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The Doors of Cooperstown - Wood Burning Art[ NEW YORK, NY - NYC - 7/22/2012 - www.Littleviews.com ]>> The following article by Steve Barron of Syracuse, NY, shows how the takeaway from a vacation area can lend itself to a spectacular craft, in this case, wood burning scenes of Cooperstown, NY. Enjoy! [Editor]  My wife and I had always wanted to have a Log cabin getaway and seized upon the opportunity when we inherited lake front property in Cooperstown in 2010. The property had been in my wife's family since the mid-60's but the existing small camp and property was in need of significant repair.  We decided to tear down the existing camp and build our dream home (log home) getaway on the property. During the design process, I was looking for ways to incorporate elements of the uniqueness of the Cooperstown area into the home.  The home was designed to take advantage of the majestic views of Otsego Lake, but needed more to capture the remarkable atmosphere that one experiences when visiting the area. Being an amateur woodworker in my spare time, I came upon the idea of building two panel interior doors out of pine.  I have a brother-in-law that has a laser engraving business and the idea was to have him engrave images of local scenes onto the upper panels of the doors. Unfortunately, upon doing a test panel, we quickly discovered that the laser setup he had didn't work very well with Pine as the wood was too soft.  Instead of giving up, my wife suggested I try wood burning the images onto the doors by hand. You might remember using a wood burning kit as a kid, but to be honest, I had never tried it since growing up, or on such a scale as these.  I spent weeks locating pictures of local scenes of the Cooperstown area and then narrowed them down to the ones for the doors.  I blew the pictures I found up to approximately 11 x 17 inch sizes and traced the images to the door panels. After burning a few small samples, and getting used to the 5 or so tips I had for the wood burning pen, I dove head first into my first one.  I spent a few hours each evening after work working on the panels. The first one took me about 20 hours to make (Canoe Rental). And I was pleasantly surprised by how nice it came out. This gave me the confidence to tackle the rest of the project. In all, there are 11 doors I built for the camp, but two doors have images on both sides resulting in 13 wood burnings.  Some were more complex than others and the hardest one was the image of chairs on the Otesaga Hotel Porch. This one took two weeks of nights and weekends to complete. Keeping those lines straight took time!  Overall, I estimate I have between 400 to 500 hours of time in creating the images on the doors.  As I write this we are nearly complete with the construction of the camp and hope to have our certificate of occupancy within a couple of weeks.  Anyway, the doors are installed and truly give the camp a unique presence while paying homage to the great town that is Cooperstown NY. Article, photographs and art by Steve Barron. First published on 8/5/2012. All rights reserved by www.Littleviews.com. Please ask before republishing any work by Steve Barron |
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