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Doggy heaven in Vermont

BY JOHN CURRAN | The Associated Press

March 16, 2008

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Degas had his ballerinas, Monet his water lilies. For Stephen Huneck, inspiration comes on four legs - playing on a beach, its teeth dug into a stick, or tugging on a piece of rope.

The eclectic Vermont folk artist, who started out whittling wood sculptures of dogs and now specializes in dog-themed furniture, woodcut paintings and children's books, has carved out a unique niche with his whimsical reproductions of Labrador retrievers and other breeds.

And his Dog Mountain studio and dog chapel - on a picturesque 175-acre hillside farm in rural northern Vermont near St. Johnsbury - have evolved into a kind of doggy Disneyland, drawing animal lovers and their pets from all over, and some to mourn.

To Huneck, dogs are more than man's best friends.

"I really believe they're the Great Spirit's special gift to mankind," said Huneck, 59. "Dogs teach us more than we teach them."

But his first lessons were tough ones.

As a toddler, he was bitten by a German shepherd, terrorized by a St. Bernard on his newspaper route as a teenager and left heartbroken once when his father bought a puppy for the family - but took it back to the pound the next day.

"Through it all, I just loved dogs," he said.

Saws carve paws

A longtime antiques collector, the Sudbury, Mass., native turned to art professionally in the early 1980s, using old-fashioned chisels, saws and planes to carve his first few canine creations. Much of the basswood, cherry, maple and pine he works with comes from his farm.

His woodcuts - dogs with halos, dogs peeking out from under bedcovers, dogs sniffing each other - brim with the playfulness of a 6-week-old puppy. His sculptures and furniture, meanwhile, range from his Angel Dog statues to coffee tables with sculpted legs that look like dogs, from night tables with dog-head handles to rocking dogs.

Dog lovers fairly hound him for commissioned works. His client list includes actress Sandra Bullock (a dog sculpture wedding present for her husband); Dr. Phil McGraw of TV talk-show fame (a drawing of his dog); and U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy, whose Washington, D.C., office is decorated with Huneck art.

"I think, to describe his work to someone who has never seen it, you simply say, 'You have to see it, I can't describe it to give it the credit it deserves,'" said R. Scudder Smith, publisher of Antiques and The Arts Weekly, in Newtown, Conn. His books, including "Sally Goes to the Beach," "Sally Goes to the Farm" and the new "Sally Gets a Job," feature woodcut prints accompanied by simple, pithy captions that celebrate man's unique relationship with dogs.

"Like a dog, he has no inhibitions," said Rob Hunter, gallery manager for Frog Hollow Vermont State Craft Center. "He has tapped into that playfulness you get with a dog."

The dog chapel grew out of a bit of inspiration after his 1994 hospitalization with acute respiratory distress syndrome, which nearly killed him. When he came out of it, he said, he had a vision.

"I kept thinking what a great thing it could be for people not only to mourn the loss of a dog but to celebrate nature and their relationships with their dogs," he said.

A wag-your-tail chapel

Using wood harvested from his property, Huneck modeled the one-room chapel after 19th century Vermont churches, with vaulted ceilings, stained-glass windows and wood pews.

Built at a cost of "several hundred thousand dollars" and completed in 2000, its stained-glass windows have images of dogs pieced into them.

The wood pew-style benches in the 30-by-22-foot main room have one-dimensional dog likenesses at either end that are so realistic, Huneck said, that live dogs sniff their bottoms.