I knew Jim Hart before he got so famous. When he wasn’t off in the wilderness, facing his fear of bears, he’d be out halibut fishing with his tsinni, his grandfather. At home, in the village of Old Massett on Haida Gwaii (the Queen Charlotte Islands in British Columbia), he played basketball. He stood six-foot-two, had hair blacker than the inside of a raven, a tease of a moustache and caramel eyes, which, like little windows in furnace doors, only gave a glimpse of the heat inside. When Jim took a shot at the basket, there wasn’t a woman in the bleachers who had her eyes on the ball.

But Jim was more interested in spending time with his elders, learning everything he could about these islands he says are “medicine” for him. When he began to carve, he made canoe paddles out of yellow cedar, and jewelry. “Carving and designing jewelry, you have to sit still, have the piece right close up in front of your face. You put on weight, making jewelry,” he’d say, grinning.

Jim felt he had to choose, eventually, between fishing and carving. Carving chose him. Robert Davidson, already an acclaimed Haida artist, taught him how to fashion his own wood-making tools, which gave him the freedom he needed. In 1980, he assisted legendary master carver Bill Reid with a monumental cedar sculpture called “The Raven and the First Men” at the University of British Columbia’s Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver, BC. It would become renowned.

“These [monumental] structures are part of a dream,” he said. “You want to build one. Build one and then your dream is carried on.”

He also liked working on them because they required him to move around a lot when he was carving. “I keep the weight off that way,” he’d say.

Jim apprenticed with Reid, putting the finishing touches on some of Reid’s most memorable pieces, including “The Jade Canoe,” a bronzed version now housed at Vancouver’s International Airport. Jim is grateful to his mentor, who taught him another kind of art. “I knew how to carve, but I didn't know anything else,” he recalls. “He taught me how to survive in the city when I came down from the village there. It’s pretty small.”

Over the years, Jim has received commissions to carve some 20 red-cedar poles for private collectors around the world. He has displayed his Haida designs on fabric at the Louvre in Paris—innovative designs bridging classical and contemporary forms. He shaped a nine-m (30-ft) killer-whale pole for the King of Sweden’s summer castle grounds, in Helsingborg, where most of the other sculptures are made of stone. “People there like to burn wooden sculptures,” Jim notes, wryly.

Ten years ago, Jim had his first solo exhibition at Vancouver’s prestigious Buschlen Mowatt Gallery. When the director Barry Mowatt asked Bill Reid to recommend a young carver for the gallery to represent, Reid picked Hart. “Jim’s a good rascal,” said Reid, a man from whom compliments did not come easily.

Jim worked onsite, chiselling away at a wooden mask of the moon, a large sculpture of Wasco, the mythical seawolf, and a two-m (7-ft) yellow-cedar pole. “It’s living art,” said Mowatt. “Jim likes to have people drop in on him while he’s working, the way people do when he’s at home, carving in the village.”

Mowatt says Jim’s work stands out because of the quality of the finishing, the exactness of detail. Jim, he says, has perfected Reid’s “art of being well-made.” His pieces have beauty and drama. “There’s an Easter Island quality to how he handles mass, or like the best of the Mayans or Aztecs. His work hearkens to the heritage of all native peoples.”

In August 1999, at the Memorial Chieftainship Potlatch at Old Massett, Jim raised a 17-m (55-ft) pole in honour of his family, and received his Haida name as hereditary chief of the Stastas Eagle Clan, 7idansuu (pronounced “ee-dan-soo”), the name once held by Charles Edenshaw (circa1839-1924), the legendary carver from whom Jim is descended. Jim, who is married with four children, now spends half his time in Vancouver. But at home in his village, he is respected for being a natural-born leader, committed to mentoring his community’s emerging artists.

And he will welcome anyone who drops by to watch him carve.

You will likely find him standing ankle-deep in red-cedar shavings, contemplating his biggest, ongoing task: the two-beam-structure traditional Haida longhouse he started building years ago before he got famous and busy. You’ll hear ravens discussing his progress from the branches of a monumental cedar, and frog-song from the cemetery. And Jim will draw you into the soft fires behind his eyes. “I’m carving my way to heaven,” he’ll begin.

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