Réne LeBel: A Touch of Art

The the angular forms of a Rocky Mountain vista are one of Réne LeBel’s inspiration points: ‘I believe everything that we experience and that surrounds us is part of our inspiration.’

Réne LeBel lives in the Canadian Rocky Mountains. In 2024, his piece Crosswinds was the winning entry for the Recycled & Rescued category, Maker of the Year Awards. He has two workshops. One is for his day job as a bespoke maker, the other is a compact home workshop for his personal projects.

At home he explores a range of forms and processes inspired largely by his local environment and the materials at hand. We asked him about his work, and in particular about the complex furniture he builds from ‘random’ endgrain glue-ups.

Crosswind, Réne LeBel’s award-winning Maker of the Year entry in 2024

With countless blocks of wood combined for endgrain tables and ‘cubes’, is it about dealing with waste, the challenge, or for the Zen of it?
Although I’d made endgrain countertops for clients before, the first time I discovered the potential of this work was about 10 years ago. We had armfuls of offcuts at the shop that were 18–20mm square and 2.5m long that I ended up gluing up into a tabletop. Since then I’ve been exploring further. It’s a wonderful way to use up scraps and offcuts and the beauty of it is that I can ‘grow’ them to virtually any thickness, width and length. So yes, it’s about dealing with waste but there are also interesting challenges of aesthetics and making the structures work.

Réne LeBel’s work reflects his local environment as shown above in these skeletal and hanging tree forms and hoar frost.

What’s your day job about?
I pay my bills by running a custom woodwork shop with one other employee. Located in a small town we do a bit of everything from cabinets and millwork to doors and stairs. I have access in off hours but tend not to use it for my personal work, except to break down sheets and lumber and to use the thickness sander. This is also where my vacuum press lives.

I work on personal pieces like Crosswinds in my small, but well equipped shop in my double garage. Working in my spare time, these pieces can take weeks to complete. At the home shop I can set up and leave machines and tools for a specific task indefinitely. I am actively trying to make the transition into doing my creative, personal work full time.

Initial mock-ups for the base of Crosswinds were made scrap wood and holt-melt glue.

It gets very cold where you live in The Rockies. How does that affect your woodworking?
Yes, it gets cold here but the shop is heated. The main thing is that it’s dry. We are on the dry side of the continental divide. Plus the cold temperatures in winter limit the amount of moisture in the air. Air at -20 to -40°C can hold very little moisture, heating to room temperature keeps this low humidity. In the winter the moisture content of our lumber can get down to 4–6%. Shipped from more humid climates, lumber and even sheet stock can be very ‘warpy’ until it acclimatises.

The dryness also makes PVA glues tack up very quickly. PVA costs more in the winter because it’s shipped in heated trucks so it doesn’t freeze. We only use the glues with the longest open and working times. I use an electric blanket to heat resin glues for curing. I think this is common elsewhere though. Sometimes I arrive and often leave in the dark, but in the summer it’s light out until 11 at night.

To assemble the base, the MDF exoskeleton shown was initially used to position and hold the legs to arrange and then cut lap joints. It was then used in conjunction with a router on a sled to cut the top of the legs to the angle meeting the tabletop. Lastly, the table was flipped upside-down and the jig used again with the router and sled to cut the bottom of the legs parallel to the tabletop.

The cracked ice pattern may be ‘random’ but it all starts with a plan. Réne works outwards from the centre, cutting pieces and fitting them. After pressing the completed cracked ice layon to its substrate, the edgings are cut, fitted and glued on.

How do you go about your ‘randomly’ arranged geometric compositions?
These designs are drawn out full scale by hand and ruler onto paper. Often I’ll do a few versions then pick the one I like the best. I find it’s important to have a paper plan, otherwise the design can run away on me. I don’t necessarily follow the plan exactly but it gives me a road map.

I pick a starting point, usually the centre and generally work outwards enlarging around the edges. I use carbon paper to trace veneer pieces off the pattern. This is just a guide as the pieces need to be fitted to their neighbours much more precisely.

I use the sliding tablesaw to cut the veneer piece by eye and pencil mark, lining up the cut to the edge of a zero clearance base. A very good blade and minding grain direction are key. With a bit of practice, I get into the zone and get the cuts first try, but they can be adjusted with a block plane or sanding block.

Réne spends some time finessing the coopered base of his WORT table in his day job workshop.

When working the pattern outwards, I try to work so that only two edges are being joined at a time. Joining three or four edges is sometimes necessary but exponentially more difficult. This isn’t part of the paper plan. The paper plan is only layout and aesthetics.

When people see these pieces at a show or exhibition, I’m often asked how it’s done or if I have infinite patience. I say it’s not that bad, it’s just a process with a strategy to make it as efficient as possible. This seems natural and obvious to me. I’m usually met with blank looks, that at first I didn’t understand. I now get that not everyone has an affinity for this kind of work!

Réne’s WORT table has a random cracked ice veneered top with solid edging and coopered and tapered base.

What’s behind your complex bases with multiple legs and more?
I try to not get stuck on typical or traditional forms of furniture. The goal (and this is a work in progress) is to deconstruct the function of a piece and design for that, forgetting every other example of that furniture form I’ve seen before.

As an example, a table generally is just a flat surface a certain height off the floor. You may need knee space for sitting or other demands, but fundamentally it is a flat plane parallel to the floor. Most people think of a table as a rectangular surface with four legs, one at each corner, maybe connected with aprons. We probably all have one and they work wonderfully but this is the form of ‘table’ I’m trying to forget. I’m exploring other options.

Réne’s home workshop is housed in a garage – it’s compact with well thought-out storage and work areas.

How do you make your cube forms?
The Cube originated as another way to use up shop leftovers. The process has been called ‘chaos endgrain’ by cutting board makers. I start by gluing up strips of similar thickness offcuts into blanks that are just narrower than the width of my planer.

Réne LeBel’s Cube forms have mitred together panels with random patterns achieved through through multiple stages of gluing, crosscutting and regluing.

This takes a lot of wood so I make various thicknesses depending on what my scraps provide. After planing, I crosscut them into strips. The width of this cut determines the thickness of the endgrain pieces which become the faces of the cube.

These strips are turned 90° on edge so the endgrain is facing up and down, arranged randomly and glued up into blanks with endgrain rectangles of various sizes. Crosscutting these into various widths promotes randomness as does arranging the resulting strips randomly and gluing them up again. If I cut the blanks at an angle I get more random patterns and triangles, but this also makes more waste.

I repeat this cutting and gluing five or six times until the pattern looks good, and uniformly mixed. Now I have the faces of the cubes. I run them through the thickness sander to flush them, then cut them into squares with mitres on the edges. Six mitred pieces make the faces of each cube.

I use packing tape and do a complex mitre fold to make the faces into a cube. The whole process is very labour intensive. Also, a lot of material (around 40%) is lost cutting through kerfs and in the unusable ends (especially on angled cross cuts).

By the way, I’m calling the cubes ‘7 of 9’ as part of a series and partially because of their resemblance to a Borg ship from Star Trek.

The first glue-up for a cube form is shown, initially all side grain here. The first panels are crosscut into strips that are rotated 90° and then glued into second stage panels. After mitring the six panels are glued into the final form.

As a professional, how do you balance time vs money?
I do keep track of the amount of time a project takes to make. I enjoy the technical challenges of woodworking and attempting new things. However, I try to not let the technical side of the work be a means to an end, or let difficulty or complexity be for their own sake.

When I’m designing the goal is to turn off the woodworker part of my brain so I’m not thinking about how to make something. This is an attempt to maximise creativity – thinking about how to build something will stunt an idea before it is fully formed or explored.

Once a worthy design is reached, I then figure out how to build it. Sometimes this results in complex techniques, but I think the end results are better. Plus this process brings me joy. When I do commissions they generally are simpler forms to keep costs in check as the job will be quoted.

Is your locale reflected in the patterns of your built-up forms? Does it influence your aesthetic?
I believe everything we experience and that surrounds us is part of our inspiration. It follows that the environment where I live, and spend most of my time, is undoubtedly reflected in my aesthetic and the forms I use.

Crosswinds is a good example of that. Periodically, we get very strong gusty winds here called Chinooks. Actual crosswinds are a real and common occurrence here. The Rocky Mountains are sharp and angular similar to the geometric, angular forms I’ve been so fond of recently. Similarly, the wintertime, leaf-less branches of deciduous trees create geometric patterns.

We also get something here called surface hoar. It’s a frost that forms overnight and coats surfaces with tiny ice crystals, again a geometric pattern. The forests here are mainly composed of skinny, tall coniferous trees.

When I’m out near my house in the woods, I see blown over trees with their tops hung up in the neighbouring trees canopy. The criss-crossing pattern is very similar to the legs of crosswinds. And in fact the trees were likely pushed over by a Chinook crosswind!

You wrote: ‘What is the point of a scrupulously crafted piece if it has not been touched by art to evoke an emotional response, please the eye, or create attachment with the audience?’ How do we add that touch or artistry to our work?
I’m still trying to figure that out! I think it starts with caring about the outcome, and how the parts interact with each other, the environment and people. For me it’s a deliberate and intentional goal to strive for, not that I always achieve it.

Many years ago I studied the elements and principles of design, and continue to be interested in proportions. Incorporating these tools into one’s work is a good foundation to make it happen. I don’t think there is a formula that always works for me (or for anyone).

Another helpful practice for me is to not rush. I’ll typically start with a sketch, move to scale drawings and then maybe a scale model or samples. At each stage I try to live with each drawing or model for a bit, and come back to it periodically to revisit it.

I find it easy to get attached to an idea initially, but it might not be the best idea. Revisiting allows me to evaluate more objectively, and make changes if needed. I believe our brains work on this stuff subconsciously. Allowing the brain the time to work on these problems often yields fruitful results. But I also like to allow for minor changes during the construction. No matter how long I do this, even with good drawings and models, I can never fully anticipate how something will look full scale in the finished material.

First published in Australian Wood Review, issue 127, March 2025

René LeBel @lebel.rene has been crafting work in wood professionally in Canada for over 20 years. Starting out self-taught using only hand tools, he then experimented with a brief stint timber framing. In 2004, studying fine woodworking at Selkirk College became the springboard for nurturing a continuing passion. His craft was further refined in a handful of shops in British Columbia’s interior. He now lives in Canmore, Alberta. Learn more at www.renelebel.net