Dutch Baseball: Artist Peter Schuyff Carves Old Baseball Bats Into Extraordinary Spiraling Sculptures

Baseball may be the great American pastime, but Dutch <a href="http://www.schuyff.com">sculptor Peter Schuyff</a>'s stunning baseball bat sculptures bring a whole new dimension to the sport. For his "<a href="http://www.schuyff.com/bats-02.php">Dutch Baseball</a>" series, Schuyff spent days carefully carving away at old bats, transforming them into spiraling works of art. Read on for a closer look and an interview with the artist!

Schuyff originally started <a href="http://www.schuyff.com/pencils-01.php">carving ornate shapes on to pencils</a>, but after a trip to New Guinea transplanted his passion onto larger pieces of wood.

To date, Schuyff has carved about twenty bats, fifteen big logs, eight smaller ones and around three hundred pencils.

To carve a pencil takes about half an hour, but a full bat takes a whole day.

Generally, the sculptures end up with half of the wood becoming fragrant cedar shavings.

Schuyff originally started carving ornate shapes on to pencils, but after a trip to New Guinea transplanted his passion onto larger pieces of wood.

Speaking to Inhabitat, Schyuff said: "A few years ago, I took a very long walk into the highlands of New Guinea. At night, while camped out during the trek, I noted that there was not a lot to do. It was too dark to read and I shared very little language with the locals, so I sat by the fire and whittled branches."

"I carved them into the same helix and corkscrew shapes as the bats. I suppose those shapes were right because I could carve them by feel. I sort of held the knife stable and turned the sticks over and over. They almost carved themselves."

"In Vancouver, I had access to beautiful yellow cedar logs so I continued carving. I was always on the lookout for wood that I could carve, pencils, logs, broomsticks and so on. Then one day, I carved a bat and it was perfect."

"I started carving a bunch of them. The carved bats as a group are called "Dutch Baseball". This is because one day I was crossing the street with five or six finished bats over my shoulder and a guy in a car waiting for the light to change asked me "Hey what kind of bats are those?"" <br> <br> "Without skipping a beat, I said: "Dutch baseball." I don't know where that came from, it just dropped out of my mouth and has stuck."

<big><a href="http://www.schuyff.com">+ Peter Schuyff</a></big>