A sculpted bird and the original print block from which a woodblock print was made are two examples of art by members of the Stender family on display at Easy Lane Frames and Select Art Gallery. Contributed Photos

The making of art is a process. Gathering materials, fishing for the image that ignites a concept, or wrestling techniques — an artist is both master and victim of the process, and often the very best artists are those who know when to stop.

Case in point: The Stender family of North Bend, currently the featured artists at Easy Lane Frames and Select Art Gallery, in North Bend, definitely have a handle on when to put down the knife. Or torch. Or scoring tool or red sable fine-line brush.

Veneta Stender creates jewelry, using hand-beaten silver, oil-rich leather, polished chunks of iridescent shell and vivid gemstones. Her necklaces are deceptively simple pieces that focus the viewer’s gaze like a raptor scanning a hayfield at harvest time.

Easy Lane owner Jane Snoddy likes Veneta’s work because the jeweler consistently works in realms “beyond gold and silver. I admire her,” states Snoddy, “because she’s always going to workshops, always learning something.”

And I admire Veneta Stender because she knew that a single stone of royal purple charoite, whose depths held streaks of white like vapor clouds trapped on a distant planet, could not be successfully embellished. It was a stand-alone gemstone, and so she contrasted its shiny smooth surface with a hand-wrought square of silver, mounting the charoite off-center and adding a silver snake chain. She knew when to quit. She calls the piece “Nebula.”

When Duffy Stender goes too far with knife or chisel, he tends toward the philosophical. “With the mistakes,” he admits, “you take it from there. You make it into something interesting.”

But, when studying his woodblock bird prints, his base relief stone carvings, his little pine needle baskets no larger than a bagel, studded with semiprecious stones and wisps of sun-bleached grass, the wonder is, what mistake? How could this perfectly balanced prismacolor print, this sculpture, this basket, be the result of an error?

We’ll never know. Carvers are always taking away. Duffy Stender brings forth turtles and birds from solid stone, listening as he chisels, aware that there is a grain to the stone, and the piece could easily split in two. He gouges lines from a block of wood, working with the grain, and then he inks the block, presses paper against it, and jumps through the looking glass to discover his carved image in reverse, with its wealth of new possibilities.  

Greg Stender is the son of Veneta and Duffy Stender. His medium is sculpted wood, and he creates small, precisely painted birds. The work is both more realistic than bobbing, carved cork, glassy-eyed hunting decoys, and less sophisticated than abstract, contemporary bird sculptures.

Stender’s niche is folk art, and it is beautifully realized in the collection of 11 birds now on display at Easy Lane Frames. Jane Snoddy notes that Greg Stender selects unusual birds. “He’s not your typical seagull and eagle artist,” she says.

Among others, he has created a California quail, a Virginia rail, a Western snipe, the dark-crowned sora and a wild and unpredictable chucker bird.

“I’m not trying to make them feather-perfect,” says Stender. “It’s not realistic. The birds are taken to a point that the dowels still work.”

Ah, the dowels. Rather than standing upright on fragile bird legs, Stender’s pieces are fixed to a sturdy dowel. Painted with care, mounted on varnished pieces of burl or freeform driftwood, the little birds are unique.

Like his parents, Greg Stender allows the creative process to shape his direction. And with the entire Stender family, when the process stops, the product is art.