Joe is the kind of guy you want to keep your eye on. He looks like he might have a nasty temper, a real chip on his shoulder. Something about him exudes force, and unmistakable authority.

"He's like, this heavy dude," says artist Michael Dennis of Joe's imposing figure, standing in the courtyard of Vancouver's Diane Farris Gallery. Joe is one of Dennis' monumental cedar sculptures: no arms or legs, or head; just a hulking torso, a thick neck and a deep crease in the wood, which on this sunny afternoon is being traversed by a pair of adventurous ladybugs running across what would be the figure's left shoulder.

"Joe was my father's name," the Denman Island artist says, by way of explanation. "And he was a heavy dude."

Dennis, who says and creates some pretty heavy things himself, has made an international name for himself by sculpting these human forms from pieces of wood that loggers have left behind on the west coast of Vancouver Island.

Using a crane he has mounted on the back of his flatbed truck, Dennis loads up logs with interesting shapes and carts them back to his home and studio.

He strips away the sap wood and any rotten sections with an electric chainsaw. Sometimes there is little left to work with, but usually there is enough to create one of these monumental figures.

"I'll bring them home set them in my yard and they sit around for a year or more," Dennis says, his aw-shucks manner belying a penetrating intellect. "I'm kind of watching them while I'm working or thinking about things and then I'll see a form," Dennis adds, just before the opening of his current exhibition, Elders Series.

Those towering forms, impermeable to the elements and thus suitable for outdoor installation, sell for close to $10,000. Dennis has sold his figures to Hollywood titans, to the University of Washington's sculpture garden in Bothell, to Simon Fraser University and many other public collections throughout the Pacific Northwest.

"Much of my work has addressed ancestors," he explains. "If we look back far enough, our ancestors lived in caves. They were much like us, less the technological niceties: the ate and slept, laughed and argued, sang and danced or stood quietly by the fire. The firelight cast shadows of their lives on the walls.

"I try to sculpt those shadows."

The breeze in the gallery's courtyard forces Dennis, 62, to use his big, workman's hands to brush aside his longish dark-grey hair, charged in places with occasional strands of welder's-arc white.

"If you had said to me, 'What about being a sculptor?' I would have said that's impossible, I can't do it," Dennis says.

"After Grade 2, all my education was science-oriented ... and there was [no art] going on in my family home. Being a firm believer in genetics, I would have said I can't do it. It was a complete surprise. A gift. Here's something I thought I couldn't do, but I could."

Dennis' education led him to the highest ranks of the medical world. In the 1970s, Dennis studied neurophysiology and was a professor at two of the most prestigious medical schools in the United States: Harvard and the University of California at Berkeley.

He got the big grants, he had a staff of researchers working under him, he even had tenure. With all of that, however, came unwanted heaps of "bureaucratic sh--," as Dennis calls it unflinchingly. He had to judge other people's requests for grants and he was asked to sit on more and more committees.

"The challenges left in front of me, like being the chairman of the department or the dean or the president were completely uninteresting to me. ... It was, like, let me out of here," he said.

The escape route was an otherwise innocuous request from a friend in the early 1980s looking for people interested in buying a share in 160-acre farm on Denman Island for $2,000.

"I'd come up here on holidays and there would be all these weirdos who looked like they'd crawled out from under a rock or something.

I felt more at home with these people than I did back there in the white-coat, doctor world.

"I would go back and think, Why am I going back here? And [my co- workers and students] would say, 'Oh, there's Dr. Dennis, welcome back.' And I would be thinking, Why am I here? They don't know, but I don't belong here."

While still working as a professor at medical school, Dennis began, during vacations, to build a home on his share of the Denman Island property. He had never built a house or anything else on that scale before.

Most of the materials for his home were purchased from lumber yards, but he had an interest in using trees from the area, even then.

"A few years before I had gone to a conference in Japan, in Kyoto, and in their architecture they would often use natural lines just to accentuate, and I thought I want to do that in my house, too."

That was when he began noticing the subtle shapes and bends in the trees. After friends complimented him on how well-built his home was, he decided to try his hand at sculpture.

Dennis sees value in things that other people often overlook. Besides the logs, he also takes the hoods of old cars that have been condemned to the wrecking yard, and shapes them into abstract busts.

"I tend to work with material that is freely available in my environment. Living here on the west coast of B.C., wood is definitely one of the items there is a lot of. Nothing is going to happen to this. It's just left lying there. Eventually it will rot and it will become the forest floor again."

Living in what he calls the "People magazine century," Dennis has an abiding interest in ancestors and the knowledge they possess.

"To my dismay I realized that I know no wise elders. I felt deprived. So, I decided that I must summon them from within."

Dennis jokingly wonders if there are any people with business acumen in his family tree that might help him sell more of his works, not that he really needs the help. Within a week of being installed in the Diane Farris Gallery courtyard, three of Dennis' current crop of Elders are already spoken for. One piece in particular has multiple suitors.

As of Monday, however, Joe, remained unsold. Who knows why? Maybe people are taken aback by the big chip perched on his shoulder. That sort of thing used to upset Dennis, but now he says he celebrates the unexpected.

"Suddenly it's okay. Just like people, nobody's perfect. No piece of wood is either. That huge valley running up the front of Joe," he says, looking at the cleft where the ladybugs are still exploring, "I kind of like it now."