Large scale carving, the raw material

I recently started work on a large scale carving at St Anastasia’s church, 1095 Teaneck Road, Teaneck NJ.  I’m carving a life size Virgin Mary into the standing trunk of a large softwood that died recently.  It’s been exciting to get to work this large.

Here’s a picture of what I started off with. The bottom 8 feet of the tree were left standing by the tree removal people. I needed to start by trimming it down a foot and a half, and picking what angle the figure fit into the trunk, which has a pronounced lean.