John Porritt Sermon on Stick Chairs

by Brian Crawley

On a bracing day this past Sunday – cold enough to move the event from a large unheated barn in Austerlitz, New York, to a little body-heated church – John Porritt gave a talk on his masterful stick chairs. He brought two Welsh antiques he’d found in nearby Hudson, New York, and 20 chairs by his own hand, mostly Welsh-style stick chairs, an English-style forest chair, and several side and children’s chairs. A few he brought over from his workshop, but mostly his friends and customers brought their own Porritt chairs along to show off and share a sit in. 

John views making a chair as a journey. In one sense, the journey is the improvisatory interplay between the wood sourced for arm bows and crowns, then the seat, legs and sticks shaped to complement these. In another, the journey is more literal, actually starting with walking the dog. While John used to find curved pieces in the trees and limbs linemen left cut at the roadside, once they started using chippers, he began to rely instead on himself and his friends spotting roughly right-angled trunks and boughs on their walks.

John spoke of one such tree, a black birch on a friend’s property, which was a sapling when a terrible ice storm in 1983 bent it parallel to the ground. It was held in that position long enough to be set that way. In time it grew upward normally again, and formed, as the trunk grew up and bigger around, two nearly 90°-angled sections that John used some 30 years later in one of his chairs. John spotted a similar ash trunk, pictured below, while on a walk with his dog. (With this one, nobody knows exactly why it grew that way.) During a visit with Chris Williams, Kevin Adams and me a year and a half ago, John had enough helpers on hand to harvest this pair of angled turns. The armbow in his latest completed chair is from this ash. A fire wood, ash dries quicker than most.

The advantage of a naturally curved piece is that the grain is continuous and strong along its length. It also allows for (or suggests? requires?) the wide variety of shapes found in vernacular Welsh chairs. You can get continuous grain strength by steam-bending chair parts, but the old chairs John is referencing, and building typically have 1-1/4″ or thicker arms, which can be very hard to bend successfully. And, it requires extra tools and experience – and is outside the tradition.  

Woodworkers who make Windsor, or forest, chairs typically employ steam-bending to impose a consistency on the wood, to make a repeatable production form. It is a different aim than allowing found wood to spur design. A person who is looking to make a few chairs for family and neighbors, a side hustle perhaps, hasn’t the same need for a uniform, easily replicable chair. This is the type of person we imagine a 19th-, 18th- and 17th-century Welsh chairmaker to have been.

In the 20th century, John’s commissioned chairs are likewise destined for family, friends and neighbors. One was made to place by the wood stove a friend tends for warmth. It sits deeper than most so she can push back from a just-stirred fire; its fore-edges are developing a rich patina. Another made for a fellow craftsman lacks the “belligerent” finish John often uses — because Tom wanted to distress it himself, by shoving it under the table after dinner to abrade the arms and butt-burnishing the seat. A kitchen chair made for Lydia, who carries on Tom’s work at Monster Machine in Chatham, New York, is armless so that she might more easily spring to stove, sink or counter in the course of a meal.

But John more often builds his chairs on spec. Then the only client to please is himself. A four-stick chair made at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic marked a turning point. John answered one question, as to how much time each chair takes, with: “Far too long! Up to a point I don’t care how long it takes me, because I really want to do it the way I want to do it.” One example of mid-chair change of direction was in the chair with the black birch arm bow, from the tree mentioned above. The two arms were colored with nitric acid and burnished “like crazy” with a chain-mail pot scrubber and a deer’s antler. At first they were square in section, but when viewed with the seat, the shapes didn’t look right to John’s eye. So he visibly softened and rounded the arms with a rasp and scraper to better suit the piece. This had the happy accident of making the short stick tenons a little more visibly worn, with the arms falling away from those high spots, like the thumbprints you can sometimes see on an old, well-loved saw’s handle or plane’s tote.

Another example: His most recently completed chair is made of soft maple, with ash arms sourced from the tree he is sawing through in the photo above. John said he colored it with a milk paint he made himself from powdered milk and lime. A first thin wash looked good, but a second went on too heavy, so he cut it back to almost nothing. Rather than continue on to a darker color and an aged finish, his wife, Sue, suggested he bring it to the talk as-is. (The final stage of a chair’s journey comes in deciding how to finish it.) John has a keen sense of color, texture and their interplay, developed through long experience in restoring and refinishing antique furniture and tools. His book The Belligerent Finisher (2022, Lost Art Press) goes into detail on those techniques. 

He had planned for the chair to have more sticks, five, maybe seven, in the lobster-pot style. But that felt overcrowded when he mocked it up. He liked the fifth stick at the top, but it was too crowded at the bottom. So he removed the bottom half of the stick. Chris Williams saw a photo and loved it. And given the diversity of form in the tradition, Chris noted that Welshmen have done the same thing in the past. So that’s how it stands today.

I’m guessing a quarter of John’s audience last Sunday were fellow woodworkers. I recognized some, professional chairmakers includinng David Douyard and Charles Thompson, and hobbyists including Kevin Adams and me. Others I didn’t know, but their questions revealed them. Lay members of John’s congregation were just as involved in the talk. (“Do you find all your own wood?“ ”How long does it take to cure?“ “Why do some have rungs, and some do not?“) The head of the Old Austerlitz Historical Society said they’d never had a talk quite like it. I imagine because John, after a brief introduction, asked for questions rather than give an academic talk. One thought then followed another very naturally, and he had a bevy of chairs nearby to hoist up and illustrate his answers. John’s daughter, Mia, came up from college for the weekend to help lug and place all the chairs, and to sell copies of his book. And we all hung around in the churchyard afterward, until rain started to fall on the chairs that hadn’t yet been tucked away in everyone’s cars and trucks.

Brian Crawley is a woodworker, screenwriter and award-winning playwright.