(bright music) (saw swishes) - Welcome to the "Volunteer Woodworker."

I'm your host, Charles Brock.

Come with me as we drive the back roads, bringing you the story of America's finest woodworkers.

(bright music) (door thuds) (bright music continues) We're going to Downtown Nashville to meet Kelly Maxwell.

Kelly works with giant figured wood slabs with that popular live edge.

Using his artistry and experience, he builds one-of-a-kind pieces of fine furniture for the finest homes.

Let's meet Kelly Maxwell.

(bright music) (saw swishes) - [Announcer] "Volunteer Woodworker" is funded in part by: (saw swishes) Since 1970, Whiteside Machine Company has been producing industrial-grade router bits in Claremont, North Carolina.

Whiteside makes carbide bits for edge forming, grooving, and CNC application.

Learn more at whitesiderouterbits.com.

Real Milk Paint Company makes VOC-free, non-toxic milk paint, available in 56 colors.

Milk Paint creates a matte wood finish that can be distressed for an antique look.

(gentle music) Good Wood Nashville designs custom furniture and is a supplier of vintage hardwoods.

Keri Price with Keller Williams Realty has been assisting Middle Tennessee home buyers and sellers since 2013.

Mayfield Hardwood Lumber, supplying Appalachian Hardwoods worldwide.

Anna's Creative Lens, crafters of resin-on-wood decorative arts.

- Kelly Maxwell.

- Charles Brock, good to see you.

- Oh, it's so nice to be here in your shop in Nashville, Tennessee.

It's interesting that we were neighbors, almost, in Columbus, Georgia for a long time.

We knew of each other, but we had never met each other.

Then we moved to Nashville, Tennessee and we became friends.

- Yeah, I mean, it's kind of crazy.

Had a mutual friend there, but never met each other in person.

- Well, you do some amazing work.

And the wood selection that you have is just tremendous.

Live edge is a big thing in the world of furniture and decorating and woodworking these days.

You're kind of my king of the live edge.

- Well, I thank you on that.

Kind of interestingly enough, you know, live edge has been around for generations.

I mean, you might know a gentleman by the name of George Nakashima.

He actually made it famous back in his day.

- Yeah, "The Soul of a Tree."

- Exactly.

Exactly.

- Yeah.

Well, Kelly, what exactly is live edge?

- Live edge is the outside portion of the tree without the bark.

We really don't wanna leave the bark on.

Majority of the time in the drying process, it's gonna fall off.

But it also, if you leave it on, will actually cause an issue with creating bugs, or bugs will want to come and live in it, and that's not a good thing.

So we take all of our bark off and actual live edge is just the outside of the tree or the outer layer of the tree.

- And so some people might see those things as faults, but you celebrate them.

- Yeah, I mean, the beauty that's found in it, you can create endless amounts of furniture designs with live edge by either cutting some of it off or leaving the live edge there completely.

Just the raw organic beauty is, that's the stunning part about it.

- So if you want your furniture or a piece in your house to look really organic, then live-edge furniture might be for you.

- Yeah, I mean, and we tend to think that it's only for a log cabin or a rustic-style place, but no, it actually will bring a lot of energy and a renewed life into the, a modern style or even a contemporary home.

We do a lot of fireplaces now with live-edge mantles on it just because you're bringing that piece of nature into the home.

- Piece behind us, I think is a beautiful example of your art, the composition and everything.

But it's also a multimedia piece.

You have more than just this beautiful wood.

- It's an award-winning design from Western Design Conference in Jackson Hole, Wyoming that I designed with Anthony Martin of Red Tail Forge Works.

We used spalted bigleaf maple burl, and it's extremely spalted.

And then he created aspen trees all out of steel.

The trees actually have 5,000 leaves on it, believe it or not.

It's all hand done, done out.

It's really a cool piece.

- Yeah, now, spalting, a lot of your slabs, live-edge slabs, have spalting.

What is spalting?

- Spalting is decaying wood.

And there's different colors of the spalt marks will be different funguses.

It's a fungus that's in the wood that's starting to decay.

You let it go to a certain point, and then you stop.

If you go too far, you've just got rotted, punky wood.

But if you stop at the right part, you have beautiful, I mean, it is just absolutely breathtaking and can be used from everything from furniture, to bowls, to pens.

- So, Kelly, you call this composition "Entwined."

What does that mean?

- The name "Entwined" is my interpretation.

Aspen trees are the largest plant out there, entwined because they're entwined through the root systems.

They speak and live a lifestyle together.

The spalted maple speaks to me of the root systems and the intertwining of those root systems and life together and taking it back to life in general, that we're all entwined in each other.

- Well, your work is very entwined, but you started out as a kid.

How did you get on this path to become the artist that you are?

Not everybody takes that path.

- No, man, I'm a farm boy from Kuna, Idaho, just southwest of Boise.

Grew up there my whole life.

I did not think I knew nothing about woodworking.

I am 100% self-taught.

I did not pick up woodworking until I was 36 years old.

And that was purely because my wife and my stepdaughter came to me.

My stepdaughter got engaged to be married, and the wedding was coming up, and they said, "Can you build some of this furniture we see in the log home magazines?"

And I being the, I guess crazy guy, I said, "Sure I can."

(Charles chuckles) I did 20 pieces for the wedding.

I gave some of it away, and I sold some.

Good friend said, "Hey, come do this little show here," throws this application out.

He was my boss in EMS.

I was a full-time paramedic.

And he said, "Come do this little craft show."

Write a check for $25, and I showed up.

I looked like the redneck stepchild because I was in a little green beach tent.

I was not in a little white tent with all the other vendors.

But I sold.

I went back, and that was the start of actually marketing and selling log-style furniture.

- And so, at some point, you left your day job as an EMT and you tackled the world of being self-employed as an artist.

- Yeah, I did that.

And 10 years ago we moved to Nashville, Tennessee.

At that time, I retired my paramedic license.

Before that, I had worked full-time, or part-time at least, as a paramedic.

But when I moved to Nashville, I retired 10 years ago and run a studio here in downtown Nashville, Tennessee.

- Kelly, what is it about you that has helped you become the artist you are today?

- Man, me stumbling on myself, creating something, a natural drive to find the next thing, push it to the next level.

It's not easy.

It's blood, sweat, and tears.

I mean, it literally is.

If you think that it's going to be a easy thing, you go out and set up a website, market, and everything else, you're gonna be working 100, 200 hours a week.

And that's fictitious, but you live this job 24/7 if you want to market.

You can't just build art.

You gotta learn how to market it, too.

And that's what I've learned to do is to design furniture that's functional.

Not just look good, but it's gotta serve a purpose, be functional, and then sell it to customers that can actually use that furniture in their homes and enjoy it for the rest of their lives and many other generations.

- Well said.

(saw swishes) (bright music) (saw swishes) (bright music continues) (bright music continues) (bright music continues) (bright music continues) (bright music continues) (bright music continues) (bright music continues) (saw swishes) Kelly, before you return to your studio and make some more beautiful furniture, I want you to tell me about a few of these gorgeous pieces.

This one (chuckles) is Mother Nature's delight.

- Thanks, Chuck.

I'll be glad to talk to you about this piece here.

This is "The Wizard."

My style has been defined over the years as being more of a nature-themed, raw, organic, taking the raw materials from nature and creating a functional piece of furniture.

This piece here is a young-growth redwood root.

I like to leave the freeform edge and the gnarl and everything here.

So when you run your hand across it, you feel it, but it's smooth as a baby's bottom.

There's no, nothing that's gonna reach out and grab you and hurt you.

I use a real clear, soft, natural matte finish, and the base is a western cedar root.

And this one was really just perfect for this piece, as I brought the root through the top, so it- - Thus, we have the name of the piece: "The Wizard."

- "The Wizard."

The wonderful wizard.

- Now, you have done some inlay work here, but it has purpose and function.

- It does, it does.

I mean, in furniture, the most important thing is, you can have a cool-looking design, but if it does not have functionality, it's just a hunk of wood sitting there, in my opinion.

But I've taken and placed some bow ties, and I opted in this piece to be a little bit progressive, and I used a contrasting wood of a maple burl to do my inlays.

And I did bow ties to actually support this crack instead of filling it with epoxy.

This piece has no epoxy used in it.

It is literally just some old-school joinery, putting the pieces together.

- This inlay, the little bow ties here, they kind of center the eye.

They pull the eye toward the piece, which is really great design.

- [Kelly] Correct.

And it also, at the same time, complements two different styles of burl.

- Have you got another piece you wanna show?

- Sure.

We got a little buckeye burl, right over the top of this here.

- Wow.

Wall art.

- That is wall art.

I mean, it is functional art.

It is just raw, organic.

I mean, you're sitting here, you know, you can't make an abstract that's that pure.

The best painter in the world cannot paint what nature creates.

- That's wonderful.

Now, it's all ingrain?

- This is all ingrain.

Actually, this is out of a root, so that's kind of a questionable.

If it is ingrain or if it's along the grain, there is no grain in the root 'cause it goes every different direction, especially in these.

But I do see some of the inlay, or some of the lines around the outside.

And this is where it went up into the tree.

- And it's highly spalted.

- Highly spalted, a lot of figure.

That's what I love about buckeye is just the unique color patterns.

I love the contrasting of the burl, the darkness of the burl, the compression curls in the root system, the voids.

'Cause this will grow around rocks, and dirt, and clay, and everything in the natural habitat where it's at.

- That shows Mother Nature at its finest.

- That it does.

- Yeah.

Oh, I'd love to have that in my home.

Kelly, I feel like we're in Middle Earth, and I'm a a little bitty guy amongst a field of mushrooms that have been cut off to make tables.

(chuckles) Tell me about these.

- Well, you are.

- Uh-oh.

We're in trouble now.

- We are.

Let's talk about these little tables.

These are a new adventure in my life.

It's something I've been playing with a little bit.

These are cluster burl logs.

These are actually maple cluster burl logs.

And these logs have been sitting around for a while, and we've been a little bit mean to 'em.

We just left them out in the elements with some of the bark on, some of the bark off.

Just kind of didn't take care of 'em.

Well, that's when nature gets to do its real work.

'Cause if you notice, we've got all these burls here, and then you've got all these unique colors.

There's no way you can paint all those colors or texture, all that in there.

I mean, nature made it just the way it is.

All we do is come in, clean these off, flap 'em down with a flap sander situation, knock off the bark, clean 'em up, let 'em dry for several years, and then build a table.

- [Charles] And this is just as smooth as it can be.

And you would think this would be rough, but it's not.

- No, that's why we spend the time so you can run your hand all over the outside of it, and yeah, you feel the organic, the true, like you're feeling the outside of the log.

But it's all sealed, and finished, and smooth, where you're not gonna get tore up or cut or anything else.

And this table here, Chuck, it's a little bit bigger version of the small ones.

Same type of situation.

We cut the log in a leveler with a big sawmill, chainsaw mill, leaves these natural cluster burls around.

We flap and clean the edge to literally keep it to where it shows the grain and it looks like the raw log.

We haven't put any paint or anything on this.

This is the true colors of the log.

We're just enhancing it with the finish that we're using on it.

- And this is a cluster burl.

- This is a cluster burl.

If you was to cut this and look at the top side of it here, you're gonna see the burl.

This is a burl.

Burls grow in the ground.

They grow on the outside of the tree.

And sometimes you will have the whole tree here will be nothing but a big burl.

- Wow.

- This is just a cluster burl.

So this is just a bigger version of this.

- That's wonderful.

- Doesn't have the same coloring, either.

- You know, what I like, Kelly, is you take what nature gives us and you enhance it.

It just fits your home.

- I just fluffed the dust off the top of it, and yeah, they're mushroom tables.

(Charles laughs) (saw swishes) - Well, Kelly, this is a beautiful desk for a moderately-sized office.

- Yeah, it is.

I mean, I designed this to be perfect for the home office or even for a reception area in a small office building.

It is old-growth redwood.

And funny enough, when the slab came in about four or five years ago, it looked like a frog swimming.

The waterfall legs are kind of sprawled and they have two pieces.

Well, it had looked like feet coming off the end of it.

And there was a piece out here that broke off and another piece over there that broke off that looked like the front legs were just pushing back like it was swimming through water.

- Wow.

- It's a cool piece.

But this is old-growth curly redwood.

I did a waterfall end on it, and then I did a pie front leg, kind of a simple modernist-style design underneath there, to connect, to hold and support this leg that's really clean and open-aired.

I used a simple natural wood finish that I use in my studio here, which is a premium hard wax.

It's durable.

It actually repels water, wine, soda, everything.

It's phenomenal.

But what I love about curly redwood is the shimmer.

It reminds me of the ocean, and the soft waves coming in, and the design, the ripples that are created in the sand underneath.

- That is just gorgeous.

I think I'll take it.

- I'll write it up, Chuck.

(Charles chuckles) (saw swishes) (bright music) (bright music continues) (bright music continues) (bright music continues) (bright music continues) (bright music continues) (bright music continues) (bright music continues) (bright music continues) (saw swishes) - Well, this beautiful burl is ready for, to be a tabletop.

You've already got it all finished and shined up, ready for a pedestal.

You're starting to evaluate this piece here.

What can you do with this?

- Well, this is a claro walnut.

It's actually out of a walnut grove out of California, which is the only place claro walnut grows.

I'm gonna create a, cut a straight line across here.

Then I'm gonna come up, measure it 30 inches tall 'cause I want my table to be 30 inches tall.

I'm gonna cut a fold into here.

So I'm gonna create a continuous waterfall when I connect this leg back onto it.

So it'll stand up and have a waterfall fold coming across the table.

- So it'll be at a 90-degree angle.

- Correct.

- With a miter joint.

- Correct.

I'm gonna put a couple of miters in here.

I'm gonna take this to a little bit more of a rustic, modern-style table, and put a dimensional, clean-line slab down on the bottom, probably about an inch and a quarter thick.

Then I'll put a couple of legs down here on this end and tie that in.

This is a little bit too rugged and crazy for a conventional table.

I'm gonna shape this off here, do a little bit of shaping up in here, and trim a little bit of this trashy stuff down here.

But I'm gonna leave all the raw organic of the cellular collapse in the the slab itself.

- Now, this has already been flattened.

I bet that is a very interesting process.

- It can be.

I'm lucky enough here in my studio, I have a CNC, but I also have a big double-belt sander so I can surface 'em down.

But the DIY person or somebody at home, smaller, a little router sled, they work great.

(saw swishes) How do I make a straight line across the bottom of this slab when I have no barriers to base it off of?

I take a T-square that I've had for years, I lay it in the center of my slab here, and I split the difference from my live edge, making a straight line.

(clamp clanks and clicks) I lock it down.

(clamp rattles and clicks) (bright music) (saw buzzing) (bright music continues) (saw continues buzzing) (saw buzzes) (bright music continues) (bright music continues) (bright music continues) (saw whirs) And then we have a straight line.

(clamps clank and rattle) You can measure up.

Mark my 30 inches.

After I make my measurement, I'm gonna take it over to my panel saw to create my fold so I can create the waterfall in this table.

- Yeah, I've done that many times myself.

This requires a lot of sanding, I bet.

- Yeah, it does, Charles.

And this might be your project today.

- Oh, geez.

I hate sanding.

- You know, you come to my shop, you gotta work.

- All right.

Where's the sander?

- Right over here.

I'll get it for you.

- Can't wait.

I just love sanding.

(sander buzzes and whirs) (sander whirring) - [Kelly] Here we go!

Whoo!

(sander whirs) - Well, Kelly, I really need to go see a man about a horse.

(Kelly groans) (saw swishes) (bright music) I'm gonna be heading down the road to find a story of another great woodworker.

See you next time on the "Volunteer Woodworker."

(door thuds) (bright music) (bright music continues) (saw swishes) - [Announcer] "Volunteer Woodworker" is funded in part by: (saw swishes) Since 1970, Whiteside Machine Company has been producing industrial-grade router bits in Claremont, North Carolina.

Whiteside makes carbide bits for edge forming, grooving, and CNC application.

Learn more at whitesiderouterbits.com.

Real Milk Paint Company makes VOC-free, non-toxic milk paint, available in 56 colors.

Milk Paint creates a matte wood finish that can be distressed for an antique look.

(gentle music) Good Wood Nashville designs custom furniture and is a supplier of vintage hardwoods.

Keri Price with Keller Williams Realty has been assisting Middle Tennessee home buyers and sellers since 2013.

Mayfield Hardwood Lumber, supplying Appalachian Hardwoods worldwide.

Anna's Creative Lens, crafters of resin-on-wood decorative arts.

Visit charlesbrockchairmaker.com for all you need to know about woodworking.

If you'd like to learn even more, free classes and a variety of subjects are available for streaming from charlesbrockchairmaker.com.

(bright music) (vibrant music)