Wood is special. Wood is alive.
There are many media an artist can choose to work with – clay, iron, stone, to name three – but wood is special, according to those who work with it.
Wood is alive, not just because it grew in the forest, soaking up sunshine before it was felled, whereas some other materials were dug from the earth. Each piece of wood, each board and burl, is distinctive, special, unique. The grain patterns, the knots and marks and coloring, even of two pieces from the same tree, make each distinctive.
To the woodworker sizing up a piece of wood for his next project, the wood speaks to him in its own voice.
"When you pick up a piece of wood, it shows you what it is," said Carol Spanner, one of the woodworkers whose creations are on display Saturday and Sunday at the Great Hall on the University of the Virgin Islands’ St. Croix campus. "It tells you what is inside, what it wants to become."
The fourth annual Virgin Islands Woodworkers’ Expo features the work of the St. Thomas-St. John Woodworkers Society and St. Croix Wood Artists Inc. The show opens at 10 a.m. both days.
The expo also features demonstrations by master woodworkers Avelino Samuel of St. John, Afreekan Southwell and William Johnson of St. Thomas, and Bien Brignoni of St. Croix.
Spanner has a special relationship with the wood he works. He actually harvests his own wood, all from St. Croix trees, and slabs it himself.
Then he waits for the piece to tell him what it should become.
"Wood is different," he said, smiling as expo visitors looked over his table of vases, plaques and other pieces, some obvious and some so abstract that different visitors each saw something different in it – one saw a walrus, another a dog, a third a pig. Spanner himself says he sees a bear head in the piece.
For DeRay Sabur, woodworking is more than a craft. It’s an experience. For nine years Sabur has been fashioning fully rigged sailing ships from local woods. He can’t – or at least he doesn’t – talk much about technical things or how long a particular boat took to make. That’s not the point.
"This is something I love," Sabur said. "I have to do this. When I’m working, it gives me such a feeling of peace. It’s like therapy."
Woodworking requires a series of skills that he has developed, he said, but it’s more than that. "This is a gift," Sabur said.
The Great Hall was crowded with such gifts, the work of people who find in the grain and texture and strength of wood a bear head, or a spoon or a swordfish or a perfectly turned bowl.
Most of the works in the expo are for sale, and visitors can purchase them for the holidays. After all, as Sabur said, it’s a gift.
The Woodworkers’ Expo is sponsored by UVI Cooperative Extension Service in partnership with the V.I. Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts, the V.I. Department of Tourism, the V.I. Department of Agriculture, and the West Indian Company, Ltd.