photo: Cedric N. Chatterley

George SerVance Jr

Art Form: Folk/Traditional Crafts and Visual Arts

Thomasville, NC

 

About George SerVance Jr

George SerVance Jr. easily ranked as one of North Carolina's most accomplished woodcarvers. Working from a small basement in his Thomasville home, he carved a stunning array of dancing dolls, walking sticks, Biblical figures, and other pieces. His workbench sat amid carefully organized stacks of arms, legs, and torsos. A back room held work in progress: a crucifix for a local church, a cane capturing the struggle between carved snake and lizard, a sculpted cat ascending a staircase, a kneeling prisoner in a ball and chain. "It's a gift," he said, "something that comes like second nature. Nobody ever showed me how to carve. The Lord just gave it to me."

As a child, he made his own toys. "I was always tinkering with something," he said. During the depths of the depression, he saw a dancing doll in a local dime store and wanted it. His father told him that he could make it, and "I believed him," he remembered. With a discarded apple crate, a handsaw, coathanger, big-headed matches, and a butcher knife, he set to work. Within twenty-four hours, he had fashioned his own doll. Six decades later, SerVance would still make dolls from scrap wood. However, the wood was maple and mahogany, throwaway fragments from Thomasville's sprawling furniture industry, And the dolls were miniature masterpieces of the carver's art.

Like many African American families in the South during the 1930s and 1940s, the SerVance family moved north seeking jobs and better living conditions. Eventually, George returned to North Carolina. Here he worked with Thomasville Furniture Industries until he fell seriously ill and had to have a lung removed.

During his recovery, a recreational therapist discovered that he could carve and provided him with a rough-cut figure and an accompanying illustration. "I saw that picture," SerVance recalled, "and knew I could do better than that." And he did, discovering in the process the extent of his gift.

Dancing dolls were the mainstay of SerVance's carving, but they by no means defined the parameters of his artistry. He got repeat orders for a full-size cat he first carved more than a decade ago. The same was true for his carving of a bound slave, a figure loosely modeled on chain-gang workers he remembered seeing as a child in Henderson. At the same time, he continued to draw images from the world around him and translated them into wood. In his later years, he also felt a strong calling to make Biblical carvings.

Like most woodcarvers, SerVance did not fit into a neatly defined tradition. He thought of himself as always "tinkering" but never "training," "experimenting" but not "apprenticing." Over the years, however, he developed a personal style that emerged from, and still clearly embodies, a distinct African American community aesthetic.

Before his death in 2008, he sold his dancing dolls around Thomasville for over forty years. "People come up to me and tell me how much they enjoyed that doll when they was a boy. And they buy from me now for their kids. So, it's just given me a lot of happiness to know that somebody's enjoying it as much as I did."