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Scattered clouds with the possibility of an isolated thunderstorm developing this afternoon. High around 90F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 40%..

Some clouds. Low near 70F. Winds light and variable.

BEYOND WHITTLING: Woodworker Paul Lana begins projects with mallet and chisel, then performs the fine detail work with carving tools.

WORK IN PROGRESS: Paul Lana shows the next area where he will add detail to this pastoral wooden carving.

BEYOND WHITTLING: Woodworker Paul Lana begins projects with mallet and chisel, then performs the fine detail work with carving tools.

WORK IN PROGRESS: Paul Lana shows the next area where he will add detail to this pastoral wooden carving.

Ever since Paul Lana's mother, who was also his teacher, gave him and three other boys in his grade school class a pocketknife and a bar of soap and told them to carve a bear out of it, he has been working with wood.

The Oklahoma native and resident of Waterview The Point in Granbury started out by whittling, and over the years moving into carving, working with a mallet to start each new piece, and then moving to his carving tools for the finer details.

"I try to do my mallet work in the daytime, so I don't bother the other residents," Lana said. "And then at night if I can't sleep for some reason, I'll use my carving tools."

He has used the same set of carving tools for the last 50 years, because as he says, "Good tools are good tools. No reason for me to change them."

Lana, now 86, has worked for many years with what he calls "deep relief," and has been branching out to three-dimensional work in recent years.

When he first moved to Waterview, he used scrap wood he found in the firepit, and has moved on to ordering sugar pine from northern California. He likes the pine's bark because it helps accent the scene he is carving into the wood, and pine is almost as soft as balsa, but the finished product looks better, in his opinion.

"The pine is easy to work with, which I like, and the bark gives it a nice touch."

Married to his childhood sweetheart a year after he graduated from college, Lana was drafted by the Army that same summer, and spent the next two years at Fort Hood as a clerk.

"I typed my own discharge papers," Lana said. "I didn't want to have to stay a day longer in the Army than I had to."

Lana went on to a career in insurance, continuing to carve along the way, as he and his wife spent their married years in the Dallas/Fort Worth area.

He continues the tradition of service going back to his days in the Army, completing commissioned pieces for a first responder to the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, and that responder's daughter, a serving medic in the U.S. Army.

Each piece takes Lana anywhere from a few days to several months, and the most difficult piece he has done was a memorial he did for his wife. She passed away last March after 61 and a half years of marriage, and a three-year battle with illness that ultimately took her life.

He found some Western red cedar in the cemetery in Oklahoma where he buried her and took nearly two months to carve a red fox in the wood to honor her memory.

That piece is not for sale, but his other work is available for purchase in The Point lobby, and he is working with other artists in the community to put their work up for sale in an unoccupied space at Waterview.

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