A magician with wood, Gordon Dunphy transformed old chunks and burls of hardwood into velvety-smooth vessels so fine they are in collections around the world. He was a man who appreciated the little things: the Nashwaak, his crow friend and the scent of his wood. Story by Kate Wallace

G1

Kate Wallace

Stumble Upon

del.icio.us

Digg

Facebook

Print

Email

Speak Up

In a place he called the Enchanted Forest, the late New Brunswick wood-turner Gordon Dunphy lived and worked, creating vessels of such bewitching beauty that the name of the property where he practiced his art could just as aptly be applied to the product of his labour.

Enlarge Photo

"You can see how much inspiration he drew from that place," Kate Rogers, executive director of the New Brunswick Crafts Council, said. "I refer to him as a magician with wood, and he lived in a magical place."

Dunphy died of cancer Sept. 25 in Fredericton. He was 74.

Even in the weeks leading up to his death he was still turning, continuing to demonstrate his mastery of transforming old chunks and burls of New Brunswick hardwood into velvety-smooth vessels so fine that they are in collections around the world, including that of the British Royal Family and of former prime minister Brian Mulroney. Dunphy won numerous awards, including the $10,000 Strathbutler Award for Excellence in the Visual or Applied Arts in 2002, and the Deichmann Award for Excellence in Craft in 1995.

In 2007, Rogers nominated him for the Governor General's Award in Craft.

"Dunphy turns wood," Rogers wrote in the nomination statement, "but more than that, he intimates himself with the wood, with the forests from which it stems and the messages it unleashes."

Rogers said she can't imagine the province's craft world without him, that no other woodturner could occupy the void he has left.

"I don't know anyone with the patience to fill Gordon's shoes."

A fifth-generation dairy farmer, Dunphy has always worked in and near the province's forests, but he was middle-aged before he discovered his passion and propensity for turning its wood.

"I didn't know he had it in him," his son Brian said in a recent interview. "He never did any woodworking before that, besides building a couple of barns."

When cancer was discovered in Dunphy's liver about two years ago, Brian moved from British Columbia to care for his father. He plans to stay on at the Enchanted Forest.

Moving back to New Brunswick after nearly 30 years out West, "it was kind of like getting to re-meet your father again," he said. "It was a good thing."

Brian began turning wood in the early '90s after his spinal cord was injured in a bad accident. Unable to work, he was looking for something to keep him busy.

"I thought, 'Dad's doing it, I'm going to give it a try.'"

Unlike his father, who started with small touch bowls - so named for the velvety smoothness of their surfaces that beg to be handled - Brian jumped right in making large vessels. His father told him it was typical of him.

"Dad said I started running before I could walk."

The younger Dunphy said his father could see things in wood that he can't.

"He was such a perfectionist," Brian said. "You can't find a mistake or a mark. He would wear a magnifying glass to make sure there were no mistakes on the inside, too."

Many turners make sure the exterior is smooth but don't worry about the hidden interior, "but him, he was going to make sure it was done right."

Part of what set Dunphy's work apart was the size of the vessels he made. He had a boring bar that allowed him to go in two feet deep and a lathe that could handle vessels whose starting weights could exceed 300 pounds.

"You'll go a long way to find someone working the way he was," Brian said. "There's nobody I know of who's doing anything like this."

The middle son of Ken and Flossie Dunphy, Gordon Dunphy was born in Fredericton in 1933 and grew up on the family farm near Nashwaak Village. In his teenage years, "from what I know, he got tired of school," Brian said. Dunphy's father made him a deal: if he left high school, he had to attend agricultural college in Truro, N.S. He left at the age of 17; when he returned, Dunphy was put in charge of the herd of dairy cows.

When Dunphy left farming, his accomplishments in that field were substantial, including award-winning holsteins that yielded a milk rich in fat and lots of it, and premier breeder designation from the Canadian Holstein Breeders Association. In the early '80s, his kids grown, his marriage ended in divorce, Dunphy sold the farm and travelled, including an extended trip to New Zealand.

"I think his soul was broken," his friend and fellow woodturner Andrew Ross, who lives across the river from the Enchanted Forest, said. "I don't think he knew what he wanted to do, but he knew what he didn't want to do."

Visiting museums and galleries in Canada and Europe stimulated Dunphy's creative, artistic side.

"Maybe he needed more of a challenge in life than milking cows," Brian said. "He had done that probably for 40 years."

Before he started turning wood, Dunphy photographed wood in the province's forests and swamps, and explored what happened to wood when it was burned. He would throw chunks in the furnace, pulling them out after they had charred, marvelling at the colour and textures the fire and smoke teased out.

"He experimented with stuff like this," Brian said, proffering a black chunk of wood with smooth edges and a creased top that looks like a wrinkled face.

Meg Salonius has been a neighbour of Dunphy's for around 40 years, friends for a little less. Dunphy was a frequent dinner guest in her cozy kitchen that is heated by a wood stove and dominated by a long, old wooden table that could easily accommodate a dozen diners.

She used to take her youngest daughter to visit Dunphy and his cows on the farm.

Salonius, who is from Britain, and her husband, Peter, a microbiologist who hails from Ontario, said she thinks Dunphy welcomed the chance to make friends from outside of the extremely tight-knit rural area where he grew up.

"It was good for him to meet new people," she said.

And while she has great admiration for his art, he is a friend first.

"Gordon was just part of the family," she said. "He is even in the wedding picture of one of our daughters."

When Dunphy began experimenting with burning wood, he would show her his results.

"I could see that he was really enjoying doing this," she said. "Every time we went down there, he'd have a new piece."

She remembers when he started to turn wood.

"Some of his first efforts were a little wonky, but he improved, and his tools improved," she said. "Gordon always wanted to be the best and do the best."

Aside from a couple of courses he took to learn how to use the tools, "he was his own teacher," Brian said.

He wasn't isolated, though. A long-standing member of the N.B. Crafts Council, Dunphy always encouraged those around him to develop their artistic sides, Salonius said. She spread out an assortment of the greeting cards she makes using parts of flowers from her gardens. It was Dunphy who convinced her she should sell the bright, inventive cards at local craft shops. "Gordon was very enthusiastic about this."

Before his woodturning was included in exhibitions in Japan, Australia, Germany, Toronto, New York, Montreal and across Atlantic Canada, Dunphy began by showing and selling it at Christmas craft shows and at the Boyce Farmers Market in Fredericton. The response was warm right away, Salonius said.

"His work sold itself."

Former Fredericton MP and federal cabinet minister Andy Scott first met Dunphy at the farmer's market.

"My breath was taken away by his work," Scott said by phone recently from Fredericton, where he is now head of the Social Policy Research Network at the University of New Brunswick. "I was really in awe of the guy. I felt his work was beyond a lot of what I'd seen, and I've seen a lot in my travels."

One time, when he was in Victoria, B.C., on government business, Scott was excited and proud to see the New Brunswick craftsman's work exhibited at Creations Gallery in the Empress Hotel.

Scott loved the work, and wanted to buy a Dunphy piece, but couldn't pay for it outright, so he arranged a payment plan with the woodturner. He made regular payments with the idea of eventually having outlaid enough to buy a piece. Busy with his work in Ottawa, Scott lost track of his account, which Dunphy would remind him of whenever they met.

"It became a bit of a running joke," Scott said, "but I didn't feel any urgent need to act on it."

When Scott's son Noah was born two-and-a-half years ago, Dunphy surprised the proud father with a beautiful big bowl in the baby's honour. The piece, which Scott said "was far in excess of my account," holds a place of prominence in the Scott house to this day.

When he heard Dunphy was ill, Scott, prompted by Dunphy's generosity at the birth of his son, visited the woodturner to give him a native healing stick. The carved wooden stick was a gift from a native Albertan artist who gave it to Scott during his time as minister of Indian affairs and northern development.

The piece was smooth at one end, the other twisted in a knot representing illness.

"It was quite spectacular, I thought, and I wanted to share it with him," Scott said. "I think he was enough of a spiritual person himself that he would have seen the importance of the piece."

That spirituality imbued Dunphy's craft, and his world view.

"Gordon claims that the forest has a spirit," Kate Rogers wrote. "His work always seeks to capture and communicate this spirit."

The techniques he developed were not about controlling his medium but, rather, a way of exploring the relationship between man and forest, to "form the wood to accentuate its most exquisite and interesting qualities."

In the early '80s Dunphy bought the property that became the Enchanted Forest; at the time, there was just an old fishing cabin on the land.

"I guess you could throw a bottle out through the door," Brian said. "It wasn't very airtight."

Salonius said it was her husband who first showed Dunphy the property. He decided on the spot he wanted it.

He took several years to build his house and workshops.

The post-and-beam house brings the forest indoors, incorporating wood Dunphy had been collecting for years. The broad stairs leading from the entryway up to the open main floor are made of cherry planks polished so smooth they are nerve-racking to descend in sock feet, especially as there is no handrail.

"It's all him," Salonius said. "Every piece of wood in there is Gordon's."

The wooden cabin is filled with Dunphy's work, the airy living room dominated by a museum-quality collection of around 10 of his most prized vessels arrayed on pedestals and plinths of varying heights. A photograph of Dunphy with a couple of his pieces hangs on the wall above the display.

For the last couple of years, Dunphy resisted selling, keeping his favourite pieces to build a collection he wanted to be exhibited.

"He told me that is what he wants," Brian said.

In the middle of the collection is Dunphy's urn, a beautiful golden vessel he turned from spalted bird's-eye maple. It came from a tree he knew was more than 300 years old because he sat down and counted the rings.

"I still need to make a lid for it," Brian said.

The urn is decorated with dots and squares of wood so smooth they look like polished stones affixed to its front.

One is from an olive tree burl Dunphy smuggled home from a trip to Italy; others Brian identified as ebony, cherry, black walnut and butternut.

Kate Rogers said these "adhesions" (Dunphy called them his "ornaments") that Dunphy shaped to fit the convex of a vessel are just one of his many innovations.

"He does all of these things in wood that no one else does," she said. That includes inlays of wood affected by fungi and spalting that Dunphy called his "little landscapes" and Rogers said look like abstract paintings. Dunphy would frame the inlay with resin and set it into the vessel.

One piece in the collection demonstrates his fluting technique, the concentric grooves making the wood grain seem to ripple like wind-ruffled water. Another vessel fashioned from a gnarled piece of cherry has a gaping hole on one side and smaller chasms and cracks throughout; it is hard to imagine how Dunphy managed to turn the piece without it cracking apart, but in the hand it feels solid and substantial.

"That was the last piece he ever turned," Brian said.

Outside, in the yard strewn with brilliant fallen leaves, Brian sidestepped woodpiles and huge logs en route to his father's workshop.

Some of the trees were more than 300 years old.

"A tree is usually dying when these form," Brian said, pointing at a huge, ugly-looking knurl of the sort his father was so famed for turning into a glowing, lustrous work of art that made scars, knots and cracks focal points, not flaws.

Before loggers started using machines to reduce wood that couldn't be used as lumber into chips, old burls and gnarled logs were left behind. The logger's trash was Dunphy's treasure, and he'd scavenge woodlots for pieces of maple and birch, cherry and walnut.

"He was like a little leprechaun bouncing around the woods, looking for burls," Salonius said.

Dunphy would cart the huge chunks home in his truck, a battered silver '68 Custom Deluxe rigged up with a hay barn winch he had adapted to lift logs.

"From Napadogan to Gagetown, he collected wood," Brian said.

One time Dunphy got caught poaching from private property.

A burl had caught his eye so he went to retrieve it, assuming he was on Crown Land.

"He was up the tree, ready to saw it off, and the owner came out."

Dunphy apologized, explaining the misunderstanding, but the owner didn't look like he totally believed him, Brian said.

"He was embarrassed about that."

Inside the workshop, a layer of pale yellow sawdust coats every surface, giving the shop gives an ancient feel and the false impression that no one has worked there in decades.

After Dunphy let the wood dry for one to three years outside, he would roll a piece down the slope to his shop, which he heated in the winter with an old Enterprise stove. With his lathe, he would make a rough form one to 1.5 inches thick. This form would be dried for another three to six months in his kiln - a small, windowless room lined with shelves - where he could adjust the temperature and humidity to slowly draw out the moisture so the wood wouldn't crack.

"He'd watch for it to lose weight," Brian said.

If Dunphy didn't proceed with the final shaping, finishing and polishing, the piece would likely join a collection of hundreds of other roughed-out forms stashed in a storage space beneath a hatch in his entryway.

Andrew Ross said Dunphy would sometimes go down there, light a candle and just sit and look at the forms; if he had guests, he might invite them to join him.

Dunphy loved looking at the nature around him, too.

A wooden bench outside of his workshop offers a beautiful view overlooking the shallow Nashwaak as it bends around a corner of cliffs and trees.

"He loved to watch the river," Brian said. "He said a day away from the Nashwaak was a day wasted."

The view takes in an eagle's nest, "the only one on the Nashwaak," Brian said. He said he and his father would take straw and put it on the other side of the river for the nest, along with the occasional roadkill they'd leave for food.

Deer are a common sight in the area, with the odd black bear or moose passing by.

Then there is Joe.

Around 10 years ago, Dunphy took the baby crow from its nest, before it had feathers. He raised and fed the young bird but eventually Joe left.

One day not long after Dunphy was diagnosed with cancer, an adult crow was making a racket around the house.

It didn't take Dunphy long to recognize his old charge. Joe has been coming around regularly ever since.

"In the summertime, when he gets extra hungry, he comes beating on the window," Brian said. "I'll just go out on the deck and put out a hotdog or something and holler 'Joe!' "

Dunphy's friend and protégé Andrew Ross knows the area and its wildlife well.

He started visiting Dunphy in the early '90s after his grandfather died and he inherited the old family farmstead across the river.

"We shared a lot of talks and stories between us," Ross said. "We had so many different levels of communication."

It wasn't until they had known each other for a year that Dunphy let Ross into his workshop.

"I had no idea who he was and what he was," Ross said. "To me he was just Gordon."

For the first couple of years Ross just watched him work. When Dunphy began to show him the rudiments of woodturning, it marked the start of a rigourous yet informal training that was based on Dunphy's own approach to his craft.

"He would design his own tools and if they didn't work, he'd put them aside and design a new set."

One day Dunphy handed Ross a faceplate (the piece of metal that is screwed into the wood so that it can be fitted onto the lathe), a piece of wood, a screwdriver and a box of screws. After about 20 screws, Ross' hand was going numb.

"How many screws do I really need to put in this faceplate?" he asked Dunphy.

"How many holes are there?"

"Thirty."

"Put 36 in."

Dunphy taught him about much more than how to use tools. Ross got an education in the sensual, creative elements of woodturning.

"He used to try different woods out - apple, cherry - for the smell," Ross said. "He said some maple smelled like red wine." He said Dunphy would reach into a vessel he was boring out, grab a handful of sawdust and curls of wood, and inhale.

And Dunphy would sing into his urns, Ross said. He could get the wood so thin, it would vibrate.

Ross, who makes his living as a carpenter but will have more time to turn when the snow starts to fly, marvels at the serendipity of having had the honour of knowing and learning from Gordon Dunphy.

"For me, it was a one-in-a-million chance to meet this guy," Ross said. "He was a very quiet, sweet kind of mystic."

Other friends, family and colleague describe that same quietness - Kate Rogers called it a "stillness-" around Dunphy.

He did have a mischievous streak, though, according to Meg Salonius.

One time, after she had told him she didn't like the decorative wooden butterflies some people nailed to their homes, she arrived home to find one affixed high up on her house. She immediately guessed who was behind the prank.

Her husband got it down and they waited until they knew Dunphy would be away from his house to return the ornament.

The next time they were invited to Dunphy's for a party, he assembled his guests outside.

"We're going to have a stoning," he told them.

They took turns throwing rocks at the butterfly that Dunphy had nailed up a tree until it splintered and fell.

A satellite dish on the side of the house testifies to Dunphy's love of baseball - he and Brian are Blue Jays fans - while a wine rack full of corked bottles betray him as an avid wine collector.

"He was profound at being able to smell the roses," Andrew Ross said. "He was so excited by the simple things."

Kate Wallace covers the arts for the Telegraph-Journal and is a frequent contributor to Salon.