Prescott Daily Courier, AZ
By Bruce Colbert, Reporter
CHINO VALLEY – Make no mistake – whittlers are not woodcarvers. Both use wood, but there the similarity ends.
“There are some very talented whittlers, but I do not like to be referred to as a whittler,” wood carver Brenda Behrens said.
Whittlers usually use a pocketknife. Woodcarvers use gouges, chisels, V-tools and skews; lathes, drills, grinders and saws.
Behrens developed a love for woodcraft as a young girl playing in her father’s cabinet-making shop. She learned woodcarving from a village carver while living in Japan in the early 1960s.
“I learned to carve with the Japanese traditional hand push tools,” she said while seated at a workbench in her Chino Valley studio.
Hand tools led her to power tools and a life-long passion for woodcarving. From a single piece of wood Behrens carves vessels, pots, pet urns, hair sticks, scoops and “little doo-dahs.” Her current passion is Welsh love spoons carved with her signature twisted-leaf forms.
“Back in the old days, a Welshman would carve a love spoon for the woman he intended to propose to,” she explained.
Behrens starts with a single block of wet wood – usually basswood – for vessels and smaller pieces and uses layered laminated wood for larger pieces. Wet wood carves more easily than dry wood, she explained.
“The first step is thinking of the plan or concept for the piece,” she said. “Then I choose the size of the block and the type of wood I want to use.”
She shapes or turns vessels from a single piece of wood clamped to a power lathe. Behrens uses different 2-1/2 foot long bowl-turning gouges for shaping. She uses an “Arizona toothpick” – a straight shank with a hook at the end – to hollow the inside of the vessel.
“Then, I take it off the lathe and draw the pattern directly on the wood,” she said. “I have to make sure I leave enough thickness in the wood to carve without punching a hole in the side.”
Now come the hand tools – gouges, chisels, V-tools and skews – in varying thickness and shapes.
“My carvings are straight from the tool,” Behrens said. “I never use sandpaper. The tools make the texture that you see in the wood.”
She uses hand tools and small saws to make “piercings” in her carvings. Piercings are the shaped holes that cause a layman to wonder if a carving really is from a single piece of wood.
Keeping hand tools sharp is as critical and as difficult as the actual carving.
“You can’t last long as a carver if you can’t keep your tools sharp,” Behrens said. She uses a hand-held wet stone and an electric wood tool sharpener to hone tools to a razor edge.
It takes Behrens as long as two months to complete some pieces. She keeps the wood wet throughout the process and wrapped in plastic when she is not working on it.
“I don’t use stain but let the wood take on its natural color,” she said.
Behrens teaches wood carving classes at Yavapai College and shows her work at Arts Prescott Cooperative Gallery, 134 S. Montezuma St., and Huckeba Art Gallery, 227 W. Gurley Street. Her telephone number is 928-713-7663.
Contact the reporter at bcolbert@prescottaz.com