I was born in 1959, in a woodsy place north of Seattle. My early visual impressions include drawings of buildings on my father’s desk, skeletal frames of buildings under construction, Native American Art on the walls, and trees against the sky.

I’m told that as a child I whittled everything within reach, soap, flour, butter on the table. In high-school I started carving wood in earnest. I did my degree at the University of Washington, where I studied sculpture, bronze casting, welding, and Northwest Coast Native art.

In 1984 I fell in love with carving river stone, while living in the Olympic Mountains. This prompted me, in 1989, to create a studio in the woods, on top of a little mountain on the Island of San Juan.

Contact Tom Small: tom@tomsmallsculpture.com