Francisco Clemente has spent a lifetime working with wood. He came from a family of furniture makers in Spain and worked as a carpenter and contractor in Hawaii for decades. Now he is devoted to saving trees while enabling people to see the beauty of wood.

"Beginners and other people trying to work with wood, they become very infatuated with the media," he said. "If someone were to say, ‘That is a very nice tree,’ they will try to cut it, and they’re going to ruin it because they don’t know how to work with it."

Clemente now makes beautiful bowls and sculpture out of mostly discarded trees, stumps and branches. He is a featured artist at the annual Hawai‘i Craftsmen’s Annual Statewide Juried Exhibition, which opened last week at the Academy Art Center at Linekona.

The exhibit features about 70 pieces from Oahu and about 50 from the neighbor islands; the works were selected by Allison Wong, deputy director of the academy. Wong said she would like to see more entries from the neighbor islands but added that "when I was done, I found a whole slew of new artists, which I was really happy to see."

"I thought there were really great ceramics this year, with new artists just out of graduate school, with really good finished work and different ideas, not just a crumb bowl," she said.

"You’re looking for high craftsmanship. Some things might be a bit crude, but I like that the artists were trying to push themselves and try something different."

All of Clemente’s pieces in the show are made from pieces of what would be considered "dead" wood. A bowl he carved out of Norfolk Island pine was made out of a piece of a tree trunk that he found on the sidewalk.

"Some branches grew out of (the stump), so they chopped the top again, and I happened to be around," he said.

Clemente knows enough about trees to be able to tell the history of the tree. While the swirls and ridges in wood grain are familiar to anyone, he recognized some dark patches as the result of a fungus that afflicted the tree’s branches.

"If you leave it on the ground … after about six months it will become black," he said. In his bowl, those black patches became part of an elegant, natural design.

"I know every piece, where it comes from and the story that pertains to the piece of wood," he said. "You have to know the media you work with, because some of them, they could be poisonous, so you have to wear a mask. … Some of them could cause dermatitis. They all have different kinds of (characteristics)."

Clemente even manages to make plywood beautiful. He glued together several pieces of scrap plywood from his workshop, then shaped them into a curvaceous "cachimba" (water pipe in Spanish), its arcs and twists accented by the layers of plywood. Since he did not want to encourage smoking, Clemente turned the bowl of the pipe into a candy holder.

"After you quit smoking, you can eat candy," he said.