Kathleen Sassara, Co-Content Editor
Filmmaker, photographer, woodworker, teacher. Renaissance man Erik Mortensen has arrived in the VHS woodshop, and the longstanding program is in for some major updates.
Puget Sound born and raised, Mortensen has long known of Vashon and its artistic community.
“I grew up in Seattle and Bellevue,” Mortensen said. “I went through junior high school on Beacon Hill, and then I went to Bellevue High School. … I always knew of Vashon; I knew of its artsy community reputation, so that always appealed to me.”
Mortensen is the son of a builder, and spent his pre-college years as a carpenter’s helper. Following his acceptance to New York University, Mortensen left the Pacific Northwest to pursue a degree in filmmaking, taking two years off in the middle of his degree to become a journeyman carpenter.
After graduation, he spent the next several years as a documentarian in New York. Soon, however, he found himself longing for the greenery of home and moved back to Seattle, leaving his film career behind.
While in Seattle he began a construction company, and over time built up a name and loyal customer base that provided him with a highly satisfactory career.
“I was a general contractor,” Mortensen said. “I was building house editions, and I was remodelling and doing new kitchens, so I would do a kitchen where I would do everything. I’d do all the carpentry, but I’d also design and build the cabinets. You know, one-stop shop.”
After several years of construction in Seattle, he and his wife decided to follow her career to Los Angeles, where Mortensen was forced to rethink his occupation.
“Once I got down there, I was wanting for work,” Mortensen said. “I got a lot of jobs word-of-mouth when I was here, but I didn’t have the same thing down there. I didn’t have a shop, and I didn’t have the jobs to be able to rent a shop, and so I looked around for opportunities.”
The first opportunity Mortensen came upon was returning to school.
“The first [idea] that occured to me was, ‘Well, I wonder if I can go to a teaching facility, and just take woodworking classes and hone my skills even sharper,’” he said. “I thought too that that might give me access to the tools already set up that I didn’t have.”
He discovered that he was able to do small jobs out of the space provided by Cerritos College, his facility of choice.
After three years as a student — running his own business on the side — Mortensen was offered a teaching position in the college’s woodworking department, and was able to turn more of his attention to the the business that had again been growing steadily via referrals and word of mouth.
“Your reputation sort of gets spread around, and if you can do one thing, maybe you’ll get another opportunity,” Mortensen said. “I think because of the art background and the leanings I kind of always had design-wise, it ended up that I got passed around among people who said, ‘This guy’s got an eye, so if your project needs that, hire this guy.’”
By 2008, his reputation had grown to the extent that he was hired to do repair work on an original chair and replace a missing chandelier out of one Frank Lloyd Wright’s Los Angeles designs, Hollyhock House.
“All I had [to repair the chandelier] was a picture to work from, and from that picture I was able to do design and match it,” Mortensen said. “And then another thing had gone missing over the years, and that was this old dressing screen that shows some pictures that seemed to sit in the corner of the dining room.”
Mortenson collaborated with an artist who did prints; he constructed the frame. Just as with the chandelier, all that they had to work from was a fuzzy old picture.
Through his knowledge of camera and film as well as his years of woodworking skill, he was able to reproduce both items to nearly the exact detail. This earned him the respect of the curator at Hollyhock, who recommended him as the mill worker for the remainder of the restoration jobs on the house.
Between the records and photographs maintained by the curators of the house, as well as some preserved in Taliesin — Wright’s school of architecture and design in Scottsdale, Arizona — Mortensen was able to reproduce many architectural pieces that had been damaged or replaced over the years.
“I would say I leaned harder on the photographs than almost anything else,” he said. “I was able to reconstruct and create the proportions of what I was building from that. And there was a surprising amount of evidence if you stood and stared long enough at them and start to notice little details.”
As he pieced together the dimensions of the designs, his background in film and photography came into use. He was able to understand what the lenses were doing and what kind of distortions he was seeing, allowing him to decipher the proportions of all of the parts and pieces of the original items.
By 2015, Mortensen had completed his assignment at Hollyhock House, and, once again, was missing the Pacific Northwest. He also had a daughter by this time, and he didn’t want her to spend her entire childhood in Los Angeles.
“I had worked myself silly over those 16 or so years in LA, from my mid 30s to about 50,” Mortensen said. “I was sort of burning the candle at both ends, and in the meantime too, my daughter had been born.”
His daughter is now 13, and currently attends McMurray.
“She was getting of an age where my wife and I had to decide, ‘Did we want to have her be raised in LA her whole life, or did we want to get her up here, closer to family and cousins, and grandmas and grandpa?,” Mortensen said.
The result was another move back to the Pacific Northwest — this time to Vashon — and a new job with a stairbuilding company in Seattle. Three years later, and the position here at VHS landed almost serendipitously in his lap.
“I had just quit working for the stairbuilding shop over in Seattle,” he said. “It was the very next day [while] waiting in the ferry line that I got a text that they were looking for someone here.”
Not even 24 hours had lapsed between the time that Mortensen quit his former job and the time that he heard of what was soon to be his new one.
Mortensen landed the position, and within a few weeks he was walking into a new classroom with grand plans for the future of the VHS woodworking program.
“There are a number of tools that I would like to get; a lot of small portable-powered hand tools that we need,” he said. “That jointer, that one’s undersized, and it needs to be replaced and hooked up to the dust collector. … Just a lot of management of the space and of the tools needs to happen. In a few years I’ll see what we could turn this into.”
Mortensen’s newly devised curriculum will follow a progression of projects that build on each other.
First, by constructing a simple sanding block with a wedge, then by moving into building a push stick, a carpenter’s mallet and a tool tote, students will learn dimensioning, accuracy and beginner joinery skills throughout the course of the semester.
Mortensen’s mission is clear: provide students with practical woodworking skills they can build on, and ideally spark a flame of interest inspiring students to pursue the craft.
“I want people to really prize their skills,” he said. “I mean, if they come out of this with anything, it’s [going to] be knowledge and skills. They’re not going to remember the projects as much, but later they’ll remember the fundamental skills they’ve learned.”