Wood sculptor's life work is carving the crucifix

MAT-SU — Eight years ago Charles Lochner began transforming chunks of wood into optical illusions of living ducks.

The final products look so real and lifelike that people had to touch them with their own hands in order to believe they wouldn’t burst into life and fly away. Even after touching them, the cold wood surface seemed incongruous with the lifelike image.

Lochner’s journey into the art of sculpting came later in life than most master carvers’. It happened one day in 1996, while teaching at the King Career Center in Anchorage. He walked into the assistant principal’s office and noticed a duck decoy sitting on the desk.

“I was intrigued by how real it looked,” Lochner said, “and he invited me to carve with him.”

Lochner was mostly ignorant of carving. A graduate of Minnesota College of Art and Design, he was experienced in sketching, but three-dimensional objects were another matter.

Lochner describes himself as an obsessive research fanatic with a driven personality. From the moment he took up carving, he was consumed by the art.

Lochner relentlessly studied bird books and felt the muscles, bones and feather textures of dead birds to better understand their anatomy and physiology. He studied the iridescence of feathers and the reflection of light off their surface. Lochner had no interest in whittling little duck-like approximations — he wanted the real McCoy, or as close as he could get. He wanted the wood to transcend its material composition to the point that no man, animal or bird could see through the illusion.

Lochner quickly surpassed his first mentor and, in his first year carving, won a first-place award in the novice level at the Ward World Wild Foul Carving Championships, the premier international wood-carving competition.

In subsequent years he would win other competitions. By 2000, Lochner placed second in the world championships, master’s level, beating nearly 3,000 carvers from around the world, some of them sixth-generation carvers. Lochner had only been carving for four years.

“I came in so fast that I don’t feel like an insider,” Lochner said.

After 2000, he retired from competitive carving, citing the pressure and politics of high-stakes competition and began carving for personal enjoyment.

Lochner realized, however, that his talent was beyond his years and in 2000 began what he calls the culmination of his life’s work. It was not for money or recognition. This time he was carving for a higher purpose and the work would consume him for three and a half years.

Lochner is a lifelong Catholic and a member of Sacred Heart Parish in Wasilla. When the new church was being built in 1998, Lochner joined an art committee for the new building. Someone had donated $8,000 to purchase a crucifix for the church and Lochner volunteered to find an artist to create one.

“I searched all over the world — Japan, Italy, and then someone suggested that I carve it,” he said. “So I brought my birds in and everyone on the committee thought they looked real.”

Lochner soon discovered that carving a lifelike, theologically and historically accurate crucifix was a very different matter than making believable duck decoys. His time working on ducks, however, turned him into a master carver and when he had the opportunity to carve a crucifix, he was prepared.

Lochner researched the crucifix and the story of the Passion of Christ. He studied the Shroud of Turin, pored over hundreds of artistic renderings of Jesus and read the visions of past saints who claimed to have seen Jesus.

“It was one of those things that gets beyond you,” Lochner said. “The challenge was to really check over scripture and really know the Passion so that what I rendered in wood would not do violence to the Passion of Christ.”

The person who originally donated the money said they didn’t want anyone from Alaska to create it because they didn’t think Alaska had that kind of talent. Lochner said the church gave the money back and for the next three and a half years, he carved for free.

The wood was shipped up from Louisiana in large blocks, which Lochner cut into four-inch squares and then glued back together to ensure that the crucifix would never twist or crack as it aged.

“I wanted it to still be around three or four hundred years later,” Lochner said. “I knew it would hang in the most special gallery ever. It wasn’t one of those pieces that would come and go — It was going into the permanent collection.”

Lochner started with the face, working on the folds of skin, hair and facial features. In the summers he moved the body outside his garage and carved on his porch. He said visitors, repairmen, mail carriers, door-to-door missionaries and salespeople would stop by his house and end up staying for hours, just watching him work.

“We had a garage sale once and the crucifix was about two-thirds done,” Lochner said. “People would stop and watch and talk about it. The glass eyes would catch people.”

One of the most difficult aspects of the crucifix was carving the wound in Jesus’ side. Lochner studied human anatomy to get a better idea of where the wound would have occurred. When he finally started carving the hole in the side of the body, Lochner said he looked up and the carved face appeared to be watching him.

“He was lying on his back,” Lochner said. “The first thing I carved was his face, so he watched me carve the whole body.”

After years of work, Lochner was nearly finished with the carving when he reached a roadblock. Due to the technical difficulty of making wood look like cloth, he had saved the loincloth as the last thing to carve but it proved more difficult than he imagined.

“For four weeks I didn’t know what to do,” Lochner said.

As the days and weeks passed he prayed and worried and grew anxious. He thought of hiring someone else to finish the crucifix and then one Saturday he woke up and could see the image of the loincloth.

“I had to carve it while I could still see it,” he said. “It took me about four hours and I worked so fast that my wife thought I was ruining it.”

When he was finally finished, Lochner said the weight of the project humbled him. He remembers lying on the ground in the fetal position, weeping.

“It was crushing,” he said. “I knew this was probably the epitome of all my talents.”

After building the cross out of old cottonwood planks that had been buried near an original Alaska homestead, Lochner finally hung the crucifix at Sacred Heart Parish.

“We hung it up and it was covered with a fabric,” he said. “When they released it there was a widespread gasp throughout the church.”

Lochner said the moment the crucifix left his house, it was no longer his own.

“This is God’s work, God’s hand,” he said. “The birds were just his way of preparing me for the crucifix.”

Lochner said there is something called enlightened grace in the Catholic church. It occurs when someone is moved by seeing the crucifix.

“Sometimes I see people look at the cross and cry. That’s an emotional thing for me because I know the spirit is moving in people.”

Contact Joel Davidson at joel.davidson@frontiersman.com.