Without having time to say what I want or what I could at the moment, I will simply give you a brief update of how things have progressed over the last week and a half of carving classes. The pictures below are works that were or are in progress, including my pelican. More complete pictures to come. In the meantime, check out Chris Pye's website, and also his online teaching series, WoodcarvingWorkshops.tv.
Oh puns, how you slay me. I think that's a really fresh joke. I feel like I could really carve out a niche for myself as a writer of puns. Oh... I've done it again.
Hilarity aside, I do regret to inform you that I accidentally deleted my pictures before I got a chance to upload them from the end of last week. Almost everybody had a bench that went together, most had them glued up, and all should be proud of what they accomplished. What they left with at the end of two weeks was more than a simple bench, but a new understanding of how how joinery works and how to execute it. There really is no middle step between that and creating your own pieces of furniture from your mind. If you can imagine a shape and figure out and execute the joinery properly, well, that's furniture making. That's all it is. So kudos to everyone who participated in the last two weeks of the Basic Woodworking course. You should be pleased with your results and proud of what you accomplished.
Now, for these next two weeks, I have the great pleasure of working with Chris Pye. Master carver and "sometimes sculptor" as he said, we're embarking on two one-week classes for the next steps in carving. We have some very ambitious projects and I'm sure all will accomplish some great things under his tutelage. I will also get to do some carving during the classes. I do have plenty of other responsibilities to make sure the class runs smoothy, but as much carving I can possibly do with him around I will—and I'm very much looking forward to it. Carving was a fascination of mine even before furniture making; gargoyles and green men, ball and claw feet and Ionic columns. Perhaps now is the time to sally forth in those great unknowns with more gusto than I have in the past. But for now, I'll start with a simple relief carving of a leaf.
There was a choice I made about two and a half years ago to chase this dream of making furniture. It started off as an interest, and has developed into a full-blown obsession. The kind of life-consuming obsession that you felt for that girl in 7th grade when you were sure that nothing else in the world mattered in any significant way. I wake up in the middle of the night with ideas for a design. I think about ways to execute a piece while sitting on the beach or walking through the woods. And I love every minute of it.
Taking some time to assist here at CFC, however, and getting to do a little teaching with Peter Korn and Ian Kirk this week and last has allowed me to watch people completely new to woodworking come to new levels of appreciation for craftspeople, and new levels of interest in the craft. Some folks came in with no woodworking experience, and didn't know a chisel from a spokeshave. They are now cutting beautiful dovetails as we work through our bench project. Others came in with some knowledge but no experience, and they are working their way through various stages of dovetails, hand-cut mortise and tenons, and shaping on their benches—and they should be tremendously pleased with their new found abilities. To learn any "hand-craft" in a couple of weeks is no easy task, and on top of that they've sat through lectures and demonstrations every day, so you have an appreciation for how much time they've all put in.
The reason I mention all of this is not because it holds any greater significance to the cosmos; it won't cure aids, feed the hungry, or stop war. But if my goal as a human is to give something to the world—something to make the world even slightly better, or slightly more beautiful—then helping people to learn the craft is just as good a cause as making something myself. If I can help people to find what fulfills them and their creative impulses, what makes them happier, then I submit that is indeed making the world a slightly better place. It's not much, but it's something.
In the meanwhile, I've continued to play with a new design for a hanging cabinet. I'm trying to step outside my normal work—that is to say, more traditional design—and find my own voice. It will take some years to accomplish this, but I have to start somewhere. So with this piece, I started with a very traditional shaker style cabinet, and from there tried to think about it from a different perspective. In this case, a "mad-hatter" perspective. Again, this is simply a first prototype used only to get a better idea of the piece in physical reality. But I have been pulled away from this process the last two weeks as some commissions have come in that I've needed to design and discuss in the small bits of spare time I've had apart from assisting. When I work on these pieces, you'll get to follow along and see the steps.
It's difficult for me to describe Wharton Escherick. I've heard people talk of him as the Dean of American Craftsman, a painter, a sculptor, and a hermit. But as best as I can see he's a man not wholly dissimilar to me—someone who wants to leave his creations behind for the world in hopes of making it just a bit more beautiful. In that, I believe he succeeded. I think the best way he's been described is as follows (borrowed from whartonesherickmuseum.org): "His legacy lies not in establishing a style, his designs were too unique, but in pioneering the way for successive generations of artists working in wood to exhibit and market their original, non-traditional designs."
In my mind, however, his genius lies not in his ability to create unique, non-linear furniture designs and execute them with the skill of a master craftsman, but in taking some design that is more akin to sculpture and giving it a shaker-esk function. Form did not follow function, as is the more traditional shaker sense, but rather they were united into one complete and equal entity. A perfect example, and perhaps his most famous piece, is his spiral staircase at left. It's impossible to tell whether he set out knowing he needed a staircase and so found a material that inspired this piece, or if, in a more Krenovian fashion, he found the material and was inspired to make such a stairway. The form of the piece sheds the limitations of any traditional staircase, spiral or no, and looks like something out of Seuss's "Oh The Places You'll Go." And yet it's function is blatant and it's daily use since it's construction in 1930 speaks to the quality of his craft.
On the opposite end of the Escherick spectrum, at least in the furniture sense, is his bed and drawers pictured at right. His practicality led him to some ideas that seem shaker-esk as I said earlier, and yet when placed within his home amongst so many pieces of art and sculpture they seem all the more mad. The drawer in the picture is part of his dresser, which sits under his bed, both in order to raise his bed to the level of the southern facing window bay, and also to leave more room for his beloved books. He hated searching through drawers, however, for articles of clothing, so instead he made several shallow drawers which would be only a couple folded shirts deep.
Escherick was arguably the most important figure in American crafts, or at the very least one of them, in the 20th century, and he was downright fascinating. If you are ever in the greater Philadelphia area—Paoli to be precise—you should visit his home, which is now a museum. And if you are searching for inspiration, don't forget to look deeper into Escherick. I've spent several weeks now learning and reading about him, and I'm far from tired of it. If one day I stumble upon an idea as wonderfully utilitarian and yet beautiful as this library step, then I'll know I will have done something special.
As the second week came to a close we found many of our friends closing in on their projects. Many didn't glue-up for logistical reasons, needing to ship their pieces back to their home states is much simpler in a flat box than crating furniture. But still, we got to see projects coming together and fulfillment in work. You can see the joy and tom-foolery that tends to happen when we feel a sense of satisfaction and relief at the completion of our works. I've yet to find a medium of creativity that provides this sense for me to the level that furniture making does. I write songs, I write poems, I draw, I play sports, and, while I love all those things, there's something unique about watching a piece of furniture leave the clamps behind, or take a finish to deepen and expose the beauty of the grain. I think just above you're seeing Walter experience something of the same. Below is Allan's desk and divider sans drawer. A good deal of work for two weeks, and I believe he's quite happy with his piece, as he should be.
As we move on to other things, I've thought a lot lately about design and what it is to be a designer. I've been diving into the world of Wharton Escherick as of late, and can't seem to escape it. Looking through his house is like meandering into Wonderland, and his works are like stumbling across the White Rabbit or the Mad Hatter—they're strange, yet captivating, and they most certainly serve a purpose, even if the purpose isn't always immediately clear. He's an inspiring craftsman, even if his work doesn't speak to you. And as I've been working on a new design for a wall cabinet that is largely in the Shaker language, I've worked to bring in a little bit of Escherick influence. I've got the drawings at full scale, and while I'm not completely set on a few details, I'm going to press forward into production because, as I've found in the past, the material and "real-space" will allow me to see more what this piece wants to be than will paper and graphite. I'd like to do a post or two on him to give you a better idea of who he was and how he profoundly influenced furniture in the US.
Lastly, as my wife and I spent our Sunday at the Farnsworth Museum in Rockland, ME at their Shaker exhibit, I was disappointed to find I couldn't take pictures for your enjoyment. But the show was fantastic, and not just about their furniture. It sheds light on why they made things and what their purpose was, and how that purpose was reflected in the works of their hands. And if that doesn't excite you, they had a foot-powered mortising machine. Oh yes, oh yes. I strongly encourage anyone in the area to check it out if you have a chance, and if not, buy a few books on the shakers. They will influence the way you design furniture, I will put money on it.
...in furniture making. And you know, the wonderful thing about this thing we call woodworking is that it has the power to bring you into the moment and release the world around you. Over the weekend I had to travel back to NY, where I live, and found out that one of my close relatives had died unexpectedly. That kind of tragedy—which my family is still dealing with—makes the days long and distracted. Nothing can be quite the same for a time, but doing the thing you love to do most, and being immersed in it completely, can help. There's a sense of relief knowing that you can be happy in a time of sorrow, even simply as a distraction. This is what woodworking means to me—it's a beautiful, poetic lifestyle. You can pay homage to your loved ones through your furniture, and you can love your furniture through your daily work.
Our class this last week and a half has been fantastic; and by fantastic I don't mean perfect. We've made mistakes—silly mistakes, physical mistakes, unforeseen mistakes—but mistakes which are key to learning. If you make a mistake at home, you can analyze, watch videos, read books, and try again. But if you make mistakes here, while you're at school, you have the benefit of learning from people who have a great deal of experience, and they can tell you exactly what went wrong, why it went wrong, and, now that it has happened, how to fix it. Hard work is critical in this work, but making blunders and learning why it happened is even more valuable.
We're just now beginning to see some of the projects taking shape. After a week and a half of joinery and lessons, we now have some end tables, coffee tables, and tool boxes starting to form. We've done some (pre)finishing, surface prep, and a few glue-ups, and it's always encouraging to see our progress along the way. In the meantime, I've been continuing to workshop a small design, perhaps a key cabinet of some sort, which I'm itching to get to work on. We'll see how this and other pieces I'm scheduled to make over the next several weeks progress.
This week started the "Next Steps in Joinery" class with instructors Tim Rousseau (www.timothyrousseau.com) and John McAlevey (www.johnmcalevey.com). The class is designed as a second step after Peter Korn's Basic Woodworking course, so here we take our designs and our joinery a little further. We introduce new machines, such as the slot mortiser, and, while some of us may branch out, we have a base design for an end table and work from there. The sheer volume of joinery is greater than the usual bench built in the first class, but also we dive deeper into the strengths, weaknesses, and reasoning behind why things are generally done the way they are.
For example, someone asked what the purpose of a haunched tenon was. The answer is two-fold: First, and most simply, it was originally to fill the gap left by a groove. Back before we had fancy router tables and shapers, grooves would be cut using a plow plane, and it was a real pain in the arse to stop a groove. Consequently, when they carried the groove to the end of the board, they needed to fill the gap left behind. So, we filled it with a haunch. But the haunch also serves a second purpose—it widens the tenon and so helps reduce and twist that may occur during the life of the joint. And sometimes little bits, like a 3/4"x1/4" haunch, make a difference.
And such is our course with this class. A good group we seem to have; everyone excited to be making furniture, asking great questions, and seemingly not ashamed to not know the answers. That's the key to successful classes: asking questions. When I was a student, I threw heaps of questions at my teachers, and not just about my projects. I was and am just so fascinated and in love with this world of woodworking that even now I simply wonder about random aspects and bring it up in conversation during lunch or a free moment. It's just something I love talking about—or, for that matter, writing about.
For the first three days we've been working on our designs and watching Tim demo certain aspects of joinery. You can see we spent some time in the Messler Gallery on Monday to find some inspiration (and it's shaping up to be a great show, I might add). I've even been jotting some thoughts down in my notebook in hopes to get back to work soon. Take an honest look and see how furniture begins—nothing more than sketches. Don't judge an idea too harshly right away, rather give it time to develop. Draw variations and don't give up on a good idea just because the rough sketch looks off. As you can see, my sketches aren't perfect, either.
We began milling in ernest today and will continue that through the week. I'm confident they'll turn into wonderful pieces of furniture that they can be proud to have built with their own hands. Being away from the distractions of the world, they can really dive deep into the world I live in. It's a wonderful place to reside.