“You may know your business, but no one else will if you don’t advertise,” Miles Carpenter at one time opined. Carpenter advertised his roadside ice, soda-pop, and vegetable stand in Waverly, Virginia, by creating a menagerie of idiosyncratic, funky, and humorous sculptures of animals and people. Both an additive and subtractive sculptor (he constructed as well as carved his work), Carpenter explored a variety of methods and modes of working for nearly thirty years in order to achieve his artistic goals. The result is a range of expressions, from realistic carved renderings of watermelons to wild and outlandish root sculptures. Using roots as the basic understructure for sculpture is actually quite common for self-taught artists, though the intentions, motivations, and reasons for using roots is wide and varied.

This ambitious “root monster” is humorous and dynamic. Most museum visitors have learned how Michelangelo, a carver in stone, allowed the material to bring out the figure hidden inside. Miles Carpenter seems to echo this process, once recalling, “There’s something in there, under the surface of every piece of wood. You don’t need no design ‘cause it’s right there, you just take the bark off, and if you do it good, you can find something.”

Brooke Davis Anderson, "Beast," exhibition label for Folk Art Revealed. Stacy C. Hollander and Brooke Davis Anderson, curators. New York: American Folk Art Museum, 2004.