Tim Boyden, Woodworker, Respecting the Trees
Show: Viz City
Subject: Tim Boyden
Date of Interview: Tues. Jan 2, 2018
Date of Broadcast: Wed. Jan. 10, 2018
RE: Out on a Limb Gallery
You’re listening to Viz City, KLCC’s Arts Review program. Walk downtown Broadway on any decent day, and you’ll stop to admire the smooth surface of tables and chairs on the sidewalk inlaid with patterns of inlaid sea stones. This is Tim Boyden’s Out on a Limb Gallery, which was featured in the January Art Walk.
"I struggled a long time in my head thinking, I have all this passion and excitement-- I must supposed to do something, and then when I finally slowed down enough, I realized I’d been creating things my whole life."
A job as an engineer brought Tim to the Pacific Northwest. During the evenings, he drew, "1981, I took a job actually as an engineer in the oil fields. And so as I did that duct job for a day job, when I came home, my hobby was to draw. That was my passion at that time."
Tim is best known now for his world-class woodworking artistry. At another point in his life, he learned the basic necessary skill set when he took a job in a window and door shop. It was during that time that he says he fell in love with the source of the wood--the trees themselves.
"For me, any way you slice it, a tree, it matters not what tree it is, there’s a painting there My job is not screwing it up too much. A traditional woodworker will take a round piece of wood and make it rectangular, angular, dovetails, perhaps. I’m leaving the live edge, so you can actually see where it was still alive."
The way Tim’s tables and other objects of functional beauty look, he says you can see from rim to rim, see the entire history of the tree in its rings. Later when he noticed how tree roots at the beach will grow around stones, he began inlaying stones into the surface of the wood for eye-catching, unique, one-of-kind pieces of art furniture.
Out on a Limb is located at 191 East Broadway.
Viz City is co-produced by Terry Way and Sandy Brown Jensen.
