herself as a wax modeler for the jewelry industry and she was looking for an apprentice. I took her up on her offer and quickly learned wax modeling for precious gems set in gold, silver and platinum. Before long, I was earning and income with her and my engineering and production education was helping her develop power tools with Foredom Power Tools which took hours off the old way of wax modeling. These tools and methods are still used today.
During winters, I subsidized my skiing by offering my sculpting services to New England ski areas in exchange for lift passes. I worked for 5 years at Wildcat Mountain, in Pinkham Notch, NH, doing snow sculptures of large cats as big as a two car garage with slides through them and as small as a car. Not much compares with being on a mountain top watching a sunrise turn a snow blanketed mountain range all the colors of a sunset. I’ve also done snow sculptures at Attitash/Bear Peak, in Bartlett, NH for vacation week attractions.
To date I sculpt in nine medium. Wood, wax, snow and sand, clay for the ceramics industry, stone, ice, foam, and chocolate. I like carving Chocolate. I get to eat the cut-offs. With all my travels doing sand sculptures at mall, fairs and trade shows, I met a man that did great wood carvings, big carvings that he roughed out with a chainsaw then put in the finished details with hand tools. This inspiration me to buy my first chainsaw. Soon there were bigger wood carvings, much bigger, from tree pieces. A popular carving I do is black bear cubs in amusing poses; sleeping on deck rails, peeking in kitchen windows, or sniffing a champagne bottle. Some of the biggest tree carvings I’ve done were a life size Indian shooting an arrow into the sky with a yellow lab dog in Hudson, MA, a fourteen foot high mother mermaid with two daughter mermaids in Brookline, MA, and a twenty five foot high compilation of story book characters from a tree trunk at StoryLand, NH, carved while hanging out of an aerial lift.
My work at Story Land also includes the medium of foam. This is a two pound density insulation foam I sculpt into the profound and comical characters you can only find at StoryLand. After I sculpt them, Story Land puts a hard coating on them, paints them and puts the pieces into the park. The Foam Gallery page on my website shows much of what I’ve carved for them.
With a new chainsaw, it was an easy progression to creating ice sculptures. After all, sculpture is sculpture. All you need is the right tools for the medium. (you should see the hedges and mailbox in my yard). Ice is no different, just colder. Proficiency with the chainsaw and a carving bar tip make easy work of it, especially the large ice sculptures. I did First Night events for Newburyport and Beverly, Mass, for many years as well as “The Big Show”, First Night Boston in 2001 with some fellow ice carvers in the culinary profession.
Currently, I teach two wood carving classes, one in Groveland and another in Randolph, Mass. with the South Shore Wood Carvers. The South Shore Wood Carcvers are on Facebook. I instruct with any type of carving the students want from the abstract to lifelike and relief to in-the-round. I’m also an active member in the New England Wood Carvers Association. (NEWC.org).
Now I concentrate mostly on fine wood sculptures, architectural carvings, clock case carvings and restorations, gun stock carvings, and sand sculptures. But I’ll still consider sculpting anything anyone asks me to.
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Has it been a smooth road being self-employed? Are you kidding? Are any roads we take smooth? Self-employment roads are like the roads in Massachusetts. Very bumpy with many pot holes.
After being self-employed for the last 26 years, there’s a lot to be said for working for someone else with regular paychecks and health insurance. But would I go back to corporate America? Not on your life. If anyone in a company is going to make those dumb-ass company decisions that the employees all have to make happen, by God, it’s going to be me.
Try also having to pay taxes twice with the current tax codes: once as an individual and again as a business. No one else has to do this but the small business owner.
Try working so much you forget what day it is. When you get off a 25 day straight stretch of working 8 to 14 hours a day and it takes you at least five days being home to get your life and mojo back, then ask me if self-employment has any struggles.
Try having your health insurance canceled because oddly the state determines that your income exceeds a certain level, yet your income level hasn’t changed in the last 10 years. Then you find out some creative state employee added your net income with your gross income and determined you make too much for your health care program. And, had you gotten sick during the time they canceled you, you would not have been covered because they won’t reinstate retroactively.
Try going over 12 years with no health insurance and luckily staying healthy but finding out that paying cash for physicals, back doctor visits, and an emergency appendectomy, saves you nearly 70% in costs. (but always realizing that a catastrophic event would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars) Struggles? What struggles?
Try waking up one day with a strange nerve issue in your hand and your hands are your livelihood. Or, you get a knee pain that won’t go away. And if you don’t work, you don’t get paid. There are no sick days or vacation days in a sole proprietorship.
I’ve been a small business of one. Try having to wear ALL the hats in the company from marketing, to purchasing, to the Human Resources Manager, to travel agent, to production manager, to the production team, to being the boss and being the janitor. Struggles? What struggles? No problem. We do what has to be done to get the job and get the job done, and done well.
Yet I’ve been to some amazing places around the world. I’ve met some really great and talented people. I’ve helped do some truly amazing things to entertain literally thousands of people. And I wouldn’t trade it for all the struggles in Strugglesville.
Elwin Designs – what should we know? What do you guys do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
I’ve been in business as a sculptor / wood carver in the Boston and New Hampshire area since 1991. I’ve been carving wood since 1974 and if I haven’t gotten good at carving in all these years, I shouldn’t be doing it. I’ve marketed myself as one who can sculpt or carve anything, and I can do just that. My experience as a sculptor and simple life experience has taught me to be present and notice things. Not everyone knows which way a violin’s fiddlehead scroll rolls. But that helped me with a customer who wanted scrolls like a violin for their music room mantle corbels. But the architect didn’t know which way the scrolls rolled – away from or towards us over the top.
I specialize in wood carvings of any type. When I meet a customer, I ask questions to find out exactly what they want. They are hiring me to do a job and my job is to give them what they want. Not everyone expresses themselves clearly so questions help clear the air and get the details required to do a good job. And the secrets to good word-of-mouth advertising is doing a good job with friendly service, for a reasonable day pay.
Besides being nearly the only diverse wood carver / sculptor in New England, I’m also old school and believe I’m entitled to nothing. What I get, I’ve earned and appreciate. Once I’ve secured a job, I always end that contact exchange with this statement: “Thank you for the job and I hope to only exceed any expectations”.
I read once that if we just “do what we’re here to do, let the chips fall as they may and let God’s grace take you to where you’re supposed to go”.
What moment in your career do you look back most fondly on?
There is no single moment in my career that I’m proud of. I’ve had to earn my wings and it’s every moment that makes a career. In a field that’s limited in need, it’s not easy to keep one’s head above the water line. I think I’m most proud of just keeping myself in business for the last 26 years and doing some really nice pieces for people and businesses. It’s great making things happen when no one else can.
I worked at Storyland for the original owners sculpting anything they needed and they were restoring one of two real “Silver Bullet” trains in the world. A guy in Maryland had the second one of these trains. The owner of StoryLand and the guy in Maryland would exchange parts as they could to refurbish each of their trains. The Maryland guy needed a rare corner urinal. The Storyland owner had one, but only one, and he needed parts the Maryland guy had. The Storyland owner came to me one day, dropped this corner urinal on the bench and asked if I could duplicate it for the Maryland guy to get some much need parts. I knew I could and did. A few hours later the Storyland owner came back and saw his finished urinal and was simply amazed. It was finished, painted and top coated and ultimately looked exactly like the real thing. He was all smiles and totally happy at that moment. He couldn’t believe what had taken place. I always joked with him that “he’d taken my career into the toilet”. That was a defining moment for me where I realized I could do things like this.
Contact Info:
- Address: 1 Wharf Drive
Groveland, MA 01834 - Website: www.ElwinDesigns.com
- Phone: 978-521-0363
- Email: justingordon@comcast.net
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Image Credit:
Sand Sculpture Ogre pic by Martha Lardent
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