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Meet the Artist: Lois Keneer Ventura
"There is no good and bad art. Art is something that comes from your own heart and your own mind."
-Lois Keneer Ventura

Lois Keneer Ventura is a seasoned veteran when it comes to breaking into male-dominated activities. Growing up as the only girl of seven children, she found herself constantly having to do everything better than her brothers if she wanted to play with them. But when she started doing everything better, they didn't want to play with her anymore, or they didn't want to play fairly. It's amazing that Lois still has such a strong attraction to wood after being locked up in the cedar chest countless times by her brothers while playing hide-and-seek.

Fortunately, not all the men in her life were as taxing on her emotional reserves. She watched her father and grandfather work with wood while she was growing up, and in admiring their creations, found herself naturally drawn to wood. Her grandfather was a particular source of inspiration. He built his own log home in the 1950s, and to decorate it, would search the forest for odd wood shapes that he would turn into wall hangings and sconces. Lois was attracted to the natural shapes and textures of these pieces, and today, many of her grandfather's ideas go into her boxes.

She started her self-directed woodworking education 20 years ago, and dabbled in furniture, scrollwork, and intarsia as hobbies while she worked various odd jobs. Although she tried a few night woodworking courses out of curiosity, most of her woodworking education she found in books. When asked how she feels about people who look down on self-taught artists, she answers objectively: having participated in numerous art shows she has seen the pendulum swing both ways. She's seen projects by many artists with superior education who lack the talent and creativity to translate that training into superior artwork. On the opposite hand, she has become successful simply by teaching herself.

Lois decided to make woodworking her part-time job in 1985. In 1992, after growing tired of jobs where she wasn't paid what she was worth, Lois decided to quit the mainstream world to take up woodworking full-time.

Her decision to make woodworking her career meant that she would once again have to prove herself in a male-dominated pursuit. To do this, she decided to view her work as a product of novelty rather than of minority, an attitude that helped her break into a male-dominated profession with few problems. She does still encounter ignorance in men who assume that she only does the measuring and sanding for Knothome Designs, the woodworking business she and her husband, Peter, established to sell their original designs. Generally, she finds that many male woodworking professionals are intimidated by their female peers, a fact that she advises women to use to their advantage. She adds that there's no need to be arrogant, since the men are already scared of you, but adds that you shouldn't have to sit through hours of unwanted advice from men who assume that they know more about woodworking than you do.

And Lois knows woodworking. She has been focusing her design efforts solely on bandsawn boxes for the past seven years, producing over 500 individual pieces. She sells the boxes through Knothome Designs or displays them at juried art shows all over the eastern United States. She has won countless awards; the most recent include the Festival Award at the Three Resorts Festival in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; the Designer's Craftsman Award for Excellence at the Canton Museum, in Canton, Ohio; and another top award at Cincinnati's Summer Art Show.

When asked what keeps her going, Lois jokingly suggests credit card debt. While she loves the freedom self-employment offers, she adds that "craziness" comes with doing woodworking for a living. Artists must be painstaking in their efforts, but for little compensation. Lois often finds this frustrating. To make a reasonable living as a woodworker, she would have to concentrate her efforts on mass-produced, high-demand, lower-quality, "stapled-together" items like cabinets and furniture that leave little room for her artistic sensibilities.

Is all the "craziness" worth it? Lois says yes. Her gratification comes from expressing herself through designing and completing a project, applying the first coat of oil to it, and stepping back in admiration. And we all know there's no craziness in that.

When Women in Woodworking's graphic designer, Kris, brought a copy of Lois Keneer Ventura's Building Beautiful Boxes with Your Bandsaw to the development table, I was instantly intrigued. To grasp the idea of devoting all your woodworking hours to one type of project, while still being able to make each piece an individual work of art, I simply had to ask, "Why bandsawn boxes?"

First, Lois wanted a unique woodworking creation to display at juried art shows and contests, where artists must create all their pieces from their own original designs, rather than from someone else's patterns. But she also wanted a design that would allow her greater artistic expression than she could achieve through standard woodworking practices. "I don't like measuring," she revealed. With bandsawn boxes, she found that the exact measurements required were only for the basic length, depth, and width. Once on the bandsaw a box "takes on a life of its own."

She created her first box in 1993. It sits atop a bookshelf in the Ventura home, and after glancing at it during our conversation, Lois commented that it seemed crude to her in terms of technique, with rather tight spots in the design that were very difficult to sand and chisel. Still, the box became a great learning tool in the end, and all the problems she ran into trying to construct it helped her refine her design strategies, evidenced in the following pieces, a sampler of Lois's favorites.

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