As the Wood Turns
There was no grand objective when Luke Garrison picked up his Opinel whittling knife and started in. He had always found a way to work with his hands. While still in high school, he had built a wooden dory from a kit in his parents’ garage. For nearly 20 years, he worked off and on as a bike shop mechanic in Mill Valley. By the time he started whittling, he was working the land at a farm in Sutter County and looking for industrious diversions while selling the produce at farmers’ markets on the weekends.
Luke built his own pedal-powered lathe fashioned after the classic English pole lathes, expanding his repertoire to include bowls and cups. When a friend’s father offered his old electric lathe, Luke’s output tripled. He made wooden spoons, bowls, spatulas, selling them at the Mill Valley farmers’ market until he could afford a Vicmarc lathe—providing 600 pounds of pure wood-turning power.
By the time he married and turned to woodworking full time, Luke knew most of the arborists in Southern Marin—meeting them at the felling of a tree to load his truck or trading one of his beautiful bowls for a delivery. He sought mentorship from some of the woodworking greats, spending a few months with Keola Sequeria in Maui and visiting the shop of John Cobb in Ross.
Luke’s studio is located in a Sausalito warehouse near several of the area’s local arborists. There, he works with walnut, oak, maple, black acacia, bay laurel and madrone, among the many other varieties of trees found in our area—turning what would have become wood chips into beautiful, heirloom-quality bowls for the table. Whether cut from a downed walnut on a Tiburon hillside or an elm from a backyard in Novato, each piece of wood—even those from the same tree—contributes to bowls that are entirely unique.
“I love that you never know what you’re going to find when you start carving a piece of wood,” Luke says. “Each one reveals something entirely different.”
lukegarrisonwoodwork.com @lukegarrisonwoodwork
Saturdays at Marin Country Mart Farmers’ Market
