| Finding the flow and the beauty...
By Jack Kintner
Tucked away in the woods about a mile east of Everybody’s Store in Van Zandt, just south of the Mt. Baker Highway, Rand Jack’s woodworking studio is one of a complex of small buildings that stand deep in the second-growth woods.
“We built all this ourselves, over the years,” said Jack, 66, in an easy-to-hear drawl that the Shreveport, Louisiana, native has carried through Princeton University, Yale Law School and, since 1971, a career on the faculty of Fairhaven College in Bellingham. His wife Dana, a psychologist, is also on the faculty. Their son Darby is currently in a post doctorate fellowship at the Earth Institute at Columbia University, and daughter Kelsey is a doctoral student at the Kennedy School at Harvard University.
A devoted teacher, Jack’s other two passions are conservation and wood carving. He’s a founding board member of the Whatcom Land Trust, a non-profit that has preserved over 10,000 acres of county land, helped create eight county parks and has found sites for four more since its beginnings in the early 1980s.
His wood carving is a more solitary and much less public activity, but one that has drawn its own set of admirers who have seen his work at galleries in Seattle and now, exclusively at the Wood Merchant in La Conner. Pieces are also scattered around at various offices in Bellingham in addition to the many he still has at home.
As with most artists, display space is a consideration. “There’s just so much room in the house,” he shrugged with a laugh, saying that he has no idea how many birds and other animals he’s carved in the past 30 years. The larger pieces often show a group of birds together, rendered in woods like maple, butternut and walnut standing on a simulated rock made of a maple burl, brought to life with six to eight coats of hand-rubbed gunstock oil for durability.
“Carving is a way of working intimately with the wood, of displaying its beauty, the way it flows and changes. I don’t do this for the money but for its own sake,” Jack said. He got his start during the academic year 1975-76 when he and Dana took a break to teach at Groton, the well-known eastern prep school whose graduates include Franklin D. Roosevelt, Sam Waterston, Dean Acheson and McGeorge Bundy.
The recently retired shop teacher was a somewhat enigmatic master carver named Harvey Sargisson. “He hated to sand,” Jack said, “so we worked it out to where we’d spend a day doing what he wanted to do – have me sand – followed by a day doing what I wanted to do, which was learning to carve, to follow and slice the grain without crushing it.
Jack said that his first choice for a subject was a goose, and Sargisson objected. “He said it was too big, that I was over-reaching since the bigger birds are harder to do,” Jack said, “but after a weekend I went in and here was a block of butternut waiting for me that I eventually carved into a goose.” The bird now stands atop a cluttered roll-top desk in Jack’s house, and is most definitely not for sale.
Since returning home more than 30 years ago Jack has carved hundreds of birds and sometimes other kinds of animals, “like a frog I did once. Of course, it was being eaten by a heron at the time,” he grinned. His house also has carvings from another favorite part of the planet, Nepal, where he and his wife have made extended visits.
He acquires wood from a variety of sources. “It’s where you find it,” he said, “although now people are calling me up when they cut a big tree, something I kind of wish they wouldn’t do so quickly.” He uses everything from exotics like Catalpa to locally grown Western Red cedar, Big Leaf Maple and even Butternut, found growing in a vacant lot near Bellingham.
“It was a huge tree, and despite neighbors’ protests the owner was determined to cut it down to make room for a new house. When a friend of mine and I began to cut it an old woman came up and told us that her grandfather had planted this tree 100 years ago almost to the day with Butternut seeds he brought west from Kansas in a covered wagon,” Jack said.
Except for the initial roughing out, Jack avoids using power tools, sticking with hand-forged steel chisels, gouges and other tools made by Dick Anderson in Clear Lake, east of Mt. Vernon. “It’s too easy to make a huge mistake with a power tool,” he said, and as far as I can tell, Dick makes the finest carving tools you can find anywhere. I never carve anything without giving him a chunk of credit for his invaluable contribution.”
Anderson, who’s been making and selling woodworking tools for over 30 years, described Jack as “one of the best” he’s ever worked with. “Hand forging allows me to make a much thinner tool that’s also stronger and that holds an edge much better” than the stamped-out hardware store variety. The durable blade also makes for a more forgiving tool that slices rather than crushes the grain, allowing its natural beauty to come out. He makes more than 300 different shapes, “half of them standard and half of them built to special order,” he said, to customers “all over, on several continents.”
Sometimes the wood dictates the subject, as with Jack’s current project, an 18-foot totem pole that he’s carving from an old-growth Western Red cedar log someone gave him two years ago. The tree itself was cut down 25 years ago near the Twin Sisters and though there was some damage where it lay in contact with the ground it was allowed to dry naturally, keeping checks and splits to a minimum.
The story behind the pole, what Jack calls an “environmental morality tale,” includes the five animals plus companions depicted in the carving, a sow bear pregnant with twins on the bottom, an Orca with an extended dorsal fin and a blow-hole decorated to resemble the wild woman of the woods, an owl with extended wings, a man holding two salmon and, on top, a raven with a massive extended beak.
He’s using acrylic paints directly on the cedar for color, and has used a kind of wedged joint used by old-time furniture makers to attach the extended owl wings, whale fin and raven beak. “It works pretty well, but once it’s on, it’s not coming off,” he said.
He says that he has no idea how many birds and other animals he’s carved, almost all of them out of wood but also of marble and soapstone. When asked how long it takes to carve one he said “I don’t want to know. I do know that it’s more fun and a lot cheaper than a psychiatrist.”
Jack’s work can be seen in La Conner at Bob and Jennifer Cole’s Wood Merchant Gallery on First Street, the main shopping street, and also at Brett & Coats, a Bellingham law firm where Jack practices one day a week. |
