Tim Brudnicki, shown in his Eau Claire studio, incorporates local wood and
stone into his furniture.

Think of a table. Is it formica and chrome, glittering in the kitchen? A molded plastic folding table in the church hall? Is it your nicked-up old oak family dinner board? A sleek Ikea Oddvald? The new fused and laminated conference table at the office? Or is it just a generic rectangle with legs? For such huge pieces of furniture, tables are usually pretty invisible, just horizontal surfaces set up on legs to put things onto, or as a space for things happening above them, meals and meetings and daily work. When tables themselves are active, when they whisper their own poetry into the room, most often it comes from all that’s happened to them, their history.

“It seems people genuinely have permission to be artists here. You definitely feel supported by the community and not some weirdo artist.”– woodworker Tim Brudnicki, on the artistic climate in the Chippewa Valley

Now imagine a new table: It’s a sinuous slab of black walnut cut from the forests east of town, shaped into a board by a local Amish sawyer, sculpted into a table by an artist. In this table the artist has carved recesses and placed into them pebbles he gathered from Lake Superior, filled then with resin they evoke lakes across the landscape, or liquid streams stilled in the movement of flowing that echoes the grain of the wood’s heart’s growth. This table comes to you already breathing music. It has its own motion, folding micro into macro, indoor into outdoor, new into ancient. This is the work of Tim Brudnicki.

In Brudnicki’s Eau Claire studio, a canoe hangs on the wall, half-finished frames are carefully stacked on the workbench, long shelves hold unfinished wood of varying shapes and sizes waiting to be fully seen and used, while just an edge of a sneeze of sawdust roughs the air. A lifelong woodworker, Brudnicki had been working in Milwaukee as a finish carpenter and then as a minister until three years ago. Then he and his family had one of those rare, exhilarating, yet somewhat unsettling moments in life where a whole new chapter opens and anything becomes possible. Brudnicki says, “I wanted to get back into carpentry, but I really wanted to make sure I challenged myself artistically, not to just open up a cabinet shop, but to produce beauty.” Looking for a place to support a creative enterprise, they chose Eau Claire, and he has found the city to be all he had hoped. “It seems people genuinely have permission to be artists here. You definitely feel supported by the community and not some weirdo artist. I feel that on a macro level but then on a micro level here in the shop it’s supportive as well.” His studio shares space with the carpentry workshop at My Next Home, owned by Glen Mills, who has been a great resource of professional collaboration to Brudnicki since they met.

Brudnicki’s River’s Edge series of furniture, which incorporates local wood and stone, developed as he was first working toward fusing his carpentry skills with an artistic practice. “In a way it was forgetting all the methods or styles that I’ve looked at my whole life and trying to slow down and design something from within,” says Brudnicki, “I’m a huge music fan. When I witness music that’s built well, there’s always this evidence that a person really went into the depths of themselves to go and get this music. I started asking, how I can apply this to what I am good at?” His deep love of nature sparked the idea of mingling wood and stone and water in a piece of furniture and he then spent the next month figuring out the technique to make it both functional as well as beautiful. As another local serendipity, his neighbor Rick Pahl – who happened to be an expert at auto-body finishing – was just then open to trying out something new, and came to work with him on finishes for the pieces.  

Brudnicki has a great respect for artists. Now that his new business is established, he is actively looking for opportunities to collaborate with local artists and otherwise participate in the cultural profile of the city he has come to call his own. “I think of an artist as someone who has a lot of curiosity and who has a lot of courage. Those two things have to go hand in hand. There are a lot of reasons I can think of why to not create something authentic, but once I get over those excuses then a lot of really neat things can happen. Moving to Eau Claire was one of those things. I love it here. Ultimately, this is home.”

To see Brudnicki’s work in person, you can find him at the American Craft Council Show in St. Paul (shows.craftcouncil.org/stpaul) from April 11-13. He also has work to view in his studio by appointment. To learn more or to contact him, visit www.eauclairewoodworks.com or call (715) 559-5523.