Conversations with Chris Cantwell: Touch points to talk about, including how materials influence art, and how art finds its own expression February 15 2025, 0 Comments

By Kimberly Nicoletti

Chris Cantwell visits the Vail gallery Feb. 15-16 each evening to answer questions and just generally chat. He’s happy to talk about his process, which often includes 300 different species of wood; what goes into his signature “waterfall” technique; stories behind the pieces; and much more. And, if you want to explore other topics, he happens to love skiing, snowboarding, surfing, rock climbing, and church activities.

One of the highlights of last year’s visits to the gallery came in the form of a family toting a bunch of kids.

“They were really fun. They asked me all these really good questions — it was like teaching a class,” he says, adding that the question he enjoyed the most revolved around how he makes the frames. “The bigger they are, the harder they are to make because wood moves back-and-forth and likes to warp and crack. To get a piece that big (up to 70" x 34”) that will stay flat and hang on the wall, I have to make what’s called a torsion box … so it’s stable enough that the movement of the wood won’t pull the frame out of square.”

He's also open to talking about the deeper meanings of his pieces, including “Things Lost That Can Never Be Found,” which he made last year. Brian Raitman had encouraged him to produce a large piece, but Cantwell felt a little gun shy after losing big pieces to a gallery out East that went under.

“I was scared to make more, but Brian is reassuring, and we have a great relationship, so I started this big piece for last year’s show. It was supposed to be a landscape,” he says.

But art has a way of shaping its own destiny. As he added a skyline and sun, he began feeling sad, and that’s when he realized it was about losing his son to a hit-and-run driver a couple years ago. The sun represented his son in heaven, and the skyline represented him taking a winter off to ski and snowboard to help deal with the grief.

This year’s piece, “No Wrong Answers,” grew out of that one. Aesthetically, he moved on by inlaying a center line being pulled this way and that. Eventually, the line, fashioned from mother-of-pearl, snaps into pieces. He initially thought the piece was about his divorce — how he and his wife love one another but recognize they’re moving in different directions. His working title was “Ties that Bind,” which he did view as sarcastic and worried about naming it such. In addition to fretting over the title, the piece greatly intimidated him.

“I had this fear that what I had in my mind wasn’t possible to actually execute, and I didn’t really find out for sure until I sanded it out after I spent a month inlaying it, and that day I sanded it out was very spiritual for me because this piece just kind of smacked me upside the head and said, ‘No, I’m not going to accept all your garbage. I’m going to be who I’m going to be, and I’m going to be much more hopeful and peaceful, and you’re going to call me: "No Wrong Answers,” he says. “There’s a positive side in the piece. It has this part that’s broken, but then there’s all the stuff that blends together in a way that is encouraging to me, (in) that humanity is deeply connected in a lot of ways.”

Of course, if you don’t feel like going so deep, Cantwell is just a carnival of fun to converse with. Here are several talking points — and the Cliff-Note version answers — which he’ll, of course, expound upon.

• Ask him why he abandoned making custom guitars, and he’ll tell you he’s tone deaf, so all he cared about was how they looked.

• Ask him how he started making wall art, and he’ll tell you customers loved his furniture but often were afraid to actually use it.

• Ask him how his 300 series began, and he’ll take you back to a Scottish apprentice.

• Ask him where he sources his wood, and he’ll tell you about cigar boxes he has  filled with scraps from the 1930s and ’40s.

• Ask him about Christmas, and he might just tell you stories about creating ornaments for the White House’s holiday tree.

• Ask him about his early rock climbing days, and he’ll probably tell you how the Ansel Adams Gallery launched his career by commissioning boxes inlaid with abstracted scenes of Yosemite National Park.

• Ask him to do math, and he might point to his five-piece work, where each box is exactly twice the size of the last.

Or, simply rely on your own creativity to strike up a conversation.