Bio of James J. Kizak
I was raised on a farm in Twinsburg, Ohio, enlisted in the Navy after high school, and worked as a civilian electronic technician in Greenland for ten years on the Dewline. During that time I met many talented people, one of which was Darell Perkins, the lead mechanic who instructed me on metal turning on the lathe. “Patience” was his main law which you have to “self inflict” constantly to do precision turning and I use this all the time in carving. Traveling on the path of life presents many twists and turns, some of which cross over previous paths. In the 1980’s while working in the plastics heavy industry as electrical and mechanical maintenance I met Ray Muniak who was the patternmaker constructing wood and aluminum molds for forming plastic components. I was impressed at the time of Ray’s organizational, creative, and disciplinary skills in woodworking which were if you were to rate them they would be an eleven on the scale of one to ten. I didn't know it at the time but in the future he would be my mentor in the field of woodcarving art. I learned three important laws of woodworking there---never let anyone use your woodworking tools, align the tools as perfect as possible, and construct fixtures for routering or milling very critical divergent products. After my retirement with some diversions into Corvette restoration and video editing I decided to replace the very large kitchen light fixture with something unusual out of wood so in 2009 I purchased a wood lathe to do the job. I loved the grain structures in all kinds of wood and wanted to utilize the grain and natural curves to augment the look of the light fixture. Flowering crab apple, walnut, cherry, purple heart, southern pine, spruce, and pear are my favorites. So I decided to do a lot of practicing and started turning old and new pieces of wood, some of which were waiting to be burned in the fireplace. I contacted Ray again through his website to talk about turning wood and low and behold the artistic direction of my creations commenced to take form using his knowledge and expertise as guidance. Several trips with Ray to the turning classes and PBS wood turning shows were also very helpful. My main thrust now is finding suitable root structures or driftwood for new pieces and molding them into graceful flowing curves of expression. Ray has literally beaten me over the head to establish this website and I have finally given in to his guidance. Several of the pieces have wound up at my doctors and relatives domains and also as wedding gifts. It is ironic that the kitchen light fixture has to this day not been replaced as I originally intended although as I toil digging up stumps by hand there may be a fixture in the future. James J. Kizak