Webster defines an artist as one who practices an art – one who creates objects of beauty. Art, he went on to say, is a skill acquired by experience. In turn, the use of that skill combined with imagination and talent produces things of beauty. I met an artist fitting that description last week.

Ken Coats, master knifemaker, lives in Stevens Point and has created knives for a lifetime with precision and passion. He remembers making his first knife at age 7 while his father, a plumber by trade, was at work. He recalled answering his father’s “What have you done?” that evening by proudly showing off his first attempt at a knife from workbench scraps. As a teenager, he recollects using scrounged scalpels to dress trout caught on Buena Vista Marsh ditches. That inspired creating what he called a toothpick style knife.

Underneath this craftsman exterior lies a diehard outdoorsman. In the late 1950s, then a toddler, Ken remembers “seeing his first ruffed grouse from the shoulders of his father. I’ll never forget the sounds – as my father cocked the gun, the roar of the grouse flush and the shot.”

The ensuing decades found him fishing and hunting just about everything found in north central Wisconsin. To name a few, he describes with keenness duck hunting at the nearby Mead Wildlife Area with his labs, fly fishing and filling the freezer with pre-spawn bluegills, bow fishing for carp on the river and bow and gun deer hunting in our county. When he described bow hunting on an oak ridge overlooking a backwater slough I know well a mile and a half north of my house to a tee – well, I knew he was no doubt the real deal.

Now 63 years old, Ken still hunts and fishes with enthusiasm and in his “spare” time creates about 30 highly sought after knives – all undeniably works of art. A Knifemaker’s Guild member, his custom knives and slip joint folders are in great demand. He went full-time the year a friend posted a Coats Knife on the internet while they sat at a knife show in Waupaca. “Before I got home that night, the knife was sold. I sold two more the next week and knew it was time to go full-time.”

Five years ago he found himself making 60 a year to meet demand, but knew he had to reduce his backlog. The majority of the 30 knives a year he crafts and enjoys making these days are slip joint folders. By request, he’ll create a fixed blade knife and leather sheath. From his small home workshop on Fifth Avenue near Bukolt Park, he fashions finished products from scratch using stock raw material – bone, horn, antler, carbon fiber, burl oak, leather and steel.

Equipment, like a high-temperature furnace, belt sanders, drill presses, clamps, vices, grinders, oils, dyes and whetstones, fills every nook and cranny of his shop.

Ken calls knifemaking a precision art – describing it as a three-part process, “Grind, fit and finish.” It appears much more complicated than that to me, but perhaps that is the difference between an artist’s and a consumer’s frame of mind.

Currently, there is a six-month long waiting period for a Coats Knife. Come October, I figure the Coats fixed blade bird and trout knife I ordered will be done. I couldn’t resist. It will be well worth the wait.