As a young child, I was strongly influenced by my mother who ran a small home business decorating cakes, planning wedding receptions, and making ceramic mold pieces in her in-home shop called The Mud Hut. As ceramic molds may sometimes become very heavy, wanting to gain favor with my mother, I would help her pour the clay "slip" into molds and set the molds in place for drying. My greatest pleasure was to open a cured mold and see the ceramic “green” (unfinished) piece that had been produced. This became the foundation for my love for carving. That was how I began carving into some of the ceramic pieces, creating my own chess sets in the clay, and learning about the art of molding and carving during my high school and college years. While in grammar school, my mother and I entered a birdhouse building contest by entering a small A-frame cedar wood house that stood in our back yard for many years. Although I graduated from Western Carolina University with a bachelors degree in accounting, I never lost my love for craft art.
In 1973 I married the love of my life and continued to enjoy carving, advancing to wood and wood working. We had no children; however, I learned that building a birdhouse was a perfect way to gain the interest of my niece and nephews. I designed a plan that would yield a perfectly fitting traditional “A” frame birdhouse that can be sawed using a hand saw making only straight cuts across a suitable piece of 1 X 6 pine lumber. Even a child can do it. I am now making birdhouses with my grand nephews. I set up a summer workshop with children building and decorating birdhouses during the summer. Contact me for setting up a summer workshop at your church, club, or community.
During 2007 I began decorating my birdhouses with discarded plastic bottle caps and cutting colorful plastic containers to depict scenes such as apple orchards, grape vineyards, citrus groves, daffodils, etc., and marketing these locally. I also make birdhouses with pine cone parts, tree stumps, tree bark, and broken tree limbs. Another variation of my work is to make birdhouse stands from discarded bicycle parts, even water falls that are topped with one of my unique birdhouses. If you would like a custom structure sculpted especially for you, please contact me and I will be very happy to develop a purchase order design to suit your specifications. Look at my work in the pictures that I hope you will find have the professional touch necessary to classify my birdhouse construction as works of art, and worthy of being accepted as Art Sculptures.
Thank you.

To visit my PHOTO GALLERY and see more of my custom work and other structures please visit my website at http://www.JVERNONART.com