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Inside the Studio

by Diane Daly

Artisans: Robert and Jabra Robles
Media: Woodwork and Masonry
Studio Location: Steinfeld Warehouse, Warehouse Arts District

all them the Doors of Reception. Through the two front doors of the Alamo Woodworkers Cooperative at 101 West 6th Street are more doors, a whole pile of them. All are Mexican mesquite; some glow with colored stain, while others are raw and dry like summertime skin. William Blake, Aldous Huxley, and Jim Morrison all saw doors as passageways between what we are taught to sense and what truly exists. Robert Robles, who crafted all of these mesquite doors with his son Jabra, sees doors no differently.

Robert began working with wood in 1975. “I was going absolutely nuts at my job as a counselor at the time,” he says. Shortly thereafter, he began making his living as a stone mason and custom woodworker, and soon joined Alamo at the Steinfeld Warehouse, where he has split, sawn and scorped ever since. He has been called Tucson’s master woodworker, and for good reason. His pieces can carry tremendous detail including chip carving—cutting chips out in a pattern—and serpentine flourishes that look so fluid Jabra has taken to calling him Samba Bob.

The Alamo’s workshop is a long corridor overhung with an unrailed loft, and bordered with machines that drill, hack, and gouge. Hardly childproof, yet to Robert it has been the “perfect” environment for shaping a new generation. “They’ve been in this shop for twenty years. I’m twenty-one now,” Jabra explains. The two Robles’s share the same maple complexion, though Robert’s is more seasoned beneath his black-and-gray goatee and half-buttoned summer shirts. At easily six feet, Jabra is taller than his father, and despite his youth moves so steadily he makes their languid dog look jumpy.

Jabra has always called his father Robert and lived in a world apart from other young men. “I tried to beg him out of ninth grade,” Robert says, and not without pride. Jabra attended ninth grade anyway, but on the first day of his sophomore year Robert brought him on a trip across Guatemala, where they studied architecture and surfed the sparkling Pacific. Their trip opened a door to the world for sixteen-year-old Jabra, but closed the door to a more conventional education. When they returned later in the fall of 2001, Jabra’s elected classes at Tucson High had all been dropped, and his apprenticeship soon became full-time membership at the Alamo.

Since then he and Robert have worked on countless pieces together, and Jabra has also produced his own line of handmade drums and didgeridoos, all exquisitely resonant instruments carved from cherrywood, eucalyptus and South American purpleheart.

Does he regret leaving school? “Um…no. The only thing that was a little rough at first, I came here and just worked, and everyone was like twenty years older than me.”

“You didn’t work all the time!” Robert interjects.

A different twenty-one-year-old might shoot back a petulant reply, but not Jabra. When you work with such exact measurements, you must be calm, even when your building is falling down. And it is. The stone foundation of Steinfeld Warehouse sheds a snowdrift with every tremor, and tremors abound: Reverberating inside the Alamo during my visit was the intermittent growling whine of a thickness planer, the constant thrum of Sixth Street traffic, and five horn-heavy trains. “Sixty-five a day,” Robert rants after one train fades out, “and every one of them blasts a gazillion decibels at our brains.”

The Alamo cooperative and the other tenants of the Steinfeld will not endure the cacophony much longer, though. They are being evicted from the Warehouse by the Arizona Department of Transportation, which owns the building. Robert seems worn by the “battlefield” that his work environment has become since the controversial eviction notice, and is looking toward new work space for himself and Jabra in the Dunbar Spring Neighborhood this summer.

When that happens, however, the Alamo Woodworkers Cooperative may dissolve, so he will lose some of the shared equipment he has given so much of himself to—literally. Woodworking is a dangerous profession. “Everybody’s got a little bite,” he says of his coworkers, and then he brandishes his own wounds: the tips of his left middle finger and his right thumb have both been lopped off. Jabra watched one of these accidents and says now, “I just knew. You can’t rush to finish.” His own lanky fingers are well-worked and whole. “You can either learn from cutting your own finger or learn from watching your dad cut his finger.”

Why devote your life to a profession that takes you away in pieces, and then guide your son to follow it as well? Robert’s answer comes immediately: “Freedom from the system. I’ve had a very free life. I can use tools and build things. I haven’t had a boss in a very long time.”

Jabra Robles’ solo work is sold at Bohemia Gallery, 299 S. Park Ave., phone 882-0800. Robert Robles’ work can be viewed at www.robertrobles.com.