CARL E. FEATHER / Star Beacon
BUCKEYE LOCAL Schools art teacher Dennis Kortyka recently completed
another carousel horse carving.
?Tantus? took 851 hours of research, preparation, carving and painting to
complete. Kortyka has also done a giraffe, lion and other horses in wood.
Dennis Kortyka spends 851 hours on a carousel horse
By CARL E. FEATHER - Staff Writer - cfeather@starbeacon.com Associated Press
There are 196 rivets on the figure. Each rivet took about five minutes to fashion from small wooden dowels; Kortyka had to file down the top of each pin to make it look like a rivet head.
The entire figure was hand sanded, and at times Kortyka’s fingers would bleed from the abrasion. Kortyka’s sweat and blood are literally in this work.
Thanks, in part, to having plenty of snow days in the recent school year, Kortyka had the work mounted on the pole and ready to paint after 715 hours of labor. On April 18, as Kortyka was moving the work to show his granddaughter the progress, the horse toppled over and its leg broke off.
The break, while discouraging, was not disastrous. Kortyka drilled the leg pieces, repaired it with dowel pins and reassessed his approach to mounting the horse. He then proceeded with the final stage, painting. He gave the figure four coats and often used a rag to impart a patina to the finish.
Kortyka named the horse “Tantus,” which means “great one” in Latin. He carved a “K” emblem into the side of the armor, and the symbol can be interpreted as standing for Kortyka, knight or the king’s horse.
The figure has joined his wife’s giraffe in the carousel room of their home. He says Tantus is for sale, but seriously doubts if he will be able to find a buyer willing to pay the kind of money that would compensate him for the 851 hours that went into Tantus’ making.
That’s the longest Kortyka has devoted to a carving, and yet he knows it will probably be topped by his next project, a horse reared up its back feet.
“God willing, I’ll do it,” Kortyka says.
However, after devoting so much time to Tantus, Kortyka has some serious catching up to do.
“Right now, I got a honey-do list big time because of this,” he says.
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