?Located in the Sylvan Abbey Memorial Park in Clearwater.
According to (
visit link)
CLEARWATER – There are bears in the city.
Two of them share tree space with an eagle, an owl and a raccoon. A mother and cub stand nearby. A couple of others watch from afar.
Visitors to their oak-canopied home west of McMullen-Booth Road, between Sunset Point Road and Union Street, don’t always see them right away. They’re more apt to notice the neat rows of headstones, some with potted poinsettias or other flowers beside them.
The marble angels and other sculptures, some larger than life, are hard to miss as are the green canvas pavilions pitched over freshly dug dirt.
But the bears are there, blending into the trees because that’s what they are – trees. Rather, tree stumps sawn, sanded, ground, and drilled into wildlife sculptures.
“Most likely, the tree took a lightning hit,” said Ben Marshall, operations manager of Sylvan Abbey Memorial Park, as he walked around one of the larger pieces.
This one includes not just the trunk but also several of the larger limbs. Marshall pointed out a raccoon peering out from the end of one limb and an owl nestled in the end of another. An eagle perched on a limb above where a bear seemed to emerge from the trunk; another bear climbed a limb on the opposite side.
The menagerie, and the other tree trunk critters in the park, is the work of Brevard County artist Keith Carroll who uses a couple of older model Stihl chainsaws, one large chainsaw with anywhere from a 20-inch to a 36-inch bar to cut the bulk of the trunk away from the creature inside and one smaller one with a 14-inch bar for more detailed work.
“A friend of mine was doing chain saw sculptures,” Carroll said. “I was an assistant pastor at a church and needed something part-time to help support myself. When I asked him about it, he said that it was funny but he’d been praying about asking me himself.”
Carroll said his friend sold him his equipment and moved out of state.
“I fumbled my way through it,” Carroll said with a laugh recalling his first attempts. Carroll said he was a cosmetologist at one point and cut hair, but that was the extent of his sculpting experience.
Fifteen years later, Carroll’s work is in parks, cemeteries and private collections around the state, and he’s done a couple of pieces for clients out west. Carroll said he can work with just about any hard wood including sable palm and that he completes most sculptures within one day.
Carroll explained that people sometimes buy cemetery plots because of the trees nearby and then get upset when the trees die because of lightning or disease. Turning them into sculptures rather than removing them completely eases the additional grief.
“One woman called to thank me,” Carroll said. “Her dad ended up being buried near a heron I did, and he had been a woodcarver.”