By Alisa Boswell-Gore

Charles Brooks hates to see things go to waste.

There was no exception to the scraps of mahogany left over from building his porch trim.

“Mahogany is a wonderful wood to work with; it’s a straight-grain, hard wood, and it doesn’t rot, so I thought it would work well on the porch,” said Brooks. “I ended up with a bunch of pieces, and they were just sitting under foot, and we had a whiskey barrel we had used for a plant and the wood had rotted. So, I had a bunch of stuff under foot, so I just thought, well, I’ll just use the whiskey barrel ring to trace off on a piece of shelving that I had, and I arranged the pieces in a way that pleased me.”

And a unique artform was born.

“I had fun doing it, so I made a couple more pieces with rings I had lying around,” he said.

Although if you ask Brooks, he’d say it’s not really an artform.

“I don’t know that I’d go so far as to say it’s an art. It’s more crafting,” said Brooks, who very modestly says, “well, I don’t know about that” when people tell him just how amazing his wooden art is.

But he won’t deny that it’s unique.

“I tried to look online to see if anyone else is doing this kind of stuff, and I’ve had a hard time finding anything similar to this,” he said of his round pieces of artwork that entail various pieces of shaped wood placed strategically on the background.

“A lot of what I do is assemblage, meaning that I just place them (the wood pieces) however I want to place them to best fit what I want to do,” said Brooks, who has done a variety of southwest themes, sports themes, as well as a piece after the children’s book “Goodnight, Moon” and one based off of the Joni Mitchell song, “The Circle Game” that shows the passage of time through pieces of wood that show the different phases of life and the different seasons.

And he takes his crafting seriously, saying that some of the projects were “an exercise in learning how to use tools” and if they didn’t “make the cut,” they were taken apart and redone.

“It was just a way of trying to use up some stuff that would have otherwise ended up in a landfill,” said Brooks. “I like to piddle, and I’ve got some tools in my shop.”

But what initially began as piddling around with some scraps turned into a two-year hobby with a few personal requests being made over time.

And he makes most of his crafts from scraps of some kind, using tools he inherited from his father.

“I thought, well, I need to put this (the tools) to good use, and if I can make something pretty, it would maybe be a way to honor his memory,” said Brooks. “It’s creative; it’s a way of preoccupying some of my spare time and utilizing some of the tools to make something I can hang on a fence or a gate or a wall.”