Blacksmith Dan
Klug punctures a red-hot steel support for a brazier. Klug and his
wife, Heidi Shewchuck, work out of their garage in Oak Grove, south of
Milwaukie.
Art
by the
Pound
By NEVILL ESCHEN
Issue date: Fri, Dec 30, 2005
The Tribune
|
Shewchuck shapes the serpent portion of a steel
gate for a Sons of Norway lodge.
Shewchuck trained
as an artist and usually sketches projects first. |
Sometimes
people don’t want just any old gate or handrail; they want wrought iron.
And that keeps blacksmiths Heidi Shewchuck and Dan Klug very
busy.
In their Oak Grove garage, outfitted with anvils and hot-as-volcano
forges, the husband-and-wife team produces work that goes far beyond
traditional twisted metal rods. As White Hart Forge, the two shape
dragons, tendrils and leaves into gates and railings.
Southeast Portland resident Nancy Monroe sought out the craftsmanship
of Shewchuck and Klug. Monroe had ruled out planting wisteria to frame
her Eastmoreland home’s doorway after she learned how aggressively the
vine grows and that termites might settle into it. But she still loved
the flowering vine, so she opted for it in steel.
Monroe gushes over her wisteria pounded from metal.
“I feel like I have a little piece of art out in front,” She said of
the detailed vine that reaches about 9 feet from the ground. “It’s so
fun.”
A project usually starts on paper. Shewchuck, a trained artist,
sketches out the possibilities for a gate, a chandelier, a banister or a
fireplace screen.
“If you can draw it, we can make it. That’s what makes it so much
fun,” Klug said. “It’s not so much straight lines, squares, circles and
rectangles. It’s more flowing. It’s more organic. You get to express
with steel what you want it to do.”
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Shewchuck works on the gate for the Sons of Norway lodge.
She
and her husband use traditional methods, even making some of the
own blacksmithing tools.
|
It’s really wrought
steel
The metalwork referred to as “wrought iron” is, in fact, steel.
Steel is an alloy made primarily of iron, but the older reference stuck
despite the industrial overhaul — the Bessemer process — that allows
mass production of the stronger alloy.
For her part, Shewchuck, who studied at Seattle’s Pratt Fine Arts
Center and honed construction skills when she was Portland Opera
assistant prop master, is as involved with the metalwork as she is with
the sketches.
“I get to use tools, I get to be a woman, and I get to do beautiful
plants and vines and things like that. … If someone needs hinges, I know
how to make them. If someone needs a tool, I know how to make them,”
Shewchuck said. Women in the field are rare but not new, and have been
documented in blacksmithing back to 18th-century London.
Before firing up the forge, Klug and Shewchuck literally hammer out a
rough draft in sculpting clay, which has similar qualities as molten
steel but without the intense heat or the clanging of metal on metal.
Their propane and coal forges heat steel to at least 1,800 degrees
Fahrenheit, softening it just enough to be coaxed with some well-aimed
force. The work takes patience: It’s continually interrupted as the rods
cool and need to be reheated. It takes focus: Those skinny steel rods
require a practiced grip. And it has its hazards.
“Black will burn you faster than red will,” Klug says he tells his
students. Instinct warns you to stay away from red-hot metal, but even
as it cools to black the steel still can be a blistering 700 degrees.
It’s a lesson he sometimes relearns the hard way.
“It really upsets your day,” he says. “You try to learn from your
mistakes.” |
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| No shortage of
business These are busy days for blacksmiths — hobbyists and professionals
alike. A trade group, Artists-Blacksmiths Association of North America,
based in Farmington, Ga., says the metal-forger contingency is growing
among its 5,000 members.
The association’s central office executive director, LeeAnn Mitchell,
sees two reasons for the upsurge in interest: a growing appreciation for
increasingly rare handcrafted work and affluent homeowners who are
putting “major money” into their houses, willing to spend thousands of
dollars on a gate or a chandelier unlike anyone else’s.
Mitchell says she’s gratified these days to see home-improvement
publications list ironworkers along with framers and electricians.
The Artists-Blacksmiths Association president, Don Kemper of
Ridgefield, Wash., estimates the area from Northern California to
British Columbia to Montana has about 500 blacksmiths, with the vast
majority of them part-time or hobbyists. Kemper says he expects interest
— among craftspeople and buyers — to grow.
“The market is untapped. … (Wrought iron) has a three-dimensional
quality, it has peaks, valleys, highlights and shadows, more mass, more
depth.”
The field accommodates traditional and modern artistry. Klug and
Shewchuck readily produce Norse and Celtic designs — both are history
buffs and immersed in old-world sensibilities.
Klug spent much of his early professional life as a federal Bureau of
Land Management archaeologist in Eastern Oregon. During that time he
kept up the blacksmithing hobby he had learned at Northeast Portland’s
Benson Polytechnic High School. He later studied under the late master
blacksmith Geronimo Bayard of Sutherlin.
The couple started White Hart Forge in 2001.
“We bounce ideas back and forth,” Shewchuck says. She concedes,
though, “it’s hard sometimes because you butt heads, any working couple
does.”
It adds up to an intense workplace: the heat, the sparks, the
concentration, the creativity, the hard work, even the tedium. For that,
though, Klug and Shewchuck say they get the satisfaction of making
something solid and sometimes complex with their own hands. |
Klug
and Shewchuck have operated White Hart Forge since 2001.
"We
bounce ideas back and forth," Shewchuck says. |
Email Nevill Eschen
|