There's a saying in the art world that goes, "If you can't make it good, make it big. If you can't make it big, make it heavy." By that measure, you can be pretty sure that Steve Tomashek is really good -- he works ridiculously small and keeps the weight of his pieces to a couple of ounces instead. A dozen of his creatures could fit in the palm of your hand.

When I first came across Steve’s work in 1998, his photos of his carvings usually featured a penny in the picture to illustrate their minuscule scale. It didn’t seem to me that a penny for this guy’s thoughts was enough, so I proposed that we photograph them more playfully, more in the spirit of the carvings themselves. Some of his mice, for instance, are barely three-eighths of an inch tall; instead of using a penny to show just how tiny that is I thought it would be fun to stand them in the holes of a wedge of Swiss cheese, as if those holes were the windows of an apartment building. Steve was game, so we started to stage photos using props that turned each picture into a little story.

I’m not the only one transfixed.  At the art fairs in the U.S. and Europe where Steve exhibits, people buzz around his work like bees visiting flowers. You have only to watch children cluster around his booth, their sticky little fingers pointing at his tiny pigs, chickens, gorillas, lizards, elephants, monkeys, ducks, and dinosaurs to see how fascinated they are; they can't tear themselves away from the world he has created for them. Grown up or still little, to get a good look at a miniature, you have to draw in close. In doing that, your perception tends to concentrate itself. To peer in at a small, finely detailed object is to exclude what's going on around you -- the wider world falls away. You look at miniatures as through a tunnel. . . they funnel and focus your perception. . . they draw you in.

Steve Tomashek’s sculptures trace back to the earliest art of man, to the walls of the caves at Lascaux, to the Venus of Willendorf and figures made from ancient pieces of bone. Intensely concentrated small packages of energy that you can hold in the palm of your hand, they have the power of amulets and talismans. They are charms, totem animals you can identify with: a tiger, two inches long, tensed to pounce, all but devours its prey with its stare. A lemur, the nervous wreck of the jungle, seems ready to jump out of its skin. Spilling forth from a couple of tools almost too simple to be believed, a whole zoo springs to life from scraps of basswood no bigger than a cookie or a lump of coal. I have been photographing Steve’s creatures for more than ten years now, and for me, no less than the day I first laid eyes on them, they are still charged with that antic wild spirit -- the slapstick and the pathos that animates everything alive.

-Glenn Gordon

The first of these tiny tableaux appeared in an article I wrote profiling Steve for Woodwork magazine in 1999. Since then, we’ve gotten a little carried away: Steve’s slide show has more than a hundred of our pictures of the micro-beings that keep tumbling out of the clown car of his apparently inexhaustible imagination. It’s probably illegal to have this much fun putting on a parade, but we mean to get away with it as long as we can.

His knife moves in response to the impulses that stir the animal itself. He studies the animal's characteristic postures, the way it moves and carries itself, then distills his observations into a gesture an inch or two high. His creatures seem alive. Some of them look like they have just been caught red-handed in the act of being who they are. They fix you with stares of such animal intensity that you can’t turn away your gaze. They make me want to return the gaze through the lens of a camera.

The tools Steve uses to create his teeming, bug-sized little world consists of a grand total of two or three knives, a small stone to keep them sharp, a few files, and some sandpaper. Along with a few of those thimble-like rubber fingergrips used in offices for flipping through papers, which he uses to protect his thumb from cuts, this is the whole extent of his kit. Steve Tomashek has achieved an enviable economy of means in the pursuit of his art, both in the minimal number of his tools and in the amount of fun he can squeeze out of a piece of lumber. He gets more mileage out of one plank of basswood than most woodworkers get out of a boatload of mahogany. After a carving is done, he paints it as meticulously as if it were Persian miniature, mounting the work on a toothpick so that he can twirl the carving and work on it from all sides without having to handle it. When the painting is complete, he signs and dates the animal on the bottom of one of its feet in handwriting so small you need a magnifying glass to read it.

There is a secret to making a figure carved out of a lump of wood seem alive, but no one can say what it is. It might have something to do with being able to feel, inside your body, what it's like to be that animal, and then transmitting this feeling into the wood with the tip of your knife. The vivacity of Steve’s carvings comes from his gift for sensing an animal's structure, for feeling the action of its bones and muscles, from the inside out, so to speak, even while he carves the animal from the outside in.