Wood — it’s not like it grows on trees. Hawaii’s woodcrafters take it from wherever they can find it.

Let’s take, for example, the biggest and smallest pieces of furniture in this year’s Hawai‘i Forest Industry Association’s juried Wood­show, which runs through Sunday at the Academy Art Center at Linekona.

To make a full-size bench that is also a polar bear, Maui’s Clay Simpson contacted a landscaper acquaintance who had felled a pine tree. The log was already cut into 10-by-12-inch chunks and some 2 1/2-by-12-inch boards.

"I reglued them together in the shape of a bench. Oh, yeah, I knew before I started it would be a polar bear," said Simpson, for whom carving life-size animals is something of a specialty. "I didn’t want to waste any wood, so I used just what I needed."

The lumber was glued together with the grain running in the same direction so it could shrink and expand without compromising the joints. Although the rough shaping was accomplished with a chain saw, Simpson prefers using an Arbortech tool attached to an angle grinder for detail work, as there’s no fear of kickback. Dremel tools took care of the small details, and the eyes are taxidermy glass eyes placed with epoxy putty.

The woodcrafter also knew he wanted a kind of translucent finish that accentuated the grain. "The problem is that pine has dark-colored knots, so we mixed up paint that was the natural color of the pine and painted them over, and then thinned it to a stain that helped hide the blue-grey and brown bands — the color was blended."

Then there was a light dusting of pure white applied by airbrush, catching the high points of the wood like snow on icebergs. Several coats of translucent varnish completed the effect.

"Look closely and it looks like the Arctic," Simpson said.

The finished piece weighs about 200 pounds — "it’s hollow inside, so two men can easily move it, even in elevators" — and it can be yours for roughly the price of a new economy car. (Check with Simpson at www.simpsonartworks.com.)

With his wife devoted to animal research, Simpson has carved dozens of large animals for the Calgary Zoo in Canada and would love to have a similar relationship with the Hono­lulu Zoo. In the meantime his bread is buttered by making cabinets on Maui.

At the opposite end of the spectrum — and we have managed not to make a Three Bears reference yet — is a "Goldilocks" chair created by Larry Nitz of Kailua.

It’s a wee thing, only 10 inches tall. It’s made of cypress from a tree out of Nitz’s own yard, a tree he planted himself in 1976. Fully grown, it had a 14-inch trunk, but when it had to come down, he made sure it didn’t go to waste. He cut planks out of it freehand, using a chain saw.

"There’s really nowhere to go on Oahu to make planks out of trees, so you do it freehand or use an ‘Alaska mill chain’ on your saw to keep the planks as even as possible under the circumstances," he said.

The 2-inch-thick wood was then dried for two years.

He got the idea from unfinished "shower furniture" and from a granddaughter. "The Three Bears are part of our repertoire," Nitz said. "Cypress grows well in Hawaii, and because it’s a soft wood, you just need to remember to use bigger and longer screws."

At last report he hadn’t decided whether to put a price tag on the piece.

Nitz is a professor of political science at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. So why does he shape wood as well as young minds?

"Because I never never met an impolite, obstinate or stupid board!" he laughed.