MATTHEW BURNETTE, Staff Writer

Just like many Americans in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, Joshua Dotson discovered a passion for a new hobby that he soon found to have soothing powers: woodcarving.

“It’s a way for me to bring my own little doodles to life and actually give them kind of a soul, to take them from the 2D plane to the 3D plane, it’s therapeutic,” he explained. “It’s a creative outlet. It lets me sit and focus in quiet and quiet the mind and just create something.”

Dotson started carving figurines in Nov. 2020 during the lockdown period. He and his wife had a child under the age of one, and he needed to find a new hobby that wouldn’t disturb a sleeping baby.

“I’ve been a musician 20 years and when you’ve got a little baby, you can’t really be rocking the walls at ten o’clock at night, so I was trying to find something quieter and something that I could also put the kind of pent up creativity towards,” he recalled. “I found someone on Instagram that was doing it and I was like ‘Well that’s pretty cool.’ I’ve always liked sculpting and I just got a block of wood and a box cutter and started.”

Dotson plays the bass, guitar, piano, drums and sings and also serves as the Worship Leader at Outreach of Jesus Christ in Winchester Springs. He honed his carving skills by watching more experienced carvers’ online “how-to” videos, many of whom Dotson says are “really generous.”

“The community, by and large, is very giving, so a lot of these big-name carvers, they’ll put out full tutorial videos like step-by-step, kind of a “Carve with me” sort of video, and I did that for the first couple,” said Dotson. “I would just sort of go along step-by-step and kind of see what cuts they were making and why.”

“It’s kind of like watching Bob Ross. You really don’t get it until you can step back and look at it at the end,” he added.

Dotson says he would often see other carvers’ work and try to see if he could carve it himself, but once his skills became sharper, he started taking doodles he had drawn and making sculptures out of them

He takes a lot of inspiration from tabletop fantasy games like Warhammer and high fantasy films like the Lord of the Rings trilogy and Studio Ghibli’s Howl’s Moving Castle and Spirited Away. He also says that often the wood decides what it wants to be carved into.

“Even for just a blank block, I can have an idea of ‘Yeah, I’m gonna carve this,’ but ultimately the wood, if it starts to chip away or break away in a particular way, I’ll have to change it and kind of go with what the wood decides it wants to be,” explained Dotson. “I know that sounds weird, but it’s true. The wood ultimately will decide what it wants to be. One of the great sculptors said that they don’t really sculpt, the figure is already in there they just have to find it.”

Though Dotson does sell some of his pieces at events like Old Timers’ Day and the Beersheba Springs Arts and Crafts show, he avoids taking commissions due to the pressure involved.

“I carve for me at the end of the day. That’s what I do it for,” said Dotson. “It’s my own outlet, but other people seem to enjoy it too, so the ones that I’m okay letting go, I’ll put them up for sale, but with commissions, it’s too stressful. There’s just so much involved like I want to get it right and I want it to be perfect, but I’m my biggest critic. I can pick a thousand things wrong with each and every one of these that I could have done better.”

Dotson works as an Agency Manager for Hank Rymer State Farm in Tullahoma where he’s been since 2019. He says that he and his wife, who owns Proper Pandemonium Crafts, have weighed eventually moving towards a full-time schedule for their respective crafts.

“I’ve kind of tested the water with mine,” said Dotson. “It’s something we think about, going full time and we’ll just travel around and do shows and drag our kids across Middle Tennessee and East Tennessee.”

The two older Dotsons aren’t the only crafters in their family. He says that his daughter has taken a particular shine to his work, often asking him to make pieces specifically for her to paint.

“I have a little toy light saber key chain that she’ll take and then go grab one of my pieces of wood and she’ll just gnaw at it like she’s carving too,” he said. “She wants me to show her how to carve soap. I don’t know where she heard the idea but she wants me to carve soap bars, and she wants me to show her how to carve when she’s older.”

Each piece takes anywhere from 30 minutes to weeks to carve. After carving, each figurine is sealed with Danish Oil to harden the wood before painting. Burt’s Bees Beeswax is then applied to give the finished product a shinier look.

Dotson says he enjoys the painting as much as the carving.

“It’s like my unwind,” he explained. “I’ll break out the station, set it on the bed and just paint. That’s probably another couple hours’ worth, painting layer by layer and the detailing.”

No power tools are used for carving by Dotson. He says, as a musician, he doesn’t like the idea of using a tool like a Dremel.

“I’m weird about my hands, and the idea of having a Dremel, like a spinning blade, this close to my hand, I can’t,” he remarked.

Though up until this point Dotson has only sold his pieces locally, a new market may be opening up for him in the form of one of Gatlinburg’s oldest businesses, The Wood Whittler.

“I talked to them the last time we were down there about what someone has to do to get in, and they set me up an appointment,” he recalled. “I showed them some of my work, so come April, I may actually have some pieces featured in Gatlinburg which would be awesome and serious street cred.”

The overall response has been “really good” according to Dotson and the followers of his business page Fort Dotson Woodcrafts on Facebook have been “very supportive.”

“It’s very validating in a lot of ways,” he started. “It’s very vulnerable for any artist to put out like ‘Hey this is a thing I did. Does it suck?’ By and large it’s been really nice to have people enjoy my creative process.”