By Steve Pick
If you’ve ever met Rick Wood, you’ve heard him laugh—a high-pitched bellow, sometimes punctuated by gasps. He’s a person who finds humor, or at least whimsy, in almost any situation. It’s no surprise, then, that his art is as whimsical as all get-out.
“I call them my wind-up whirligigs,” says Wood, showing off his work. He builds little wooden scenes with moving parts that work at the turn of a crank or push of a button. There might be a dancing Beatle Bob figure at the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Or a string might slide through a person’s head as an advertisement for something called “Mental Floss.”
“I do these things for fun,” says Wood, “mostly to give to friends or to show off in my home. I created the Ramones mobile when some friends of mine had a baby about 10 years ago.”
That mobile will bring a tear to the eye of any nostalgic punk rocker. Meant to hang over a baby’s crib, the figures of singer Joey, bassist Dee Dee and guitarist Johnny all have angels’ wings. Drummer Marky, the only one of the four Ramones still alive, does not.
“That was done when they were all still alive,” says Wood. “At the time, I was playing around giving them wings, and I didn’t see any way to put them on a guy sitting at a drum kit.”
Wood co-owns Silver Wing Studios, which builds scale models of build-ings andinteriors for arch-itects. The work is spectacularly detailed, providing a meticulous vision of how his client’s building will look when it is finished, but music is Wood’s passion.
“I got started doing the whirligigs back in 1994 or ’95, when [local musician] Bob Reuter was in the hospital,” says Wood. “I decided to build an image of Bob onstage, with his hands moving on the guitar, and had so much fun doing it, I’ve come up with more over the years.”
His next project may be his most elaborate yet. Wood is working on a large replica of Frederick’s Music Lounge, the recently closed center of a certain part of the St. Louis music scene, where Wood could be found most nights of any given week for the last few years.
“I like to mix an element of fantasy into things that are very accurate,” says Wood, “so I’ve got little pictures of the paintings which were on the wall, the giant Stag sign in the window, the cigarette machine, the ceiling fans with the underwear hanging on them—but I’ll put Fred’s favorite band, the Gourds, onstage, even though they never played there. “And”—this is the kind of joke that makes Wood laugh every time he shows a new piece to a friend—“I’m thinking of having a car crash through the front window.”
