BEREA, Ohio – Many artists tend to gravitate to a specific medium - paints, pen and ink, or charcoal for instance. For Ron Roell, the world forms his canvas.
Roell, who has been working out of a shop in Berea for just the past few months, makes live-edge pieces from trees – large, fallen ones that probably would rot or be chopped or grinded otherwise, with nothing to show for decades of life. What Roell creates are artistic pieces that could find their final resting place in a boardroom, restaurant, bar or home.
His talents call on him to be artist, woodworker, laborer, entomologist, ecologist and even theologian. And they all come together in an industrial 1,500-square-foot facility in Berea where magic and art create beautiful and usable pieces.
Roell looks for shape and character rather than type of species. A slab twists with a bend; he sees a bar top. A long wide piece shows distinctive grains, and it’s a boardroom table. A piece with a hump jutting out looks like a computer table.
“I honor the wood by exposing what’s already there,” he said. “I have the eye of an artist. I am an artist.”
Pieces line his shop. A giant slice from a 250-year-old white oak stands proudly. A sycamore over there, maple over here. He knows the wood and – like a surgeon examining a patient - knows what was occurring inside the trees.
He can tell you what causes the crannies that snake along wood. The ash borer leaves behind its fatal cavities. The Ambrosia beetle carries a fungus on its feet, bores in, lays its eggs, and the young eat the fungus on the way out. The tree recognizes the tunnel - the fungus – as invaders. The heartwood part of the tree protects itself. But when sliced open, the crannies are there.
After a limb falls off, we see cracked daggers on the outside. But Roell can study the interior and see how the tree reacts by forming additional wood to support the lopsided weight.
“It’s almost like stretch marks,” he said.
“It’s the stresses that a tree goes through that creates the character; it’s not unlike a person. That’s what makes us so unique is the different stresses, the different experiences that we have had in in life that really shape our personality and our physical experiences quite often.”
The process, like an art form, is intricate. After he mills, stacks, dries and planes the wood, the fun begins.
Roell sprays water to show the distinctive lines and markings.
How he works
He specializes in slabs that are at least 30 inches wide. His milling operation is in Grafton, and his art is entirely sustainable.
“Literally every piece of wood in here was originally destined to be ground up into chips and sent to Green Circle Growers to fuel their wood-fired boilers,” he said.
“I don’t take down one tree for my own specific use. Everything that I mill was in a yard or roadside – something like that.”
Saved from the graveyard, the milled pieces are sanded multiple times to a final coat smoothed down with 3,000 grit before polishing. For those not familiar with sanding, the lower the number the courser the sandpaper. It’s a measure of abrasiveness. Matching the proper number with a particular project is key. For some projects, Roell can increase his grit levels from 80 to 120 to 180 to much higher.
Much of his time involves sanding. If you have ever sanded a large-scale project that requires a lot of smoothing out, you better be comfortable being alone. For a long time.
Roell uses a sander that resembles a floor polisher and weighs about 75 pounds. He hooks up a vacuum hose to it and goes to town.
Cracks are filled with resin and pores are sealed with latex caulk. He uses tiny, curved, metal-scraping dental tools to excavate and carve a mini bed out of the tree’s nooks and crannies.
A sanded, polyurethane finish will shield the piece from abuse and wear - water rings and the like on a table, for instance.
“The perfect finish is when it’s durable yet you can still see the grain,” Roell said.
He primarily does commissioned work, much of which is tables. Size of a piece does not equate to the finished price. Two similar pieces he had in his work area recently varied: One was $3,100, another $4,000 because of the amount of resin work involved. One might have a fast-dry resin; the other piece might take longer with exterior prep work.
Roell's shop is in Berea.
‘I’m a very passion-driven person’
“The more that I can honor what is there, bring it out, make it apparent,” he said. “I would love to just put oil over most of everything. But the downside of that is it tends to just mute a lot of the really unique color.”
A Cincinnati native, Roell started working in construction when he was 13 and spent years as a custom-remodeling contractor.
“I got burned out on the whole remodeling thing,” he said. “I’m a very passion-driven person. Truthfully most of my life I thought that I was doing what I was doing to prove to other people how good I was. But I think that ultimately I was doing it to prove to myself how good I was.”
A divorce, health problems and other issues converged in his life. He took time to write and self-publish a book, “My Logical God.” Six years ago, a new relationship brought him to Northeast Ohio, where he settled into his life and he realized his remodeling work had been “a means to an end.”
“What I determined what I was going to bring up, to me, was how I felt when I looked at it,” he said about his possessions. “It had nothing to do with value, it had nothing to do with anything else. I was only bringing good memories up with me. I either sold or have given away everything else.”
He approaches his work with the same knack artists have, that ability to see beauty where many of us see ugliness or nothing.
He looks at imperfections in wood and likens into to stresses that people endure.
One day years ago, he was splitting firewood. Several gnarly pieces couldn’t be split. He split what he could and tossed them into a heap. The remaining pieces formed a pile of misfits – which he was able to salvage and turn into assorted creations.
“That’s the most beautiful part,” he said. “All you need to do is polish the stresses, just expose some of the inherent beauty that is in you in order to let yourself shine.”
About Roell’s work: Roell’s website is Wood Tops and Tables.
The bowtie-shaped pieces are, in fact, called bowties and used for support.
Terms to know
Bowtie: A cutout piece of wood used as support in a weakened part of a piece. Its name comes from its shape. Roell prefers to use these functional pieces on the bottom, not the presented side, of a piece.
Hard vs soft wood: Nothing to do with density. Hardwood has leaves, softwood has needles.
Heartwood: Interior part of the tree.
Live edge: Anything with a non-cut edge. People think it means the bark stays on, but that is determined when the tree is taken down. If it’s down in the late fall / winter, often the bark will stay on. But if it’s taken down during the growing season or the sap is up, the bark comes off, he said.
Sapwood: Exterior of the tree.
I am on cleveland.com’s life and culture team and cover food, beer, wine and sports-related topics. If you want to see my stories, here’s a directory on cleveland.com. Bill Wills of WTAM-1100 and I talk food and drink usually at 8:20 a.m. Thursday morning. And tune in at 8:05 a.m. Fridays for “Beer with Bona and Much, Much More” with Munch Bishop on 1350-AM The Gambler.
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