Craftsman carries on tradition

By LAURA BEHENNA

Bigfork Eagle

Building rustic furniture is more than a business for Drew Hubatsek; it's a way of life that reinforces his connection with nature.

He hopes his work will strengthen others' connection to nature, too.

Large bundles of bark-covered tree limbs wait outside his Woods Bay workshop, which shelters dozens of smaller bundles inside. Many of those humble sticks will become rustic furniture that Hubatsek hopes will become family heirlooms. Friends and acquaintances call him when they prune or take down trees on their property, knowing he will see the artistic potential in scraps that would otherwise go to the landfill.

"Rustic does not mean crude," he said.

Although he uses natural materials like birch bark, pine cones, twigs and even acorns, each of his custom pieces incorporate carefully considered design and craftsmanship.

Hubatsek grew up in northern New York state, where his family owned a recreational cabin in the Adirondack Mountains. The family toured some of the large, historic summer homes (called "great camps") in the Adirondacks, where as a boy Hubatsek saw examples of rustic furniture local craftspeople had built using unpeeled native wood, bark and other natural materials. He was fascinated with the work of craftsmen like Ernest Stowe, a famous rustic furniture builder. A common story goes that caretakers at the great camps started building furniture with local wood to pass the time during long winters.

"It intrigued me, the rightness of it," Hubatsek said. "It was celebrating the intrinsic beauty of the wood, not overmanipulating the material. It planted a seed in me that lay dormant for a long, long time."

He worked as a arborist and tree surgeon in the Lake Tahoe area of northern California for more than 20 years before moving to northwestern Montana, attracted by a landscape that reminded him of his rural New York roots. Once here, he wanted to start a business that would allow him to express himself creatively. Woodworking runs in his family's blood and seemed the natural choice.

"I've always been building something my whole life," he said, adding that he and his father built many woodworking projects together throughout his childhood. His paternal grandfather and great-grandfather were professional coopers who built and hand-carved beautiful, intricate barrels in unusual shapes and sizes. Hubatsek still uses hand tools that belonged to his father and grandfather. He built his workshop on his property overlooking Flathead Lake, where he and his wife, Janna, live in a house that was once movie actress Myrna Loy's summer retreat.

He's working on a bed frame of unpeeled cedar posts crowned with small, stick-built pyramids sided with white birch bark. Gracefully forked branches of peeled, polished lilac hold the crossbars of the headboard together.

He has photos of a semicircular gazebo he built at Swan Lake, using unpeeled cedar he harvested on the owners' property. A Mayan temple he visited in Central America inspired the gazebo's high-roofed design.

"If everyone had rustic furniture and gazebos, it'd be a better world," he said.

Hubatsek particularly likes to make rustic chairs.

"Chairs must be the primal furniture," he said, noting that the first piece of furniture a human ever created was probably a chair of some kind. "They're sittable art."

Hubatsek doesn't impose his will on what he creates; he lets his ideas evolve as he considers what the wood tells him.

"With rustic work, the material dictates what form a piece will take," he said.

He likes to take a set of sticks and look at them for a few days, envisioning what form they might take. He rearranges them in different ways, sometimes clamping pieces together to help him picture how they might look in a finished piece. Even after he starts a piece, it might evolve into something else. A chair might become a table, or vice versa.

"Some people might call it a Zen discipline," he said. "I'm not forcing my will on the material. I let the material dictate what will happen."

Hubatsek's work is gaining recognition outside Montana. One of his chairs is a partly abstract sculpture of curved, high-reaching apple limbs with an antique tapestry seat. A photo of the chair appears in a college-level art appreciation textbook titled "The Art of Seeing," by Paul Zelanski and Mary Pat Fisher.

Hubatsek will display his work at the Western Design Conference in Jackson Hole, Wyo., Sept. 6-9. The conference showcases furniture, textiles and jewelry in rustic and Western genres. A jury selects the artists who may participate based on examples of their past work. Each artist may submit only one piece, which must be created specifically for the conference and hasn't been shown anywhere else, Hubatsek said. Only 34 artists are chosen nationwide.

"I feel honored to be included in the group," he said.

Individual pieces at the conference may sell for tens of thousands of dollars, Hubatsek said. At the 2005 conference, in which he was also invited to participate, the "Best in Show" piece sold for more than $30,000. Designers and interior decorators who visit the show often commission the artists they meet to create art for their clients.

Hubatsek has a land-line telephone but no cell phone, computer, e-mail or Web site. A friend once called him a "born-again Luddite," a moniker he's content to wear.

"I try to live simply," he said. "If you want to get hold of me, I have a phone and an address."

Hubatsek can be reached at 837-6868.