The Escape Artist

centers,

By Amy Perry

With the shudder of a sliding iron gate, the rumble of a metal garage door, and the hum of industrial fluorescents, the workshop is alive.

There’s an exhilarating whiff of freshly milled walnut, an itch of cedar pollen, and a faint hint of cow manure. We are in Morgan, population 457, and at the 5,000-square-foot global headquarters of Loblolli Home, population 3 –if you don’t count the elderly Chihuahua sunning himself on the concrete patio out back.

Kenon Perry —Loblolli’s owner, lead designer, fabricator, and engineer— gives the shop dog Jim a bowl of cool water and looks up. “Wanna see the robot?”

Amid the 1960s wide-belt sander and 1940s automatic planar, plus every manner of rugged jointer and intimidating table saw, there’s a strange Rube Goldberg of wires and tubes and buttons that Kenon gestures toward. His gait reveals a few high school football injuries playing for the Robinson Rockets just down the road. He then gingerly toggles some switches and boots up his laptop, and the giant arm begins to carve out a mesmerizing pattern in white oak. The shape is abstract at first but with a few more passes of the router, a pint-sized chair frame appears.

Since last April, Kenon has been starting his days in a similar fashion here in Bosque County, pivoting between this CNC machine (short for computer numerical control) and the tools of traditional woodworking. “I went to art school, but my accountant says I would’ve been better off being a mechanical engineer,” Kenon said laughing.

With a Fine Art degree from the University of North Texas, the Screamin’ Eagle took his natural drawing skills and his curiosity for machines to the big cities, first Dallas and Austin, then farther from home to Atlanta to Brooklyn.

As Kenon tells it, these last 20 or so years have been an artistic journey driven more by instinct than by map plus a restlessness to expand and fine-tune his craft. In that creative angst and penchant for experimentation, he’s moved fluidly between milling wood and welding metal, crafting contemporary furniture with a robotic arm to the painstaking handiwork of historical restorations. “When people ask me what I make, I usually answer, ‘If you can dream it, I can build it,’” he said dryly.

“I’ve also been known to take on passion projects on the nights and weekends,” he said. “I think the kids call these ‘side hustles’ now.”

Since 2005 this moonlighting has meant ad hoc commissions by friends and friends of friends: a faceted walnut dining table for a tech exec, a clever storage system for a big vinyl collector, a floating maple and steel credenza for a television director. But recently this tinkering evolved into building the CNC machine from scratch with the help of Internet research, YouTube videos, and countless padded envelopes and brown boxes from vendors with names like Clear Path, Online Metals, and Geckodrive.

“For a while there, the parts were showing up on the stoop of our Brooklyn brownstone weekly. My wife used to say; ‘More ball bearings just arrived!’” he said smiling.

In tandem, Kenon learned “the robot’s” programming language Fusion 360 and studied up on the philosophy of lean manufacturing. Twenty-five years since his art school days, and the future of his craft, his calloused hands, and his entrepreneurial ambitions were coming into sharper focus.

And then the Covid outbreak of 2020 forced a thorough reflection, as it did for so many around the world. And that rethink propelled him and his family back to the Cross Timbers.

“It’s been a homecoming of sorts,” Kenon said. “As a teenager, I’d drive up Highway 6 to this area to fish back in the ’90s. Then my wife’s parents started coming to Clifton as a weekend retreat from Dallas in the 2000s. Now we’re raising our own son here,” he remembered, “Three dogs, too,” gesturing to the Chihuahua who’s now nestled like a cinnamon roll on a thick flannel moving blanket.

From this new Morgan HQ — which offers more square footage, more heavy machinery, and more bluebird days than he could ever imagine accessing back in Brooklyn — Perry is by no means settling into a punch-in, punch-out routine. With the global supply chain issues of the past three years, his highend furniture clients in the Empire State like the immediacy of Loblolli Home’s small-scale domestic manufacturing abilities.

More locally, Perry debuted a line of Scandinavian-inspired, flat-packed children’s furniture at Market at the Mill’s Funky Flea, which is now available for order on Etsy, and built a groovy, slatted bar that served as the registration desk for Waco’s Silobration last fall. He’s also getting a reputation for gorgeous custom cabinet work.

And, yet for all the big-name projects and sophisticated equipment, he’s really just a hardworking art kid from Robinson.

“If you’re ever at the Dollar General in Morgan and see my Dodge Caravan across the street, stop in. I’d be happy to talk shop and introduce you to Jim and the robot, too,” he said.

For more info on Loblolli Home, visit kenonperry.com or call (214) 684-3518.

Culpepper & Merriweather’s tent and other vehicles on rhe show’s lot in Clifton at sunset on October 14, 2021. This was the circus’ first return since 2018, due to a lost season during the COVID pandemic. –

A five-man crew of H-2b workers from Mexico spreading the canvas for the Culpepper & Merriweather big top during the show’s last appearance in Clifton on October 14, 2019. Pending the crew’s delayed arrival in the U.S., circus performers and others pitched in to erect the tent, sometimes requiring seven hours. –

Culpepper & Merriweather

Circus owners Trey and Simone Key take a well-deserved, few minutes of relaxation prior to the first of two performances in which Trey presents a tiger and lion in the steel arena and Simone performs aerial trapeze routines, as well as being the show’s ringmistress.

Three posted arrows alert drivers of the Cullpepper & Merriweather Circus fleet to make a turn off FM 219 and onto a dirt road leading to the lot behind the rodeo grounds in Clifton for two shows on October 14, 2021. The circus’ 24-hour man places arrows from the previous town and lays out flags to indicate where the big top is to be raise on the new lot. – Photo