In the Studio: Noah Cohen

We spent an afternoon with Noah Cohen in his Boyle Heights workshop and talked about his wood obsessions and dream projects.

So Noah, take us to the beginning. Where are you from and what was your childhood like?
I grew up in Santa Cruz, California, on the Monterey Bay. What I reflect on most from my childhood is how much freedom I had to explore and traverse natural landscapes. From a young age, my parents trusted me enough to allow me a great deal of freedom. I spent hours exploring the redwood forests by deer trail or clambering along the rockscapes of the central coast.

Are your parents creative?
Yes. Both of them are professional healers. Before that, my mom was a wheel potter, she threw the most exquisite japanese forms I've ever seen. My dad is definitely an artist at heart. He is always creating, working in everything from wood to metal, making music, photography, and writing. Everything he does has the touch of an artist and I think that had a big impact on me. He influenced me and my siblings in very simple ways, like his creativity in naming and labeling cassette tapes. I recently looked through his tapes on a visit home and it reminded me of the quotidian creativity that we grew up with.

How did your path lead you to woodworking?
When I was a preteen I took music lessons and played an instrument in music class. I was never interested in practicing, but I spent hours researching different models of guitars on the internet -- a gear head from jump. At 15, my dad, having noticed where my curiosity lay, helped me to get an apprenticeship with a local luthier. I was exposed to a lot there, but I didn't get the woodworking primer that I had hoped for. At 16, I dropped out of high school in favor of taking classes at community college. A woodworking course there eventually led me to studying furniture making at The Krenov School, the school James Krenov founded on the Mendocino coast.

Krenov's approach to woodworking resonated with me on a very deep level. To this day, it still permeates everything I create. The attributes I trace back to my training are a nearly unrealistic romanticism to elevate all jobs to a higher plane of creative expression; the impulse to make even the unseen elements of my work as beautiful, or more beautiful than, the visible; an adherence to formalism in my construction method, to use the correct joinery for each application. The teachers at the school tuned my eye, exposing me to locally-sourced woods and showing me how to 'read' a piece of wood and allow the natural forms in the grain to lead the form of the piece. This quality, to always orient the grain of each piece of wood in a particular way, is Krenov's biggest influence on my work.

You lived in New York, what was your experience like there?
I love NYC in a deep way. The city never ceased to light me up as soon as I stepped out of my apartment. For years before moving there, people were always telling me I seemed like I belonged there. Maybe I do? It has a kind of magic in the air that just instantly brightens my mood. While living there, I managed a maker space in Brooklyn where I maintained equipment and taught classes as well as lessons.

How did you end up in LA?
I came to LA at the end of 2020 to be closer to my family. Both my siblings are here in LA. My sister called that fall to say a studio had opened up in the same building as her studio. She thought I should rent it and start a woodworking studio. The next weekend I flew to LA for 2 days, saw the space, and signed a lease.

Tell us about the building.
There are five studios in the building. The other artists, all painters, are: my sister, Sonya Sombreuil; Mario Ayala; Alfonso Gonzalez Jr.; and Manuel López. We're all friends, and support each other as well as maintain a lot of space to run our distinct practices. It's a place where I can have privacy to focus on my work but also feel connected to other creative people. We look out for each other and it feels special and nurturing.

How do you source wood? Can you tell us about some of your favorite pieces of wood?
I source wood in a lot of ways. One of the things I love about my practice is how the most perfunctory step, such as going to the lumber yard to buy wood, can also be a creative process. As much as I can, I source non-commercial species of lumber from small sawyers across California. I like to work in native species such as Claro Walnut and Madrone. I also source much of my lumber from yards here in LA. The lumber in these commercial yards has been chosen for homogeneity and yet, if you dig through their stacks, you can always find pieces that are unique and interesting. Trees are like that.

I hoard wood. I have hundreds of pieces I've saved, some I bought, some I sawed from trees myself, some gifted or inherited from other woodworkers along my way. I have three pieces of stunning Japanese wood brought to California by a studio woodworker I deeply admire. I also have pieces from trees in my parents' backyard, trees I played under. I can be sentimental about it -- sometimes, I become so attached to a particular piece of wood, I just feel like keeping it in its raw state.

Tell us about your two cats. And your sister’s dog.
Haha. I have two cats that both came to me while working. They live in the studio year round. They are called Spider and Motor, and have very complementary personalities. Motor is unflinching and curious about everyone. She is affectionate but in a feline way that can also feel fleeting and impersonal. Spider is cautious and easily spooked, occasionally she can be evasive, but she is capable of deep connection and sometimes is pushy for touch. They are both black cats and have black cat personalities. I like a black cat in a woodshop.

My sister's dog, Pando, is a black Belgian sheepdog. He is joy personified and has such young boy energy, goofy and unabashed, sometimes a bit clumsy, sometimes, without healthy boundaries around "personal space."

Tell us about the stools you’ve been working on.
We recently made a run of stools based on a simple three-legged milking stool I made for myself when I first started making furniture professionally. I wanted these stools to have a subtle, hewn feel to them. Every surface has been sculpted with hand tools, giving them tactile, faceted, and slightly irregular forms. Each has the legs wedged into the top wth a contrasting wood and has been textured with a carving gouge in a unique pattern. This batch has stools in Claro Walnut, Cherry, Teak, and Genuine Mahogany. There is also one in White Oak that we painted green with an egg tempera paint mixed in-house.

And your boxes?
We recently made a run of boxes for Commune. This series of boxes exemplifies my approach to working with wood: simple forms, appropriate joinery, utmost care given to grain orientation and small carved details. They are made from small remnants in my collection, many pieces dating back to my first outings in wood. Each box is built so the grain flows seamlessly around all four corners. The scale of each box was dictated by the grain of the wood used. Finger-joints for the box corners with floating panel bottoms, and either a solid wood top or frame-and-panel top constructed using bridal joints and floating panels.

What would a dream project look like?
Dream projects for me have a collaborative nature and also allow space for creativity to guide some of the decision making during the building process. I like opportunities to let the material influence form and proportion when it wants to. I like subtle hand cut details that are both precise and contain irregularities. My goal as a craftsman is to leave a human mark on everything. As more and more of our landscape is constructed with mechanical impersonalness, even generated by algorithms, I want to leave more evidence of the hand in common places.

Photos by Dante Iniguez