Today I got an email from my long-time friend, artist, magical carver, Northwest Coast spirit Godfrey Stephens (https://www.godfreystephens.com/). There’d been a snowstorm and it had cast a mantle of snow on Godfrey’s giant carving “Weeping Cedar Woman,” which now sits in the back yard of his home in Victoria, B.C. It was carved in 1984 out of a 300-year old wind-fallen red cedar, its symbolism being a protest against logging the ancient rain forests of Clayoquot Sound (on the west coast of Vancouver Island).:
Looks like a goddess warrior moving through the woods on a snowy night. “Save these trees!”
Godfrey has played a huge role in helping me find people for my next book, Builders of the Pacific Coast and his life and art will be a part of this book (which I’ve just started laying out).
About Lloyd Kahn
Lloyd Kahn started building his own home in the early '60s and went on to publish books showing homeowners how they could build their own homes with their own hands. He got his start in publishing by working as the shelter editor of the
Whole Earth Catalog with Stewart Brand in the late '60s. He has since authored six highly-graphic books on homemade building, all of which are interrelated. The books, "The Shelter Library Of Building Books," include
Shelter,
Shelter II (1978),
Home Work (2004),
Builders of the Pacific Coast (2008),
Tiny Homes (2012), and
Tiny Homes on the Move (2014). Lloyd operates from Northern California studio built of recycled lumber, set in the midst of a vegetable garden, and hooked into the world via five Mac computers. You can check out videos (one with over 450,000 views) on Lloyd by doing a search on YouTube:
you are so lucky you met him