Struggling to find your purpose in life? Carwood “Woody” Jones understands, maybe more than most.
“At 10 years old,” he says, “I had my first midlife crisis.”
Then he spent decades hunting for his calling, cycling through jobs from law enforcement to mental health counseling and owning a bar at Underground Atlanta. As Jones neared 40, his aging dad was still asking when he’d settle on something. Anything.
And then, while hitchhiking in the West, still on the quest, a chance encounter started him on a fresh path, one that isn’t likely to show up on a list of potential careers.
Now, going on four decades, Jones spends his days making wooden boxes that, when hand cranked, often depict playful, animated scenes from a person’s life and sometimes the fantastical.
He sometimes earns thousands of dollars on the most elaborate pieces, which have been commissioned for corporate titans, politicians, doctors, lawyers, scuba divers, cockroach trap marketers, golfers, bar owners, duck hunters, spouses. Anyone really.
The hand-painted scenes he portrays include duck hunters in the wild. A marriage proposal in front of a lighthouse. A Viking ship undulating on a roiling sea, pursued by a fearsome dragon with jaws that snap open and shut. A dentist drilling into the mouth of a prone patient, whose legs sporadically shoot up into the air.
There are also workers on a Ford factory line, showing different eras and vehicles over the span of a century, with parts circling overhead on a conveyor chain. And an elaborate three-level world, with heaven, hell and people who each have both angels and demons floating above them. Also a scene of 150-plus moving figures inside a miniature Grand Central Terminal in New York. And a mother in a delivery room with a doctor holding the baby and a father unconscious on the floor.
Credit: Miguel Martinez
Credit: Miguel Martinez
Many scenes are rich with inside personal jokes and so much going on that they become oddly engrossing, especially for wooden contraptions in a digital age. The mechanized creations, he calls them automata, are rooted in history that goes back to ancient Greece and China and are found in different forms around the world.
Jones has made several thousand of the dioramas, which are really pieces of folk art that move. Now he is tackling one of his most challenging pieces yet: creating one based on his own life.
He already knows it will include tigers.
How to tell your story
When he’s in his booth at big art festivals, Jones, with his white hair and mustache, dapper suit, jaunty hat and wry smile, looks a bit like Col. Sanders from the Kentucky Fried Chicken bucket days.
But at nearly 79 and still working more or less full time, he’s often laboring in the basement workshop of the Decatur home he and wife Joan Thompson share with two parakeets, four cats and three dogs. (One dog is named What? Another is Why Not? And a cat is Where?)
On a recent afternoon he used a band saw, Dremel and sanders to transform a block of wood into what will be him, if maybe a slightly more muscled version than reality. His nose will be carved from a tiny pinch of wood. Almost everything is made of wood. Anything else would feel like cheating, Jones said.
There are exceptions. Hair on tiny figures might be fashioned from hot glue shaped with a soldering iron. He might use a few metal nails, screws, springs and welding wire.
The mechanical area below his scenes is often left visible, so people can observe how it works. Typically, a hand crank turns an axle that goes through different cams — blocks of square or rounded wood. As the cams turn, they push up another block of wood called a follower, and the follower moves wooden sticks or stiff metal wires that go up through the floor of the scene and attach to whatever needs to move. That’s how wooden birds fly across a sky, waves roll, figures dance and arms wave. Sometimes, the mechanization includes multiple pulleys and spring chains.
Credit: Miguel Martinez
Credit: Miguel Martinez
Beyond saws, Dremels and sanders, Jones’ relies heavily on carving knives and chisels as well as everyday items converted to make miniature worlds. He uses fingernail files and an electric toothbrush with pieces of glued-on sandpaper to shape and smooth Lilliputian pieces.
Most of the finished scenes are 16 to 19 inches high and 10 inches to 2 feet wide. All but the most elaborate ones are designed to be displayed on a standard shelf.
But building this stuff isn’t the most difficult part.
“Most people don’t know how to tell their story. I’m struggling with my own,” he said.
In a full life, what do you depict and what do you cut out? What are the moments that matter and — what he’s most interested in — add joy in the retelling?
Many people insist they don’t have anything all that exciting to portray in a diorama. But Jones is convinced they are missing the truth. They just need it coaxed out of them.
What, he wants to know, are the odd, interesting personal moments, “the things you get teased about at the family reunion or Thanksgiving or college reunions? Those are the legends about you that your plaques on the wall and your résumé are not going to reflect.”
While working on the piece about his own life, he spent weeks thinking about what to include. He wrote pages and pages of notes. He laid out thoughts on index cards.
On one, he included options for a title to emblazon across the piece, which he envisions laying out like a three-dimensional comic book page: “Woody the Toymaker’s Story.” “How I Found Who I Am.” “Curious Quest for Purpose.” “Psych Comic, Adventures in Self Discovery.” “The Toymaker’s Tale.”
As he has it laid out on a storyboard, he imagines the piece being roughly 2 feet by just over 3 feet and having four main levels and nearly 20 different scenes.
The first scene was never really in question. It will involve tigers.
When he was a red-headed kid around 4 years old or so, a tiger escaped from a traveling circus in his hometown of Indianapolis. Police warned people to stay indoors.
“They caught the tiger, but nobody told me,” Jones said. While he knew tigers could be dangerous, he mostly thought about how cool it would be to find one. “So I became a tiger hunter for the rest of my life.”
Which is a metaphorical way of saying he looked for adventure and a way to feed his imagination.
That quest took him down many different work paths. He jots down hints of some of them on his index cards: psychology, EMT-stuntman, scuba, advertising. Navy. Shore Patrol. Cop. Funeral home. Private investigator. Fishing boat. Carnival. He says he also sold Bibles, ran and later owned a bar and was an air traffic controller.
Credit: Miguel Martinez
Credit: Miguel Martinez
He had no real experience in woodworking. But while he was hitchhiking, a group that picked him up included a teenager who told him about carving figures out of wood. Jones decided to give it a try. At first, he made simple toys. Then he met a guy who made extra money making a figure that looked like a chicken dance in a box.
He experimented. At first he focused on churning out multiple copies of the same scene involving people at work. Business took off.
He had help from four part-time workers, including Joan, whom he would later marry.
One day, a man came to his booth at an art festival and mentioned how nobody made depictions of his particular line of work. He was a gastroenterologist. The chance encounter eventually led Jones down a path of specialization. Now he only makes custom pieces, often delving into the stories of individuals.
Sometimes, he’s done pieces for himself or for organizations. One that depicts scenes of Vincent van Gogh painting, with cranks that shift not only the background scene but the painting on the artist’s easel, sold for $10,000, he says. The sweeping one of people inside Grand Central Terminal sold for $24,000. And Jones says he got $40,000 for a package of 75 scenes placed inside three 30-foot-tall towers in a state environmental center in Pennsylvania. Other, simpler pieces might go for $500.
Credit: Miguel Martinez
Credit: Miguel Martinez
Finding your spot
Ann Barker, a part owner of Terrebonne Motor Company in Houma, La., saw Jones’ work during a big festival in New Orleans. She commissioned him to do a piece showing the history of her family’s more-than-century-old business. Barker shared lots of photos and information. She planned to give the piece as a surprise to her father on his 88th birthday.
She was at an airport in California when Jones sent her photos of the completed scene, she said. “When I looked at it, I absolutely burst into tears.”
“It was the history of my family come to life from my great-grandfather and what I have done every day of my life for the last 48 years.”
It included figures that were members of her family, including one of her grandfather from the 1950s and her father from the 1970s. When she presented it to her father at a family gathering, family members cried around him. “He couldn’t speak. He had big tears in his eyes. All he kept saying is ‘Wow, wow.’”
Jim Hart and his wife are friends of Jones and have commissioned two works from him. One shows how the couple met while taking photos at a spice market in Zanzibar, off the coast of East Africa. At the time, Hart was working on a contract for a marine park. The miniature figure of him in the scene is holding a piece of paper with tiny letters that are readable under a magnifying glass.
The piece is attached to the wall near the entrance to the couple’s kitchen. Visitors inevitably crank the piece and make the scene unfold. It makes them smile, Hart said. “It is like a little film that you control. ... That is kind of a magical thing to me.”
Jones has dozens of finished-looking prototypes in two rooms of his own home, along with lots of award ribbons from festival juries.
He hopes to have the piece about his life completed by February. He said the scenes in it will gradually unfold to show “a little kid trying to figure out his purpose in life ... to finally finding his spot.”
And what is that spot? “I finally found something I can do that makes people feel good.”
Credit: Miguel Martinez
Credit: Miguel Martinez
