COLUMN:

Turning wood
into works of art

Story by Tamara Moan
Photos by Nick Epperson

The first thing that greets people when Ron Kent opens the door to his wood shop is the smell of fresh sawdust and furniture oil. As big as a two-car garage, the shop sits behind Kent’s house in Kailua within earshot of the ocean. The space is neatly organized and holds an impressive amount of equipment.

A lathe stands on the right of the entrance. A band saw, blade-sharpening stone and belt sander anchor a workbench on the left. The back half of the space holds a drill press, a table saw, a 30-gallon tub of oil, more work tables and rows of cabinets and shelves for tools and works-in-progress.

Kent spends a part of nearly every day here, often hopping among multiple projects. At 76, his “shop uniform” still consists of swim trunks and rubber slippers. He uses a towel that hangs by the door to dust the wood shavings off his bare chest and back after work sessions.

Ron Kent, ands one of his creations. Above is a look down his vortex work and below is another of his designs.

For more than 30 years, Kent has made a second career of woodworking. He’s best known for the luminous thin-walled bowls he turns from Norfolk pine. Oiled and sanded to silky smoothness, they radiate light in tones that range from moss gray to honey.

As a woodworker, Kent is largely self-taught. “I started like all of us,” he says, “by putting two boards across concrete blocks to make bookshelves in college.” In the early days of his marriage he moved on to building furniture, filling the house with pieces he and his wife couldn’t afford any other way. About his more or less accidental beginnings Kent says, “I don’t particularly love wood. I don’t love it more than anything else – like fabrics or glass or metal – but it was readily available and the easiest to work with without special tools.”

In the early 1970s, Kent’s wife Myra gave him a lathe as a gift. That first lathe, Kent notes, “was really a toy,” but he tried it out and began by turning a few wooden bottle shapes. Kent’s curiosity and sense of discovery drove his exploration of what the lathe could do.

From bottles, his shapes evolved into decanters. Some of these grew flared lips and he jokingly called them spittoons. Challenging himself to make the spittoon’s funnel lips as big and thin as possible, he then realized he could skip the bottom portion of the spittoon altogether and have an attractive bowl shape.

The silhouettes of Kent’s bowls are as distinctive as his use of Norfolk and Cook’s pine. As a beginner, Kent looked for cheap or free wood anywhere he could get it. He points out that, “If you were a woodworker, collecting wood became a hobby in itself. All of us in it ended up with huge wood piles.”

He recalls, “I chanced upon some Norfolk pine. At that time, monkeypod was used for bowls. Koa was the magic word. There was ko`u, milo. No one was using Norfolk pine.”

Kent took the Norfolk pine home, worked with it on the lathe, then remembered a trick he’d learned. “Going back in time, I did have half a semester of woodshop,” he says. “They taught us to make a pencil holder, sand it then oil it and whammo! It’s beautiful. I oiled the Norfolk pine and just like magic it got beautiful. Then it dried. I oiled it again and it dried. I did that all day long then left it. The next day I came back and oiled it again and again. I kept at it and finally I could see through it.” His finished bowls have been sanded and oiled by hand an average of 50 or 60 times, with the bowl allowed to “rest” for 24 hours between sandings.

Today many people work in Norfolk or Cook’s pine. Kent points out that turned wood and using Norfolk pine were both oddities when he started. “This was a good 10 years before anyone paid attention to wood turning. There were two other turners on the Big Island. And me. No one else in Hawaii. More and more Norfolk pine became my only wood, the wood I became known for.”

For many years Kent worked at wood turning without thinking of success, recognition or money. In 1966 or ‘67, Kent decided to enter a local Association of Hawaii Artists (AHA) show. After his piece was accepted, the AHA president called him up to congratulate him. He also invited Kent to replace him as the next AHA president. This marked Kent’s move from hobbyist to serious artist.

He took his AHA role as a serious responsibility, organizing and participating in as many exhibits as he could. At first his goal was to show utilitarian forms presented as art, pushing his pieces to be as wildly different as possible. As he succeeded in getting into shows, his work became more conspicuously non-utilitarian.

As his work drew acclaim and buyers, Kent set his sights higher to markets and venues beyond Hawaii. “For any artists,” Kent says, “and maybe for any person in any field, the biggest enemy of excellence is adequacy. It’s too easy to wallow in small successes, to be satisfied. National and world-based competition was a blessing for me. It pushed me.”

Kent began to actively look for galleries and shows where he could place his work on the mainland. “I found as much fun and challenge in seeking venues,” he says. “I hated the business end, being there and exchanging money. Even though there’s an awful lot of rejection in approaching galleries, it’s not as hurtful as people not buying.”

A major turning point was his participating in a big wood show in Washington, DC in 1983. Edward Jacobson, a collector from Phoenix, exhibited his personal collection of wood art pieces at the Smithsonian. The show toured to other institutions across the country and included a major published catalogue. Kent had four pieces in the show – a spittoon and three bowls, all of Norfolk pine.

The Jacobson show gave Kent a boost of visibility. Over the next years he expanded his venues nationally and internationally, reaching a peak of 15-20 galleries that carried his works. Over time, his work has risen in value. Today his bowls go for $5,000-$18,000.

Seeing the enthusiasm and level of engagement Kent gives his work with wood, it’s easy to forget his life ever included anything else. Raised in California, Kent began his working career as an engineer in the late 1950s, a time when engineers were in high demand and school counselors pushed anyone with multiple talents into the field.

Ron Kent poses with two of his 7-foot Guardian pieces. The one on the left is made from particle board.

It was also a strong era for the stock market. As Kent found himself with extra income, he began investing, quite successfully. In 1959 that success led him to change professions and move to San Diego. By 1965 he’d become a successful stockbroker and moved with his family to Hawaii. He continued to be very successful in business, retiring in 1997.

Kent was as much a maverick in his financial career as he has been with his artwork. He enjoyed both and is grateful for the stability his business gave him. “I had a job,” he says. “I could take chances, I could be creative.”

He’s also grateful for the opportunities that came his way unbidden. “A lot of self-made people don’t like to recognize the role that luck plays. You need luck. Luck and a day job.”

These days, Kent’s work has veered away from his signature bowls as he’s taken on new challenges. Last winter he got an idea for a new series of large works. The “Guardians,” as he calls them, are completely unlike his earlier work: 7 feet tall, imposing and massive. They’re made of plywood sections laminated together and brought to their final smoothed shapes with a grinder and sanding.

Despite their bulk, they retain the same delicate grace for which his bowls are known. Somewhere between vessels and figures, their thin tapered necks end in fluted bells. Their rounded shoulders and torsos are human-scaled, inviting embrace.

The Guardian series is beginning to find its audience nationally. The pieces have been shown in Honolulu, Philadelphia, Florida, and Bellevue, Wash. One found a buyer at the Sculptural Objects Fine Art (SOFA) show in Chicago in 2006; another piece was acquired by the Four Seasons Wailea Hotel on the Big Island. Kent’s bowls and other work can currently be seen at galleries in California, New Mexico and in Hawaii at the Four Seasons’ Genesis Gallery. He will be a featured artist in the Japanese Chamber of Commerce Commitment to Excellence show this summer at the Honolulu Academy Art Center gallery.

Kent’s woodworking has received numerous awards over the years. In 1987, he was honored to personally present a bowl to Pope John Paul II. He is also one of the few living artists to have work in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. For Kent, the most meaningful honor, however, was his inclusion in David Heenan’s book “Double Lives.”

Kent found himself among others like the late Sir Winston Churchill and astronaut Sally Ride who pursued creative work alongside other stellar achievements. Kent is elated to be grouped in such good company. “It makes me think of that bumpersticker: New York, London, Paris, Waimanalo,” he says. “I’m Waimanalo.”

Tamara Moan is a freelance writer and artist who lives in Kailua.

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