Artist Tim Kurucz sends me a text saying he’s available for an interview at any point AS LONG AS THE OILERS AREN’T PLAYING. It’s written just like that with the last words all in caps.
LET’S GO OILERS, dings the next text. Granted, the same refrain rings across the city. At the time of writing, the Oilers are about to (almost) make one of the greatest hockey come backs in the history of the playoffs.
Within days, the City’s collective excitement is as palpable as Kurucz’s. He’s standing in his driveway in his blue and orange jersey and he reaches into his car for one of the many chainsaw carvings he’s created over the last several years. As he pulls it out of the vehicle, I recognize the shape of the Stanley Cup.
He shakes his head, lips pressed together, grimacing slightly.
“As I found out, after hours of searching the web — top to bottom, inside, outside, every orifice it has, you can’t find all the proper dimensions,” says Kurucz, his voice rising with frustration. “Sure, you can get the height, and some of it. But, I know where it’s not accurate, because I’ve looked at pictures of it a million times.”
Like many Canadians, Kurucz sees hockey as more than a game. It’s something that connects him to his late father, who saw Kurucz become the captain of his Canadian Athletic Club team, and win provincials. “It is one of few moments in those last few years that I saw true utter joy from my dad,” says Kurucz. “Then, he was dead by fall from cancer.”
Kurucz’s past and present are rooted in the neighbourhood of Westridge. The land across from the home in which he’s lived since junior high school was once a pig farm. “You know what direction the wind was always blowing,” says the 61-year-old artist with a smirk.
One day, the self-proclaimed “sports guy” — who had never done any kind of art — picked up a piece of cedar and carved it into a jackfish while staying at his friend’s cabin in Seba Beach.
Carving instantly became a big part of his life. He was all in — hook, line and sinker.
He starts with the chainsaw, getting the general shape, and then uses an arsenal of tools of all sizes, sometimes even crafting a tool himself, to get just the right depth and detail on the wings of an eagle or the curving smooth roundness of a whale body. He does both custom work and creates his own art for sale. This month, he’ll compete in Rig Hand Distillery’s amateur chainsaw championship.
He recently had a little sasquatch stolen right from his lawn, but like a bit of karma, he says, someone else took a wrong turn, saw his flying pig and purchased it.
The stories spill from Kurucz as quickly as his feet move on the pathways that wind around his Westridge/Wolf Willow neighbourhood, where he easily climbs over railings to look at his early “little free carvings.”
Earlier in the pandemic, Kurucz wanted to engage community members who had more free time to wander the woods. So one day, he packed up his chainsaw and tools, parked by the road — just as we have — and looked for a dead tree in the forest. He found one and carved a face into it.
He’s standing by it now, pointing at the nose in the middle of the carving, framed by a big beard, saying it was hard to get that one feature just right.
Kurucz initially remained anonymous as he was not sure how the City would react. But he only works on dead trees and does not damage any of the living forest, and he’s passionate about creating public art. Recently, he started signing the carvings with “Ruf Art by Tim” and sometimes includes his phone number and email. He has a Facebook page where he engages with the community and shows what he has for sale.
So far, the reaction has been overwhelmingly positive. But the wood gets soft and starts to rot, and he notices a red spray mark on his first tree, signifying the City will soon cut it down. His favourite carving — a protective wood spirit with the words “we are watching you” — suffered the same fate a year and a half after it was carved.
He continues to create these carvings in Westridge’s web of connected trails: the face of a lion peaks out between branches, a bear’s head looks at those who pass the end of a wooden footbridge. Into a tree behind some neighbourhood houses, Kurucz etched a memorial carving of a ski buddy friend who passed away too soon, and he recently created a dragon, the intricacy a marked change from the simplicity of early designs.
He’s carved roughly two-dozen Westridge-area trees, and admits that while most were for the public there are a couple that he may never find again — those were simply a way of getting out his emotions, a type of art therapy deep in the woods. The art on the trees is temporary but fulfilling in a way Kurucz, rarely lost for words, struggles to explain.
We’re standing by a more recent work of art. A word on the sidewalk simply instructs you to “look,” with arrows pointing towards a woodpecker. Someone’s added their own bit of art — a rock perched on the carving that says: “When my wife is sad, I let her colour my tattoos. She just needs a shoulder to crayon.”
It might be a dad joke, but the idea of relieving stress through art and connection is one that Kurucz knows well.
He lifts his shirt to reveal his own tattoo — it’s a little cartoon alien. When doctors told Kurucz about his own rare form of cancer years after his dad died from the disease, he surprised his health-care team with a steady stream of wry humour.
The diagnosis was scary as even the doctors really did not know what to expect, and Kurucz had to wear a colostomy bag for a time. Now, many years later, he’s cancer free but the little alien in a space craft dubbed the “poop express” is a reminder of his resilience and unfaltering humour.
Like his passion for hockey, he says, he gets it from his dad.
This article appears in the September 2024 issue of Edify
