Gaperville Creative is…

I am located in Kremmling, Colorado in Grand County between Steamboat Springs, Winter Park, and Summit County, which is best known for its skiing at Breckenridge, Keystone, Copper Mountain, and Arapahoe Basin . My name is Mark Mahorney and I am the artist and craftsman. At this time I do not have a public studio, but I try to post most of what I make here. I work at my customers location and out of my home, which consists of an art studio, wood shop, outdoor carving station, and a chunk of my garage set aside for my antique printing press. I primarily work on a wide variety of commissions and try to be the guy people in the surrounding communities and resort towns think to call when they want something special and custom made.

As you can see I’ve done a lot of creative work with beetle-killed lodge pole pine trees, something we have no shortage of here in the Colorado mountains. I’ve done both traditional wood carving and chainsaw carving. Though I wouldn’t call myself a chainsaw carver, as I don’t do the little chainsaw bears you see on the side of the road. I consider my work to be casually green, both in the sense that it is rustic and casual cabin art, and in the other meaning of the word casual that it is somewhat by chance. I just keep coming up with ideas and new ways to put a free resource to good and profitable use.

Woodworking is in my blood. My father, grandfather, and step grandfather are/were all woodworkers. My dad makes unbelievable fine furniture and has a shop to die for. My other grandfather was a woodcarver for more than 30 years after retiring from Chicago and moving to the Ozarks. He passed away in the spring of ’08 leaving behind hundreds of folk carvings. I wish he could have seen my recent work.

On the web I specialize in designing clean well-designed sites using open-source content management systems so that owners can update the sites themselves. I’ve done a variety of web related work for several large, well-known corporations, as well as for my own sites and a few organizations and small businesses. This is something I used to do a lot more of . I’ve gradually began doing more wood and less web, but I’d still take on a web job whenever the opportunity arises, particularly if there is an artistic bent.

By training I’m an economist and have about eight years experience as a freelance writer, specifically in producing financial content and economic analysis. I’ve always drawn, not always so well, but being a DIY kinda guy, when I wanted some clean simple illustrations for my own websites, I set about teaching myself Pen & Ink. It turned out that I was pretty good at it right from the start I guess for the same reasons I was really good at analyzing market information. I have that kind of personality that enables me to focus on details and tune out the world for many hours on end, too the point of being a hazard to my own health if I allow it. Consequently, making thousands of tiny marks and lines is perfectly natural to me.

If there’s something you’d like me to build or draw, chances are I can get it done. All the time people ask me things like, “do you do carved doors?”. Well no, to date I’ve never done a carved door, but I’d love to, and I’d never carved a totem pole, never built a little cabin, or a large log deck, or carved a bunch of bears in trees either until I did them. If it’s wood, I can probably build it or carve it. I’d love to take on ranch gateways, wooden signs, bars, relief carvings, etc…

Thanks for visiting my site.