The Urge to Keep Building

If it doesn't involve work, family or driving to IKEA, many Seattleites I know balk at trekking to the Eastside.

Part of it is the gerrymandering of cultural identity around Puget Sound: hip thirty-somethings over here. Straight-laced corporate successes over there. Hip-hop. Handel. Handblown glass. To each their own and their own neighborhood.

But when I looked out from a friend's balcony on Capitol Hill, the causes of our condescension became clearer. From across the lake, the Eastside appears as a silhouette of unfinished skyscrapers. ("Cranes over Bellevue," a Redmond-based friend jokes.) Not the well-established, unavoidable skyline of downtown Seattle, but the plain evidence of "progress." The contrast is still too raw. The edges haven't smudged yet.

Bellevue Arts Museum sits amid the bustle of Bellevue Square like a foyer in a new mansion. There's a great deal to admire inside, but it's too new to be the kind of place where guests kick off their shoes right away.

When I visited recently, I found the works of Randy Shull and Tip Toland, both sculptors who might giggle at the fact that people pay them to sculpt. Shull's furniture-like fantasies look like they belong in Alice in Wonderland. And Toland's life-size figures (bearing an eerie resemblance to my own estranged relatives) left me afraid to linger alone.

I also saw John Grade's sculpture exhibit, where the artist shared his preoccupation with subjecting his meticulously crafted work to the erosion and destruction of natural forces (including rain, wind and termites). I was surprised by how comfortable he was with giving up control of his creations, and I admired his reasoning. Through Grade's process of exposing his work to the elements, the catalogue explains, "any predictable conclusion is denied."

I was thinking of this when I saw Ken Richards's Rocking Chair in the museum lobby. Fashioned from locally harvested walnut and holly, the rocker shimmers with colors and patterns you'd never expect to see on unpainted wood - zebra stripes and wisps of gold. Sharing a stage with Randy Shull's whimsical clocks, it might seem a bit staid. But I was intrigued.

I met the artist at Ivar's in Coulon Park. We joked about the venue he chose for our interview - considering he sells single pieces of furniture for ten times the amount I owe in student loans. But fast food fit the bill right away. Richards calls himself a "wood junkie." His rural home in Maple Valley is geared towards simplifying life enough to allow him to focus on work - and not much else. He built his own shop on the property, maintains the land and raises pigs for slaughter in the summer. He admits he doesn't get out much. Even the pseudo-urban scene of Bellevue is a bit overwhelming to him now.

The payoff for seclusion is a mind-boggling portfolio of furniture pieces. It's hard to believe one pair of hands made them. Giant secretary desks, entry tables, full dining-room sets, display cabinets - all fashioned out of exotic woods from around the world and accented with intricate details. Some pieces take almost three thousand hours of work, the majority done with hand tools. And there are no illustrated directions or plastic Allen wrenches to help.

When I asked Richards to break his process down for me, I expected him to begin with words like sanding, sawing and splinters. Instead he told me about this fuzzy picture he gets in his head:

"The reality," he says, "is that a lot of the furniture I've been making for the past ten years is sculpture that just happens to look like furniture. It took me a number of years to become comfortable with that. I held artists up on a pretty high pedestal. But it became apparent that I was not approaching projects with the priorities that a furniture maker would."

I loved listening to the specialized language Richards has for talking about woodworking: dovetail joint, blisters, proud design, bow tie keys, book matching, bee's wing and fiddleback figure. Knowing that a whole language exists behind an object that I previously would have just sat on makes me reconsider what I think of as already familiar.

It also makes me thankful to the Bellevue Arts Museum - for taking advantage of its Eastside orientation to do something a little different, like displaying a rocking chair on a pedestal in the lobby. If you consider it an answer to the flying Ford Tauruses in the lobby at SAM (they look like they're engaged in a cartwheeling Pokemon battle), it says a lot about what the Eastside has to teach Seattle: for instance, what life was like when the construction started.