Furniture became one of Rick’s favorite interests as he completed his college training at California State University, Fullerton, where he earned Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Art. Though he started building pieces for himself to compensate for what he felt was a mass-produced commercial market in wooden furniture, in 1980 he began making furniture professionally.

Rick has made cabinets, entertainment centers, tables and chairs and has even created many specialty items such as carriages to hold antique cannons! “I like chairs because they’re challenging,” Rick says. “It’s easy to make a table, but a chair is an engineering problem. It has to support weight and be comfortable.” Of all the chairs he has made, Rick enjoys making rocking chairs the most. He likes the nostalgia of a simpler time that they invoke and the way they often take center stage in a room, enticing guests to experience their soothing motion.

Rick attributes much of his success at woodworking to growing up in Alaska and learning carving techniques from Northwest Coast Indians. He was able to take the skills he learned while making masks, totem poles and canoes and, in later life, parlay them into an understanding of the importance of every object. The Indians, Rick explains, have many utilitarian things in their culture that are elaborately decorated. From spoons to tools, even wooden fish hooks–all are works of art. So, like the Indians, Rick puts a little zest into his creations, using wood that “has character,” varying the colors and the grains he uses on his pieces and often tailoring them to the size of the person for whom they are intended.

“I’m strictly into functional, not into just building a piece of sculpture,” he says. “When you’re building a chair, for example, you have to remember that folks’ backs aren’t built straight up and down. I build things to be used.”

It may be a simple philosophy, but it is one–as his woodwork clearly reveals–with an artistry all its own.