It was early June, and renowned, Sisters-based chain saw artist J. Chester “Skip” Armstrong had an unusually daunting project on his plate that he had yet to tackle.

He found the motivation in an arena far removed from the fine arts.

“It was Sunday of Sisters Rodeo weekend,” Armstrong said, “and that’s my day to go to the rodeo. So I’m there witnessing the bronc riders and the bull riders. I see the courage that it takes to get on a wild animal and ride it, whether you can run it to the end or not. Mostly they’re bucked off, but they get on.

“I took their courage and their energy and came back and said ‘I’m rodeo-ing this one!’ ” he continued. “And I started that night.”

That was June 9. On July 27, he finished the largest and most complex work of his 40-year career.

It’s a massive carving, commissioned for display in a new casino restaurant in Las Vegas, that depicts scenes of the Mayan creation myth and the Day of the Dead.

In a ceremony earlier this week, Armstrong named the piece “The Bones Remember … Dia de los Muertos.” Today, he is en route to Sin City to install it at Javier’s, a high-end Mexican restaurant opening in the Aria casino on the Vegas Strip.

That is no easy task: “Bones” is made from five 5-by-9-foot panels of Oregon alder from Mill City that Armstrong transformed into art using primarily a small electric chain saw, with a little help from a bigger chain saw and some detailing tools. He added figures that spill over the edges of the piece, expanding each panel’s total footprint to 5 feet by 10 feet.

Each of the five panels weighs about 600 pounds, said Armstrong, who said he worked 14 or 15 hours daily on the piece between that Sisters Rodeo Sunday and last week. (Bend sculptor Jan Hansson — Armstrong’s longtime friend and assistant of sorts — helped along the way.)

The finished product is striking, as evidenced by the number of jaws that have hit the sawdusty ground near Armstrong’s shop a few miles south of Sisters. Hundreds of people viewed “Bones” before it headed south, and their reactions ranged from awe to wonder to tears. Some bowed down, he said.

“Scale and magnitude — impact comes from that,” Armstrong, 64, said. “Impact is the emotional reaction that you have to a piece and as an artist, when I work big, I am emotionally excited. I’m excited about quality art on any level … but the greater and bigger it is, the bigger the impact.

“Trying to be objective, I am impacted by it … whenever I see it,” he said. “I was impacted in the act of creating it (and) as I built it up, I sat back and felt the power that I was creating. At that point, I know I’m on the right track.”

Armstrong was commissioned for the piece by Dodd Mitchell Design, an in- demand design firm working on Javier’s and other projects at Aria. The company found Armstrong after seeing his work on “Saw Dogs,” a reality television show on Discovery’s Velocity Channel about chain saw artists.

“Dodd Mitchell was surfing (channels) one day and hit on this chain saw show, and he was so enamored with the whole process that he … said ‘Find that guy,’ ” Armstrong said. “They looked up all the chain saw (art) images on the Internet, made a mark on everything that looked like they wanted it.

“And at the end of it, they found out who did it, and all of them were mine, so they said, ‘This is our guy.’ ”

The firm called Armstrong in February, but he was on a boat in Hawaii, away from Sisters for a couple of months. When he returned in March, he began doing research for the piece and bouncing ideas back and forth with Dodd Mitchell’s director of design and development, Peter Bowden, who Armstrong credits with making “Bones” a reality.

Besides size considerations, Armstrong was given very basic parameters for the piece.

“It said ‘Mayan creation myth and Day of the Dead, 25 feet by 10 feet. What can you do for us?’ ” he said. “I had to take that and translate it into visual imagery … and in order to do that, I needed to be steeped in a little bit of the Mayan cultural base.”

For that, he turned to his longtime friend and artistic brother Steven Frandsen of Terrebonne, who “lives and breathes” Mesoamerican culture, Armstrong said. He also consulted friend and Bend-based graphic artist Dave Ember on the layout and overall look of the piece.

But since June 9, Armstrong has let “Bones” lead the way, and it has made an impression on the people around it. His wife, singer-songwriter Anastacia, wrote a song that jibes nicely with the piece before she even saw it. (“You can stare at this for hours,” she said.)

Armstrong himself calls it a “vortex of energy” on their property. And a friend of the couple described it this way: “It’s like a spiritual giant came in through the forest and landed on your property.”

For his part, Armstrong’s own interaction with “Bones” won’t allow him to be falsely modest about it. To do so would be a disservice to the work and the process that birthed it.

“I would say (it’s) one of the world’s most complex bas-relief, scaled-up pieces that you and I will ever see,” he said.

“There is something somewhere in some miscellaneous corner of the world that probably tops it, but I’m willing to put it up against anything other than the (Terracotta Army, a massive sculpture of a buried army) in China,” he said with a laugh. “That army that was buried tops everything.

“For contemporary man working on a piece of art, this is a pretty incredible piece of work.”

THE STORY

Beginning below, here’s the story depicted in “The Bones Remember … Dia de los Muertos,” as explained by artist J. Chester “Skip” Armstrong.