When life leaves you stumps and you're Troy Evans, you make art.

A boyhood spent tromping through the timber and grasslands of his family's ranch near Roundup provided the inspiration and ingenuity to convince Evans to build stuff. He was the kid who loved to drag home logs to build forts and paw through the scrap bin to patch together a tree house. While other kids grew out of that phase, Evans never did.

He studied journalism at the University of Montana and design and architecture at Jamestown College. Then he went to work as an apprentice in the historic district of Charleston, S.C., building curved staircases for several years in the 1980s and early 1990s before founding his design business, Blockhorse Designs, in 1993. The carpentry piqued his taste for fine wood and the college courses expanded his world view.

"I've never taken an art class in my life," Evans said. "Art was looked down upon in the ranching world where I grew up and it wasn't encouraged."

Moving back home to Roundup several years back, Evans began to marry his rancher cred with a more evolved aesthetic. Evans works with area designers, re-creating the prairies of Eastern Montana at one of Billings' most unique restaurants, Walkers Grill, and crafting a 28-foot conference table carved into a tribal spear for a local investment company. As testament to his skill and growing reputation, Evans was named Craftsman of the Year by the Billings Association of Architects in 2004.

Evans speaks wood, coloring his conversation with tales of ancient kauri, a 50,000-year-old wood found buried in New Zealand. In his one-man show at Rocky Mountain College's Ryniker-Morrison Gallery in Tech Hall, giant wooden planks that look like part of the Flintstones' world adorn tables and benches that are polished to such a smooth surface, you'd swear they were velvet.

Jim Baken, longtime Rocky art professor, admires Evans work because it is true to Evans' roots.

"Artists always try to find their own voice; Troy has found his voice," Baken said. "Montana is so raw, rough and rugged, it seems wrong to create art that isn't like that."

Part of Evans' magic is his ability to confuse the senses. A massive writing table with only three legs. An untreated telephone pole embedded in a polished wooden bench.

"I said in my artist statement that I want to grab someone unexpectedly and inspire them to think in a new way," Evans said.

He occasionally combines what Evans calls his "signature" touch of iron lattice work with wood pieces. In the Rocky exhibit, "Mister Osage" unites hand-forged iron with English brown oak, osage orange and pear wood to make a stand that looks like a life-size Lincoln Log experiment.

Evans said he likes to create tension in his work to prod viewers to puzzle over how something works.

"This show explores a lot of new directions that I haven't gone before, but it also shows the Japanese line and the tension I like to create," Evans said.

That sense of adventure and challenge carried over into his living quarters. Evans and his wife, Coila, who is an oil painter, turned Roundup's 6,000-square-foot hardware store on Main Street into their home and studio. Their bedroom is a cube on wheels that is self-contained with flat-screen TV and a computer port. It's been a time-consuming project that Evans thought he would finish more quickly than he has.

"I'm starting to see why the cobbler's children have no shoes," Evans joked.