North Ogden resident has woodwork in his blood

Barry Holmes has an old photo of his grandfather standing on top of an amazingly tall stack of logs loaded on a horse-drawn sleigh.

"He'd been in log work his whole life. My dad worked with his hands in log and rock his whole life, and so have I, so it must be in the genes -- that or we just stay uneducated, and don't move out," he joked.

Barry Holmes is not uneducated -- he earned a commercial art degree from Weber State before giving in to genetics and starting a successful career building log homes.

But after about 30 years, he had to give it up.

"When you can't lift logs anymore, then you try to do something that's not so heavy," the North Ogden man said.

He returned to art, but in a way that allowed him to continue working with wood and building houses.

Holmes creates wall hangings that look like miniature ghost towns. Each small house, saloon or sawmill is made from old barn wood, driftwood and rusted metal.

Holmes began making what he calls "yesteryear designs" four or five years ago.

"I started just doing one or two buildings on a design, and then it evolved into three or four buildings so it looks more like a little ghost town," he said.

Each piece of art takes five to seven full days to make. The ghost town starts with a base -- a barn-wood board with a lot of character from years of weather, wear and tear. Then Holmes creates simple building shapes from blocks of wood and arranges them on the base.

Buildings are finished with a veneer of barn wood, cut to look like old boards, or rock. The town continues below the baseboard, with stairs and ladders leading down.

"My idea behind these designs was to make it look old and run-down ... and also kind of precarious -- the ladders on the designs are falling over or tipping," Holmes said.

Finishing touches include windows made from rusty screens, and chimneys, roofs, water barrels or troughs fashioned from pieces of rusty tin cans.

"You go up these little canyons and you'll find where some farmer's lived, and he's got a little garbage dump full of cans," Holmes said. "Nobody else wants them, so I pick up a few."

The wall hangings usually have a piece of unusual driftwood incorporated into the design. Holmes finds most of it on the banks of Idaho's Salmon River.

"Most people say I'm nuts," he said. "I go out and say, 'This is a neat piece of wood,' and they'll go throw it away. To me, it's worth a lot."

Holmes' art isn't limited to the ghost town wall hangings.

"Barry's always built furniture," said his wife, Marcia Holmes. "When we had a log home, he built our dining table and our chairs out of rawhide, just like the pioneers had done it."

The living-room ceiling of Holmes' home is fitted with heavy wood beams from an old barn; he bought them from a guy who had been storing them for 30 years. The coffee table is made of old wood, with a top surface of rusted metal. Even the wreath above the fireplace was created from twisted pieces of driftwood, worn smooth by the river.

The focal point of the room is an entertainment center made out of barn wood, its doors decorated with vertical driftwood branches.

Holmes is also a painter, and frames his work in barn wood.

Painting helped Holmes through the loss of his 26-year-old daughter, Natalie Boren, who died of a rare disease a few years ago.

"I did some paintings that really, to me, signified when Natalie passed away," he said. "I'd do a road, and the back end of the road was like a backdrop of brightness."

Marcia Holmes says the barn-wood art was also cathartic.

"I think that that's been healing for him, to be immersed in that work," she said.

But Barry Holmes says working with wood, for him, isn't about working through trials -- it's about doing something he enjoys.

"I either go ice fishing, or I have to make something," he said.

Holmes has given most of his wall hangings away, as gifts to family members. He once put a small piece of his wood art in a shop, but it was buried in the back of the store and didn't sell. That didn't bother him.

"My wife asked me, 'Are you interested in getting in the business?' " he said. "I just kind of like making them. I don't know if I had to make 10, whether I'd want to do it or not."

Of course, he probably would -- working with wood is in his genes.