Peter Forbes has carved for pubs, breweries, restaurants, even Ringo Starr.

Photograph by: Mike Wakefield, NEWS photo

Artist Peter Forbes is big on being original. He’s made an entire career out of it, in fact.

The North Vancouver woodworker is the only barrel carver in Canada, and with clients ranging from local restaurateurs to international winemakers, he’s definitely made his mark.

It all started about 20 years ago, when Forbes, 60, decided to drop everything and go on a little adventure “I saw a thing on the news, a guy in Seattle had built his own sail boat and he was looking for crew.

They were going go sail around the world,” he says. “So I went to bed that night, throwing myself around the bed wondering ‘Can I handle this, can I go offshore?’”

Apparently he decided he could and after making a few phone calls, he found himself on the dock in Seattle being interviewed by local TV stations and National Geographic.

The vessel itself, which had been featured in boat shows, was hand built out of teak wood, says Forbes. One day, the skipper approached him with a chisel and asked him to do some work on one of the rails.

“I’d never carved a day in my life and I said ‘Are you kidding me?’ You made this thing by hand and you’re giving me a chisel and you want me to start hacking that? Are you nuts? One mistake and I just ruined your yacht’”

He ended up doing it anyway.

“The chisel just kind of slid into the wood nicely, and I said ‘Oh, this is neat.’ That was it, that just instantly got me involved in three-dimensional work.”
When he returned to the North Shore, Forbes took up at a signage shop, hoping to hone his craft.

“I did all the Keg and Cleaver signs and all the barrels . . . and sort of left my legacy around town,” he says. Eventually he decided to go out on his own, but he didn’t want to simply compete with other sign shops — he wanted to do something different.

“I saw a picture of a carved barrel in a magazine and once again some epiphany just hit me, ‘Aha!’ So I did some research and nobody really does it, this guy made a one-off,” he says, adding only two other North Americans are currently practising the old European art form right now.

“I got a barrel and I just started teaching myself how to do it. And there were a lot of pitfalls until I finally got it figured out so now I’m the only guy in Canada who does this,” he says.

He’s currently working on a project for a wine cellar in Istanbul, Turkey but he’s also done work for pubs, breweries and even former Beatle Ringo Starr.
“Thank god for the Internet. The world is my oyster. I just wrap it up, stick it in a box and ship it,” says Forbes.

He often designs the carvings himself, unless there is a specific logo, and goes to great lengths picking the perfect grain of wood. Then he takes his time chipping away at it.

“You don’t work at it strictly for eight hours a day. . . . It’s very focused and you tend to start going too fast and then you’ve got to stop because you’re going to make a mistake.”

Forbes recently made himself a carving — it’s an image of his hand clenching a wood chisel and punching through a barrel top.

Check it out along with the rest of his work at www.barrelcarving.com.

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