By Chris King
Photograph by Frank Di Piazza
David Goodwin carved canes long before he needed one to walk. Before his accident in 2003—when he was working on a roof at a job site, “stepped into a shadow and hit the ground”—he carved canes mostly “on whims” and in a spirit of preparation that became prophetic. “Working construction, as you get old, if you make it to retirement, you beat your body up pretty good,” Goodwin says, “and you are probably going to need a walking stick.”
Since the accident, which he says shattered a leg and his pelvis and “crunched, mashed and popped everything else” on his body, Goodwin certainly has needed walking sticks, and he continues to carve them with a stylized calm. In his rambling 18th-century stone house in the “state streets” neighborhood, down near the Mississippi River off South Broadway, Goodwin takes choice sticks of sturdy wood and matches them with handles he carves into images of fish, birds, dogs, cats, monkeys, mermaids—even a quietly malevolent demon whose outlines Goodwin glimpsed in the wood he was working.
“There are carvers out there you can tell, ‘Carve me a trout,’ and they’ll say, ‘OK,’ and carve you a trout. Me, I say, ‘OK, I can carve you a fish,’ but it’s going to be a fish,” Goodwin says. “Stylized is how I work, rather than super-detailed.” “Stylized” is indeed the word for this work born initially of a whim but continued now out of painful necessity. The work is smooth; the faces of the creatures—even the demon—are calm, as if airbrushed into the wood rather than cut from it with an X-Acto knife. Yes, an X-Acto knife.
“A lot of people laugh at me and wonder why I don’t use carving tools, but I like X-Acto knives. I have worked with them my whole life. I know what they can do; I like the way they work in my hand,” Goodwin says. “My pop was one of those guys who said, ‘If you’re going to have a knife, it should be sharp.’ I’ve always kept my knives sharp as razors. With X-Acto knives, you don’t need to keep sharpening; you just pop out the blade and put in a new one.”
Each piece, which takes six hours or longer to carve, costs $100 or more; the more time-consuming work typically involves detailed inlays of choice materials, such as animal teeth or the ivory he salvaged from an abandoned piano. He carves in walnut, mahogany, live oak and Brazilian ironwood, much of it castoffs from construction sites he worked in his abler days. One of his cane handles was recently affixed to “a vine-choked stick” he had kept in his possession since high school (in St. John) in the 1970s. Why drag around a gnarled stick for 35 years? “Because I knew it would make a nice cane,” Goodwin says with the gentle, self-effacing smile that accompanies most of the things he is induced to say about himself.
Goodwin, who was given his first pocketknife when he was 5, has worked with his hands for as long as he can remember. His first work in the trades was high-end finishing work and restoration on projects like the Campbell House Museum, at 15th and Locust, and the Robert Henry Stockton House, one block south of Powell Symphony Hall. Goodwin says he never would have resorted to grunt construction work like what he was doing on that roof in 2003 had his higher-end clients not, one by one, moved away or died. In the past, Goodwin also carved stand-alone sculptures and furniture. Examples of this work left in his collection exhibit the same quiet dignity as the canes and the man, but in Goodwin’s disability—and with Social Security payments slow to materialize—canes are more his speed these days. Goodwin says, “If I sit there, it doesn’t matter how long it takes me to do it; if I keep picking at it, I’ll get it done.”
