Jack Grinyer has been making beautiful wood carvings for 35 years.
The 97-year-old Severn resident retired from being a property assessor in 1984. When he found himself with more time on his hands, he decided he wanted to try his hand at carving wood.
“I started carving a couple of things and they turned out pretty good,” he said. “It kind of took off from there.”
Grinyer isn’t sure where his interest in carving came from. It was just always something he thought he wanted to try.
“I started doing more intricate carvings as I went along,” he explained. “I’ve now done four-and-a-half dozen.”
For Grinyer, it’s all about the challenge. He has always enjoyed being a master of perfection.
“When I get something done, completed and painted, I get a good feeling,” he said. “It gives me a lot of confidence to accomplish something.”
Most of Grinyer’s carvings are of animals, but he has also done a few carvings of people.
“I’ve done a couple of ballet dancers, a couple of children, and things like that,” he said. “I have a pair of elephants that people seem to love.”
He has carved sculptures of tigers, zebras, polar bears, lions, buffaloes and various birds.
“I’ve carved pretty well every animal you could think of,” he said. “People seem to really love the artistic part of it.”
Grinyer says wood carving isn’t for everyone, stressing it is painstakingly difficult to perfect.
“You have to have an awful lot of patience,” he said. “When you are carving, if you take a piece off the wrong way, you can’t put it back on again. You have to be very careful with what you are doing.”
Each carving takes Grinyer about a month to complete, and he doesn’t take many breaks while working on them.
“When I get started, I just don’t want to stop,” he said.
Most of his carvings are given to friends, family and neighbours. He has never sold one.
“It’s just a hobby,” he said. “I never had any desire to do it for any other reason than for my own enjoyment.”
Grinyer gets a lot of enjoyment out of giving his carvings to people he cares about. For the first time in a year, he has dabbled in his wood carvings by making chickadees.
“I have chickadees out here at my house all the time,” he said. “So, I thought I would do some chickadees sitting on a branch.”
Unfortunately, Grinyer’s chickadees may be his final wood-carving project.
“I doubt I will do much more. I am 97 years old,” he said with a chuckle.
The Richvale native is a father of three and a grandfather to four. He is a widower who lost his wife, Dorothy, in 1993. He says his wife always enjoyed watching him work on his carvings.
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