With forms, glue and clamps, you can bend wood into the shape you want, and it will stay that way. But an independent woodworker’s career is forever flexible.

Jonathan Benson says he stumbled into the wood butcher’s trade. He grew up in Ames, took off as soon as he finished high school, wound up in Santa Fe, N.M., and found work at a cabinet shop. His duties weren’t exactly glamorous – moving lumber in and out of the kiln, sanding – but he fell for the craft. The whole package of sights, sounds and smells.

And so Benson enrolled at the Rhode Island School of Design and earned a master of fine arts degree in furniture design. From 1987 to 1991, he was back in his hometown, studying and serving as an assistant professor in Iowa State University’s College of Design. Then he taught for about 10 years in New Mexico and out East and now, at the age of 49, he’s working out of a 20-foot-by-20-foot former garage at his home in West Des Moines.

On a recent day, Benson was busy with a wall sculpture that might bring $3,000 in a gallery and a dining room table that’s a $12,000 commissioned piece. Those sound like nice checks to pull out of envelopes, but they don’t come in every week. “It’s hard to make a living just doing sculpture and furniture,” he said. “That’s why I write and teach.”

Along with a table saw and lathe, he uses a camera and a computer to produce magazine articles about his work. He has spent the past year putting together a book about veneering, scheduled to be published in 2007.

He has lectured from Ohio to Oregon, and has demonstrated his skills at the Woodsmith Store in Clive. Now he wants to find the right time and place to teach hands-on classes in the area — maybe in downtown Des Moines.

Curving, free-form wall sculptures and pedestal stands have emerged as Benson specialties; he estimates he has built 200 of the 42-inch-tall pedestals. He has pieces on display at a half-dozen galleries in places such as Santa Fe, Aspen, Colo., and Park City, Utah. “Those are places where people have second homes,” he noted. “They come in the galleries to buy things and send back” to their primary residences.

Benson’s clientele tends to be “the well-to-do, but not the super-rich,” he said. The dining room table now nearing completion will go to a Los Angeles couple – a museum curator and a librarian — who already own a Benson sideboard. “Older single women are a good market,” he remarked. “They have disposable income.”

Benson is married to Sherry Wise, an economist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and they have two young daughters. Good schools and an easier lifestyle pulled them to Central Iowa from their previous home near New York City.

“My machines are paid for, and I can work on my own property,” he said, summing up a good part of the traditional craftsman’s dream. “I’ve had up to two employees at a time, but I enjoy working by myself.”