His jeans are clean and creased, his workbench impossibly tidy, every tool shining and sharpened and tucked precisely into its place.
These are important things to know, these things about his rather obsessive attention to detail, and the fact that there's not so much as a single wood shaving on his carving bench tells much about who he is and how he does the remarkable things that he does.
Indeed.
"When I saw his work, I was just blown away," said fellow carver Terry Porter. "It's absolutely excellent, and very, very detailed. He is what I call an expert carver."
So expert, in fact, that Porter invited Smith down from his Flathead Valley shop to be the featured artist at Missoula's upcoming Western Montana Wood Carvers' Show.
"It's an honor to be asked," Smith said. "It means your peers think you're top-notch, and that means a lot to me because I'm totally self taught. I've taught carving classes, but I've never taken one."
He learned, instead, the only way he knows how - he obsessed on it until he perfected it, reaching the point where he now has won a wall full of awards.Smith always liked wood, liked shop class in high school and liked making his own furniture. But his career was 22 years in the Air Force - which might explain at least part of his fascination with all things orderly and shipshape - and it wasn't until he retired in 1994 that woodworking really took hold.
"I started from scratch," he said, "with some books and a few tools."
Back in 1999, he stumbled on a carvers' gathering at a campground up near Glacier National Park "and I was immediately hooked. There were something like 200 wood carvers there, and I thought, 'I think I can do this.' "
And so he went home - "confiscated the bedroom and didn't come out for two months," said Jody, his wife of 35 years.
"Well," Smith explained, "when I get into something, I get into it full-bore."
His intent was to carve Native American figures - "I love everything about Indians and their culture," he said - but when he emerged from that bedroom after two long months, "I came out with some pretty marginal carvings of Santa Claus."
Santa in particular, it turns out, and Christmas in general, is a very, very big deal to Jody, who while not as compulsively neat as her husband nevertheless has enough single-minded focus to have collected a few hundred Santas over the years. Smith figured he could add to his wife's collection with some carvings of his own, but "now I'm stuck. That's all I do, is Santas."
He carves them and she paints them, these "Santa's from the Heart," as the business is known. No power tools, no electric carving knives, just simple hand tools, some of them homemade.
"I do everything by hand," Smith said.
This is Santa unplugged.
He begins with a big old hunk of Wisconsin basswood - softest of the hardwoods - and armed with nothing more than a sharp mental image starts whittling away.
Actually, don't mention whittling when Smith's around. Don't mention chain-saw carving, either. And don't use the word "cute." And certainly don't move his tools around.
"He can be a little particular about things," Jody explained.
Particular enough that much of his work is done beneath a giant lighted magnifying glass, where every wrinkle around the twinkling eyes of that jolly old elf, every line in Santa's outstretched palm, every crease in his forehead is carved, exactly neatly and precisely.
"I don't paint in any details," Jody said. "He carves everything."
It is the difference between a master and a mere whittler.
Here is Santa with his pipe, with his bag, with his staff, with his lantern, with his dove, with, for whatever reason, his rabbit. Here the old boy's beard is thick with detail, every hair its own slice of the knife, flowing, moving like the wind, creating remarkable motion in standstill statuary.
The beard alone was two weeks' work, and the whorl of whiskers swirls into a wrinkle of sleeve, draping into the fold of hanging robes, and the texture of the grain actually fools the eye - is that wood, or fabric?
"They take hundreds and hundreds of hours to do," Smith said.
He pulls the rabbit from Santa's grip, showing the old elf's upturned hands. "These are my hands," he says, "right down to the lines and creases in the palms."
When he hands his Santas over to Jody for painting, "I can't watch," Smith said. "It's too stressful for me. When she's painting them, I'm in my room pacing around like an expectant father."
She likes quiet when she paints, because music makes her dance. He works to hillbilly music, the sort Appalachian folk whittle to, "because he doesn't dance," Jody said, "he just carves."
Then, Smith said, he puts her paint work under his magnifying lens, finding the tiny flaws that must be smoothed out. Jody rolls her eyes again.
Sometimes, she won't let him have any say, just chooses the colors herself and he must just trust.
"We do a good job critiquing each other," she said. "I can't carve, but I sure can tell him how it should look."
And so she does.
One of these days, Smith figures he's going to get around to carving that Indian figure. Or maybe - he grows very animated here - "a great big guy, a huge Santa, a life-sized St. Nick, because sometimes you just have to let your imagination go and get out the big mallets and start whacking on a big hunk of wood."
It's hard to imagine, really, but that's what he said.
For now, though, Smith continues to work in the tightly controlled world of the small, designing the details that have made his Santas among the most sought-after on the market. Generally, he carves a dozen or so each year, selling direct to a select group of wealthy and discerning collectors.
Except when he keeps them. "I hate selling them," Smith said. "Each one is an individual to me."
Jody rolls those eyes yet again. "He carves for show," she said, "and I paint for dough."
The Santas sell for between $200 and $5,000 apiece, and Smith has been known to double the price of favorites he didn't want to sell.
"But they sold anyway," he said. "Millionaires, billionaires, you wouldn't believe who collects these carvings. It's really quite remarkable.
"It's all I think about. I go to bed thinking about carving, and I wake up thinking about carving. I just love it."
Carve your own niche
Have some spare time to whittle away? Drop by the annual Western Montana Wood Carvers' Show, sponsored by the Missoula Wood Carvers. All sorts of wood wares will be showcased at the Missoula County Fairgrounds. Doors open the first weekend of May, from 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. on May 3, then from noon to 4 p.m. on May 4.Or to check out Rick and Jody Smith's finely carved Santa's, drop them a line at santasfromtheheart@bresnan.net.
Reporter Michael Jamison can be reached at 1-800-366-7186 or at mjamison@missoulian.com.
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