— Charles Hayward, The Woodworker magazine, 1949
Author: Kara Uhl
Meet the Author: Richard Jones
Richard Jones has lived his life with a simple sense of practicality – he has learned what works, what doesn’t and what must be done to get food on the table, while also allowing for trial and error to explore work and hobbies that have ultimately led to fulfillment.
Endlessly interested in the whys beneath the whats, Richard devoted more than a decade of his life to “Cut and Dried: A Woodworker’s Guide to Timber Technology.” And that alone should paint a pretty complete picture, although, given the technical nature of the work, maybe an unfair one. He’s meticulous, yes, but not stuffy. He played rugby for years, dots conversations with the word “bloody,” and enjoys biking through the English countryside – particularly if the destination is a pub with the promise of a warm (by American standards) beer.
Born in Shropshire, on the Welsh border in the West Midlands of England, Richard grew up in a farming family – one that has farmed for generations. He lived with his parents and older brother, and attended a boarding school from age 7 to 17.
“In some ways, I preferred to be at school,” Richard says. “All my friends were at school.”
Richard recalls childhood summers spent working on the farm – driving tractors, baling hay, building fences, looking after cattle and sheep. But he also remembers the joy he found in all the farm’s hiding places, and riding his bike for miles around the English countryside with narrow, windy lanes, hills, trees and green, green, green. As he got older he enjoyed tinkering with cars and engines, breaking things and then fixing them. “I guess I had an aptitude to work with things,” he said.
While not a lover of school, Richard did well in English and his woodworking courses. Once his daily lessons were complete, he’d usually make his way back to the woodwork room and build things (table and chairs) and carve things (hedgehogs and giraffes). He did quite well in sports, and played several – rugby, hockey, cricket, swimming and athletics.
Unlike his brother, who still runs the family farm, Richard didn’t love farming. As a teenager, Richard dropped out of school and came back home to work on the family farm, but six to eight months in, he had a falling out with his father. So, he left.
He worked one or two daft (his word) jobs – hotel porter and the like – to make ends meet. He dreamed of being a joiner and furniture maker, but he was unable to get an apprenticeship. In 1973, he did, however, get a job with a small shop (no longer in business) that specialized in joinery, furniture making and restorations. His mentor was a grumpy old Scot, who occasionally let him borrow tools and taught him a lot (you can read about his sharpening lesson here). Richard stayed on for two years, but it wasn’t an official apprenticeship with formal qualifications at the end. In 1975, Richard applied to North East London Polytechnic, a vocational-type school to study business.
“I thought I ought to get a job in an office where they pay some money,” Richard says. “Work that made my hands calloused didn’t get me very much. But people who worked in offices, that paid a lot more – I thought.”
This time around, Richard loved school. “I had a great time in college,” he says, laughing. “I did all the stuff you’re not supposed to do.”
After graduating in 1977, Richard applied for many office jobs, but couldn’t find work. “I thought, well, I could do something with my bag of tools,” he says. “I could get a job doing some joinery and earn some money rather than have no money. And I’ve basically stuck to that, ever since, one way or another.”
Becoming a Joiner and Maker, in the British Tradition
Richard’s first job was with a joinery firm that made bank and security windows, which he did until 1979. That same year he married his first wife, Jill, whom he met in college. They married in Edinburgh, Scotland. “I managed to get various jobs there for a little while,” Richard says. “All sorts of jobs, working in shops and joiner work.” Then, Richard and Jill, with rucksacks and tents, traveled extensively, to places such as France, Spain and Morocco.
For the next two years Richard and Jill lived in England, near London, and Richard continued to work various jobs, including a short stint that took him back to his roots – driving tractors on a local farm (they had just returned from months of travel, and Richard needed the work). Richard eventually made his way back to joinery work, this time working for Chubb Security Installations.
“I was doing all this work, furniture and joinery malarkey, and I didn’t have any qualifications,” Richard says. “I thought I better get some.”
So in 1981, he applied to Shrewsbury College of Arts and Technology, which offered a well-respected furniture course to about 15 students. He was one of the 15 accepted, and the course earned him a City & Guilds 555 Level 3 in Furniture Advanced Studies with distinction.
Steeped in the Arts & Crafts and Cotswold traditions, the college and his instructors were linked to famous British makers and designers through their association with Loughborough College, and connections to such luminaries as Ernest Gimson, Gordon Russell, Ernest and Sydney Barnsley, Norman Jewson and Peter Waals. Robert Wearing, who Richard describes as “a funny mousy little man, always with his damn jigs” came by once a week – every Friday – to teach. “He was very earnest, very focused,” Richard says. “He had a jig for everything.”
Shrewsbury, the great British makers of the 19th and 20th century, his tutors and Robert Wearing all influenced Richard’s education, and, perhaps to some extent, his style. But Richard is quick to note that while he respects the Arts & Crafts style, he doesn’t particularly like it, including the exposed joinery.
“The movement itself produced some great furniture and the philosophy was kind of interesting, but it didn’t work,” Richard says. He says he likes things that are well made with reasonably uncluttered lines. He admires craftsmanship, quality and practicality. “I’ve always been driven by the need to get the job out of the door fairly quickly.”
And that is something key to know – and in many ways, respect – about Richard. While many folks build furniture on the side, a hobby in addition to their work, it is Richard’s work. He’s typically had to work with clients who need something specific, and can pay a certain price. He may consider fancy inlay, he says, but if that fancy inlay is not part of the client’s budget, he has to cut it out.
“Very rarely in my life have I had the luxury to go over the top with my design,” Richard says. “That’s always been important to me – to always make stuff at a price the client is willing to pay. I’ve never really had the opportunity to just play.”
There’s honesty and fairness in that, and a practicality that, in a circular way, has allowed Richard to turn what many can only conceive of as an avocation, into a vocation. At first glance this way of living may seem restrictive. But by cutting out the fluff, Richard has turned a great weekend love for many into his everyday life’s work, and lately, he’s his own boss. What may seem stifling, to some, has actually earned Richard a lot of freedom.
This viewpoint, in part, also explains Richard’s love of technology. “A lot of people reject technology because they believe it takes away skills,” he says. “I don’t see it that way. Technology allows you to make something complex very quickly.” Advanced equipment, CNC, AutoCAD and similar programs all inspire Richard. For, in addition to completing often-boring work (think shelf pins), there’s brilliancy, he says, in the building of the machine and manipulating it to take on complex tasks. “It’s very exciting,” he says.
After graduating from Shrewsbury, Richard and Jill moved back to Edinburgh, his wife’s hometown. Jobless, Richard walked into Whytock and Reid, Edinburgh’s oldest and, perhaps, most prestigious cabinetmaking and upholstery shop, and asked, “Do you have a job?” They replied: “Aye, when can you start?” Established in 1807 and awarded the Royal warrant by Queen Victoria in 1838, Whytock and Reid furnished many fine castles and homes throughout Scotland and beyond until its closure in 2004.
About a year later, in 1984, Richard applied for the furniture technician position at Edinburgh College of Art. For nine years he worked with furniture design majors and staff, fabricating furniture for and with them, offering technical and aesthetic advice. He was also charged with the day-to-day general running and maintenance of the large furniture workshop, buying and storing timber, maintaining all the hand and power tools, and more.
“That’s where my real interest in becoming more of a furniture designer/maker began,” Richard says. “I was in an environment with not just woodworkers (furniture designers) but other creative people: jewelers, glassblowers, interior designers, fine artists (painters), architects, photographers, weavers, stained glass artists and sculptors,” he says. “I really got interested in all this visual stuff that was going on. Prior to that, I would just make things. Here, I started to better appreciate design, form, shape and function.”
Rugby, Love & Moving to America
At this time Richard was playing recreational rugby, his passion. “It’s sometimes described as a bit like American football but some say it’s perhaps harder,” he says. “We haven’t got any helmets and pads on for a start; we don’t change just about the whole team at the end of plays, so we don’t get all those breaks to get our breath back.”
One of his fellow rugby players had a cousin who played rugby in Texas, and he invited the club to spend a few weeks playing in the States. So they saved money for two years and took two teams to Texas where they played for a wild three weeks (in addition to playing rugby well, the teams drank well, too). His first night in Texas, Richard, by then divorced, met Gail, a Houstonian. They clicked immediately, and she followed him and the teams all over Texas. After Richard went back to Edinburgh, they kept in touch, and both took several trans-Atlantic trips to see each other. They married in Edinburgh, and Gail moved to Scotland.
Richard continued working at the college, but after nine years the job became too comfortable, with no chance of promotion. Gail missed the States, so in 1993, they moved to Houston.
Richard got a temporary job working with a firm that built exhibition stands, and while there, a colleague recommended Richard for another temporary job, this one at The Children’s Museum of Houston. He was soon offered the workshop manager position; he was responsible for running all aspects of the Exhibits Fabrication Shop. While there he also managed the build for the museum’s “Magic School Bus” touring exhibition.
In 1995, Richard decided it was time to open his own shop – Richard Jones Furniture. He rented a shared 7,000-square-foot workshop, which included office space. Two one-man businesses co-existed, pooling and sharing machinery. Richard’s clients were mostly householders and small businesses. He worked with designers and also designed himself. Occasionally, for big jobs, he’d hire sub-contractors.
It was during this time that Gail suggested Richard write an article for a magazine. “This was before I got into computers and stuff,” he says. “So I bought a computer and thought, this is a good way to learn all the damn keys on the keyboard. I didn’t know how to type or anything like that. I started to write about woodworking. Once I found where all the keys were, all this stuff just spewed out of me.”
Coming up with content was easy. It was the editing that took time. He bought a nice camera, took accompanying photos, and easily sold his work to publications such as Woodshop News, The Woodworker, Woodworker’s Journal, and Furniture & Cabinetmaking.
At this time Richard’s work was also being shown in exhibits including the Philadelphia Furniture and Furnishings Show, the Houston Furniture and Design Expo, and invitational exhibitions hosted by Brazosport Art League, Gensler Architecture, Gremillion & Co. Fine Art, Gallery3 and more.
It was hot in Texas. An outside temperature of 100° meant an inside shop temperature of 110°. So in 2003, Richard and Gail moved back to the U.K. “I couldn’t take the heat,” he says. “It was great in the winter, but the heat just drove me nuts. My wife loves the heat. I missed the British things. I liked America and I liked Texas, and the people were really nice. But I missed the warm beer at rugby and, just, all that kind of British stuff. I missed my daughter and family.” Gail agreed to move back on one condition: Richard needed to have job. “And that’s how I became an accidental teacher,” he says.
Richard had been applying for a wide variety of jobs, including that of lecturer at Rycotewood Furniture Centre. He was quickly accepted for the position. Although he had never taught before, Richard said he was reasonably organized and managed to wrap his head around the job fairly quickly. Plus, the subject was second nature to him – guided by course curriculum he taught furniture design and making to undergraduates. He also continued to write for trade journals, a kind of teaching in and of itself.
In 2005, Richard accepted a position at Leeds College of Art, where he served as leader of the BA (Hons) Furniture Making program. Throughout his teaching career, Richard kept writing and building furniture on his own time, and exhibiting his work throughout the U.K. Exhibitions took place at or with the Northern Contemporary Furniture Makers at venues such as Tennants Auctioneers in North Yorkshire, and CUBE Gallery in Manchester. Between 2006 and 2008, Richard also earned a certificate in education, teacher training from the University of Huddersfield.
Eventually, Leeds ended its furniture course citing, for instance, income from furniture student fees and the footprint requirements of a furniture student compared to, for example, a graphic artist. “The craft furniture market has shrunk massively over the last 50 or 60 years,” Richard says. “Not many people are able to sustain themselves on craft furniture.”
In 2014, Richard forged a new path filled with varied work – furniture maker, joiner, woodworker, writer, teacher, consultant – a path he’s still on, today. “I kind of like that, it keeps me out of trouble,” Richard says. “My two best subjects at school were English and woodwork” – two subjects he excels at and makes a living with, today. He also became a member of the City & Guilds Institute, Leadership and Management, receiving his Masters Award in 2014.
By 2005, Richard had stopped writing for magazines, for two reasons: One, the pay was simply too little for the amount of work each required. And two, he realized timber technology, what he wanted to write about, was too big of a subject for the magazine format. So, in 2005, he started writing a book on timber technology. He finished it 10 years later.
The Making of “Cut & Dried”
Richard wrote “Cut & Dried” while also working full-time, and building furniture nights and weekends. “I can’t tell you how many hours I’ve put into it,” he says. Those years, filled with sometimes-intense four- to six-week periods of writing, included research, asking for peer reviews, editing and more. “If I was to say, I probably spent the equivalent of two-and-a-half to three years on it,” he says.
Richard also took care of much of the photography, traveling up and down the countryside in Scotland, the south coasts of England, and visiting and talking to people at timber kilns.
And this was, perhaps, the first time in Richard’s life that he eschewed practicality in terms of time. At one point he was offered a publishing contract, but it came with a deadline. So he turned it down. With no buyer for the book, he had no obligation to factor in an hourly wage. It was side work that took over all of his free time; it was work in addition to. The end result, he thought, would be the result of all his years of training, work and knowledge. And he wanted it to be worthy of all those years, he wanted it to be good and right, and intellectual but accessible, no matter how long the process took.
“Hopefully the result is very good for everybody,” Richard says. “I was bloody-minded, determined. I thought, someone needs this. I really believed somebody needed a book of this type on this subject.”
Part of that belief stemmed from the fact that the book he was writing did not exist. He wanted to create the definitive guide on timber technology, not from the point of view of a wood scientist, but rather from the point of view of a woodworker. He wanted to offer the often-complex information in a less-dense format, and in a way easily understood by those not scientifically minded. It took him years to make sense of it all. And so, throughout the writing process, he constantly asked himself, “How can I make it so that any other reader can make sense of it?”
And that took time.
“Wood is a bloody difficult material, and if you just keep blundering along you’re going to keep making mistakes,” Richard says. “I felt like I needed to know more about this stuff because I work with it. And although I am reasonably good, I thought I’d really like to know the why behind what’s going. There’s just something about that that really appealed to me, the fact that we take this material that grows naturally, and we turn it into other things.”
Richard loves trees. Perhaps it’s a love that developed when he was just a boy, riding his bike through the hills of the English countryside.
“I look out the windows, and I see these lovely trees, and they are just fascinating,” he says. “Many of the trees drop their leaves in autumn. And then by magic comes spring, with new flowers and leaves, and how do they all do that? I just think it’s fascinating. The homes they create, for bugs and all that stuff, the medicine that comes from them … I cycle on my bike through the woods and I see the magpies and crows and trees are just fascinating places, habitation for lots of different things, all together.”
Richard and I spent a lot of time working together on “Cut & Dried,” and given the distance, it was all via email, hundreds of emails – editing notes, answers to questions, at one point panicky queries regarding images and a chart (something like this happens with every book and thankfully, as with all the others, this one, too, worked itself out). And, as often happens in many months’ worth of writing, whether by hand and posted or sent electronically, more casual notes are dropped in, often near the end – details about weekend plans, family happenings.
The editor/writer bond is interesting, as you’re almost always working on years’ worth of work, sometimes, even, someone’s life’s work. There’s a sacredness to the task, for all involved, and as rewarding as it can be it’s also teeming with anxiety. And so, it was with great apprehension I read Richard’s email dated June 11, the day he finally, after so many years of intense work, received his author’s copies. “I’m really pleased,” he wrote. “The book looks wonderful at my first skim through. In a funny sort of way, I feel a bit overwhelmed and just don’t know what to say. I think I need a bit of time to get my head around what’s just happened.” Kind words followed – Richard excels at graciousness and professionalism.
Richard’s days (and nights) feel much longer now. With the book done, new paths are open – there’s more freedom.
“I like to keep busy,” Richard says. “I don’t fancy retirement.” In addition to work, Richard gardens, bikes, spends time with friends and watches rugby. He visits his family, including his daughter and twin 12-year-old grandchildren. Richard’s father died young, at the age of 70. But near the end of his life, Richard says they both began to understand each other. Richard even built some furniture for his parents, and they paid him fairly.
Richard would like to design and build more furniture, but he has little interest in owning a furniture-making business full time. “I don’t want to invest in all the machinery and premises at this age, over 60,” he says. “The craft furniture designer/maker road is really tough to go down.”
Consultancy is something he does occasionally, and would like to expand on. The work is varied and complex – legal disputes, timber technology issues, design and construction questions, and workshop safety. And it can pay quite well. Richard is also interested in developing guest teaching opportunities and perhaps speaking engagements, especially in the field of timber technology.
And so he continues on, approaching each day with solid work ethic, great intellect and his simple sense of practicality. And perhaps now, that his book is done, he’ll be able to relax more often, by having a pint and watching some rugby, which he says is, “my big interest outside all things woody.”
— Kara Gebhart Uhl
‘Hands Employed Aright’ Poster Now Shipping
Editor’s Note: For those of you who have purchased “Hands Employed Aright,” you’ll note that we also used Jessica Roux’s illustration as endsheets. It was more expensive than typical endsheets, but worth it in every way. And now you can purchase a poster of this gorgeously detailed work of art.
— Kara Gebhart Uhl
When I got home from work yesterday, the long-anticipated shipment of the Jonathan Fisher workshop posters was sitting on my front porch! This poster features the incredible illustration that was commissioned for my new book, “Hands Employed Aright: The Furniture Making of Jonathan Fisher (1768-1847).” The image is a recreation of a typical Jonathan Fisher workshop scene, in which the parson is hard at work making furniture for his and his community’s homes. Everything from the barn he worked in, the tools hanging on the walls, the partially assembled desk in the foreground, to the sheep inside and pigs outside are all based on surviving artifacts or documentation. Little in this illustration is conjecture.
When I pitched this idea to Chris during the book editing process, he said “yes” without reservation. We agreed that this rare opportunity to see the pieces of this story come together seemed too good to pass up.
Because I’ve long admired the folk whimsy of artist Jessica Roux, having her do the artwork was a no-brainer. And we couldn’t be more pleased with how it came out. It is rich in detail, color and texture, and is something we knew folks would want to hang on their wall.
This 18″ x 22″ poster was printed in the U.S. on 100-lb. matte-coated paper. Jessica’s super high-res work means this poster was printed with crisp detail. Mike and I are now beginning to ship these posters out into the world. The poster is $15 and can be ordered here. (Yes, we take international orders.) We’re only doing one run, so if you want one now’s the time to order.
Celebrate Whimsy
Editor’s Note: Longtime LAP author Don Williams is in the process of writing a new book: “The Period Finisher’s Manual.” The book will be a culmination of his years working as a conservator, educator and scholar (including more than 25 years of service to the Smithsonian) with expertise in conservation, woodworking and wood finishing. Here he talks about his writing process. You can find Don online at donsbarn.com.
— Kara Gebhart Uhl
For most of my working life, writing tasks were simply a matter of plugging information clusters into whatever format the recipient required. Artifact condition reports, conservation proposals and conservation treatment reports follow a regular format. Either you had the information at hand or your did not. Ditto budget requests, performance evaluations, monthly and annual reports, and a multitude of bureaucratic tickets to be punched.
Much to my surprise I discovered that I did not mind the writing itself and began to explore it outside the 9-to-5 boundaries. I did not care if I was any good at it, rather I found it to be a pleasant diversion. I recall the day in the 1990s when I was reading a well-known thriller from the library. After several dozen pages I put it down and said to myself, “Self, you can do better than this.” So, over the next year I wrote a novel about a guy in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong woman and the bad, bad things that ensue; a story that tied together threads from the Weather Underground, Stasi terror brokers, mobsters, purloined identity, and a history teacher at a remote private school (and, of course, a beautiful sniper).
I have no idea if it is any good but there is a beginning, a middle with many rabbit trails, and an end. From the start, I knew where the story was going, but I did not always know how it was going to get there. I did not write it in a beginning-to-end manner. Since the bare bones of the story required a lot of embellishment I found that the enriching texture was added when Whimsy would strike and individual vignettes unfolded irrespective of where they fit in the plot. When the pile was large enough I knitted all the pieces together, smoothing out their connections. I found in subsequent fiction writing that this strategy fits my temperament perfectly. (My current book plot involves weaving together 1760s Parisian ateliers, a 1930s Skull-and-Bones-ish group, the French Underground, the contemporary New York museum scene, and a furniture conservator putting his life back together after a 10-year bender and how he saves Western Civilization while the bodies start piling up.)
I have, on occasion, written here about my similar process for creating earlier LAP books, the two Roubo volumes, “To Make as Perfectly as Possible: Roubo on Marquetry” and “With All the Precision Possible: Roubo on Furniture,” and “Virtuoso, The Tool Cabinet and Workbench of Henry O. Studley.” Since writing is a prominent focus of my working life these days, I am often asked, “How do you go about writing a book?” The answer for my current undertaking, “The Period Finisher’s Manual,” makes me sound sort of goofy.
In the former cases the text was established by Roubo himself via Michele Pietryka-Pagán and all I had to do was make it sensible to a 21st-century woodworker. There were times I thought the latter text (“Virtuoso”) wrote itself because Studley’s tool cabinet was so iconic all I had to do was write what I saw, gather as much primary source material as possible (thank you, John Cashman!), get it all down on paper and smooth out any wrinkles (aka “editing”). As I recall, the first draft of “Virtuoso” took about 10 weeks, eight hours a day most days, or about 100 words per hour. The captions took another two weeks, at a faster pace. But that was at the end of several years of traveling, observing, measuring and researching, so the raw material was ready at the waiting.
My current labor on “The Period Finisher’s Manual” began years ago with a detailed outline, so for good or ill it will have a fairly cogent organization. I hope. When the time comes, Chris will tell me if I am correct and instruct me on changes if I am not.
My typical working habit is proving to be true for “The Period Finisher’s Manual.” With my working outline in hand, and mental sketches of the knowledge to be conveyed, I wait for the paragraph (or paragraphs) to emerge from my experience of almost five decades of practicing and exploring wood finishing. “The Period Finisher’s Manual” content thus congeals in a non-linear fashion but in the end congeal it does, and the gelatinous masses are merged in a careful review and self-edit. Sometimes smoothing these wrinkles is more work than creating the original fabric.
One minute I might be working on a section describing the nature of solvents and a half hour later something about good finishing shop rags or making 18th-century sandpaper followed by using molten wax grain filler or building a flawless spirit varnish then extolling the virtues of avoiding power tools near the finishing shop might come up. I do not labor over a section if it is not flowing well from my fingertips – that just means those words are still in gestation. I know that the words will emerge when their time comes. Once a larger section has all its swatches I sew them together, a sometimes-arduous task. I am reminded of Edison’s description of invention: “It is 1 percent inspiration and 99 perspiration.” That probably explains why the timeline for any book covers many years, a characterization that fits this book, too.
When writing a book like “The Period Finisher’s Manual,” my job is to first create the skeleton (outline) then fill in all the holes of the outline one at a time and do my best to make it accurate and readable. On Day One, all the holes were empty so I had a target-rich environment – any paragraphs I threw out there would fit something, somewhere. As I told someone recently about this project, “You start with one paragraph somewhere in the book. Anywhere. It does not matter. You keep writing until you have a 1,000 or 1,500 paragraphs. You connect them together seamlessly. Then you have a book.”
— Don Williams
Meet the Author: Mary May
Perhaps the best way to describe Mary May, author of “Carving the Acanthus Leaf,” is to describe another woman – Grace. Grace began as an 8” x 10” x 21” block of mahogany, and emerged not with plan or intent, but with patience, skill and curiosity.
On her blog, Mary wrote about the process of carving Grace without referring to a model – a process called “direct” carving. “A woman was in there somewhere,” Mary wrote. “I just needed to begin chipping the wood away and find out where and who she was.”
And so it is with Mary herself. A carver was inside her, always – that’s evident in her childhood stories of three-dimensional play and carved zucchini dolls. But just as Mary handled Grace, she has worked her way through life not with a grinder, but rather slowly, with a mallet and chisel. “Without having a specific design, how do you know what is ‘waste’ wood, anyway?” she writes when talking about carving Grace. “This process of slowly chipping away helped me to discover the design as I carved.”
And so it is with Mary’s life. Her life experiences have allowed herself to live three-dimensionally. In fact, her work these days is split in thirds – carving, teaching and creating online videos. And what has emerged is a well-respected career that has allowed her to fill her days doing exactly what she loves.
A Childhood of Fulfilled Dreams & Eccentricity
Mary was born in the Chicago area and grew up in the city’s suburbs until she was 11. Her dad was working as a systems analyst at a time when computer programming was still young. His commute into the city took two hours – each way. “He got really burnt out on that,” Mary says. Wanting to simplify, Mary’s dad quit his job and became an auto mechanic, a job he held for many years.
“What’s interesting is that my dad actually went to college for philosophy and theology,” Mary says. And her dad would argue that having studied both subjects made for a perfect combination for his newfound profession. “In his very unique mind it was the right combination of someone who could figure things out and solve problems,” Mary says.
Mary’s mom collected junk and sold it. “Our entire house was just filled with all sorts of collected things,” Mary says. “I had an interesting childhood. I thought it was a normal childhood, but now that I look back on it, it probably wasn’t.”
Mary grew up with three brothers and one sister, and their childhood was spent following the whimsy of their parents. Their father’s boatbuilding hobby is a good example.
“He built two different boats, one when I was 4 and the other when I was 11,” Mary says. Once the boats were built, the entire family lived on them. “The second time we were all teenagers – well, I was almost a teenager,” Mary says. “I can’t even imagine what my parents were thinking.”
Mary says her dad, who died in 2003, served in the Navy and she has often wondered if that played a part. He sought out adventure and regularly eschewed the traditional road.
“He was a quiet, normal-acting and -looking person,” Mary says. “But he just had this dream and he wanted to live it and nothing was going to stop him. It was quite an adventure. As a child, I probably didn’t appreciate it much. It definitely was something that was very valuable as to how we developed our way of thinking and of dreaming.”
While on the first boat trip (they traveled the length of the Mississippi River and then sailed to the Bahamas) Mary says she and her siblings continued their education by taking correspondence courses through the mail. During the second boat trip they stayed in the Florida Keys for six months so the children could attend school.
“We were staying at a marina, anchored, and we were on a serious budget,” Mary says. The marina charged docking fees and utilities, but if your boat was simply anchored, there was no charge. So Mary and her siblings would pile into a rowboat and row themselves to shore every day to catch the school bus.
“My dad’s quiet way of living his dream had a real significance on my decision-making,” Mary says. “I think the main thing that I gained from it is other people may think your dream is odd and obscure, but if it’s your dream then go ahead and dream it and do what you can to achieve it.”
Mary’s family moved from the suburbs of Chicago to rural Wisconsin when she was 12. “It was a pretty drastic lifestyle change, living out in the country,” she says. When they first moved to Wisconsin they lived in a trailer they had previously used as a summer vacation home. For six months – including a Wisconsin winter – it was as if they were back on the boat, living in a trailer that had no running water. Mary says she remembers going to the neighbor’s house to fill up five-gallon buckets of water and carrying them home. “It was rough,” she says. After six months, they found a new place to live. “It had running water and was a little more civilized,” she says.
Mary lived in rural Wisconsin until she graduated from Sparta High School in 1985. “I really enjoyed the country,” she says. “I enjoyed the quietness of it. My parents were concerned with the influence that the city and the suburbs would have on us so they just wanted us to get out and experience the rural life.”
Learning to See in Three Dimensions
From a young age, Mary loved shaping three-dimensional things. And her mother’s collected junk gave her much to play with. She remembers shadow boxes that intrigued her, and Strawberry Shortcake wrapping paper, in particular. At 7 or 8 years old Mary remembers cutting out the little images of Strawberry Shortcake, making arms and sticking them on, adding dimension to what was previously flat. She became acutely aware of the closeness of things, the thickness of things, how objects could look farther apart and then appear closer to the background.
“I was interested,” she says. “It was a training ground. I started to view and visualize things, and I think that was a real plus. I don’t think my parents had a clue where that would lead me but it was interesting.”
She calls herself an obsessive child who had a tendency to latch onto projects. Once, while living on the boat, she asked her dad for all of the boat’s dimensions. She wanted to draw an exact replica of the boat, scaled down on paper. Her dad taught her how to use the scale ruler and she spent hours replicating the boat, every tiny detail – she was 11.
While Mary was surrounded by a lot of creativity growing up, compliments and encouragement were rare. “My dad, especially I think, was not a man of very many words and it was very hard to get any kind of response at all,” she says. “When he did encourage you, you thought, Wow. I’m going to grab and hold onto that one. They just expected us to succeed in whatever it was we were doing. They expected us to be good at whatever we did.”
Mary loved hanging out with her dad who was a hobby carpenter. One time, at the age of 12, she was out in the garage with her dad and told him she wanted to make a dollhouse. “My dad helped me get plywood and taught me how to use the scroll saw to cut out the windows and how to use the hand drill,” she says. “I made my first dollhouse and it was pretty rustic but it was mine. I think that was probably the first time I built something in wood. I sold it at a garage sale for $8.” She wishes she had kept it.
Mary began carving at a young age, although not in wood. In her book she tells a story about carving a pumpkin in Wisconsin (and also a delightful story about carving her name in her dresser). “I kind of always did that kind of thing,” she says. “We had huge zucchinis that would grow in the garden, beyond the point of being edible. I’d carve faces into the ends of them.” The necks of these dolls would weaken, turning the zucchinis into bobble heads. “I’d walk around with the bobble head and eventually it got so weak that the head would fall off and that was pretty traumatic.”
The Art of Making the Complex, Simple
Mary attended college for two years, but was undecided about her future. She took a class in ceramics that she loved – because it was three-dimensional. She knew she wanted a career in art, but she hadn’t yet discovered carving wood, specifically. And the idea of living her life as a starving artist offered little appeal.
During her second year of college Mary studied abroad in London. “That’s when I ended up absolutely falling in love with stone and wood carvings,” she said. Now, when she looks back at the photographs during her time abroad, she sees a theme – photo after photo of carvings and architectural details from the insides of churches and cathedrals. “It’s interesting to look back to see what you gravitated toward and what you didn’t,” she says. “You can look back and kind of locate those things.”
Mary wasn’t a good student. “I didn’t take notes very well,” she says. “I would take an entire page of notes where I would make everything three dimensional with the letters coming off the page. I never paid any attention to what the teacher was saying, but I would have pages of these very bizarre, three-dimensional notes.
Feeling like she wasn’t heading in any specific direction and not wanting to spend more money, Mary dropped out of college and enrolled at a technical college. For two years she studied desktop publishing – what is now called graphic design. “I ended up working at the school that I studied at as a desktop publisher,” she says. Her job was to assist tutors and redesign old, worn-out, hand-drawn and handwritten instructional packets. Think: a manual teaching someone how to change a tire.
“I think that really, really helped writing my book,” she says. Mary wrote “Carving the Acanthus Leaf” with a layout in mind. And although she’s never studied teaching, designing instructional packets at the technical college required her to think as a teacher would. “What I try to do is remember back to when you first start doing something,” she says. “I really try to get into their heads and into their position of being a beginner.”
There’s an art to making the complex seem simple, and it’s an art Mary excels at, as is evident not only in her book, but also in her classes (ask any of her former students) as well as her instructional videos. Her goal, when teaching in person, on video or on paper, is to take out any possibility of misunderstanding while also creating an increased interest in the work, all the while crafting a simple explanation of what actually is a complex idea and design.
Creating a Career Out of Carving
Mary began carving while working at the technical college. She bought a beginning woodcarving book at a garage sale, a large curved gouge and a rubber mallet. Her workshop was in her bedroom. It was during this time that she started taking classes two nights a week with a Greek master carver named Konstantinos Papadakis.
“The more I started to carve, the more I was attached to it,” she says. “I couldn’t get away from it. Even when I was at my job and trying to do these learning packets, I was constantly thinking what I wanted to carve. I think it just became an obsession.”
And this is why Mary was so happy to be laid off from her job with severance pay. “I was really trying to figure out how to do the carving full time and I couldn’t come up with a way to do that and be a responsible citizen,” she says.
She traveled to Athens, Greece, this time to Theofanis Andravidiotis’s studio, where she worked alongside master Greek carvers and their apprentices. From there she traveled once again to London, where she attended City & Guilds of London Art College, studying traditional carving designs and techniques. She also did a stint working as a stone carver in Malaysia. (You can read much more about all of this in her book.)
While Mary loved the training, she said she did have to go through a bit of a punishing period where you had to prove yourself. And then she fast-forwards for a moment, mentioning how often people want to become a master carver after taking one week-long class. “It’s difficult to convince people you’ll need a little bit more time,” she says. “You have to put in the time.”
When living in the states, work, at times, was sparse. Mary would do occasional sign carvings as well as spec pieces, including the Byzantine-style icon stand featured in her book. Mary found it difficult to get her name out, and difficult to prove to people what she could do. So she simply continued working on her skills and techniques until a man she was dating convinced her to move down to South Carolina. “That’s when the work really started to open up because of the area and the historical significance in Charleston,” she says.
In South Carolina, after some time, Mary found lots of work repairing and restoring furniture, as well as working on new homes along the coast. But the work wasn’t immediate. The key was convincing people of what she could do. Many builders and homeowners didn’t realize, for example, that a hand-carved fireplace mantel was a possibility. So Mary had to put herself out there, presenting herself in a way that was starkly different from the person she used to be.
“I was actually a very shy person,” Mary says of her childhood self. “I think there was a big part of me that needed to get over my shyness to function in the world. I had to force myself to get out there and go traveling. And I did a lot of traveling on my own and forced myself to get out and interact with people. It helped me through that – when you realize if you want the chance to live a successful life, you kind of have to get past that.”
Mary’s also tough. She circles back to her childhood, to the six months she lived in a trailer with no water. “I knew I could survive in pretty sparse living conditions,” she says. “I was willing to do that [again], to put up with whatever came my way, to live as frugally as possible, to take on a second job, to take on another real job – fortunately I never had to do that then.”
After finally landing in a comfortable place of steady work doing what she loved, Mary did have a concern. If this was something she was passionate about and loved to do, what would happen when it became her career? Would she lose the passion once her hobby became her business? Her concern, it turns out, appears to be unfounded. “Twenty-seven years later I still absolutely love it,” she says.
“An Enjoyable Adventure”
Flexibility and creativity have been important to Mary’s success. “There are times when I don’t have a lot of commissions, when I don’t have a lot of work, and I have a lot of time to think and get creative,” she says. “[I think:] I want to continue to do this as my job. How else can I look at this? Maybe I can go this direction, maybe I can do teaching, start an online video school. And that’s how I started the online school. I didn’t have a lot of work six years back and I wanted to keep doing this. But how?”
The key, Mary says, is to not get burned by doing one thing and one thing only way too long. “It becomes repetitive,” she says. “You get burned out. With the variety that comes with my work there are very few times when that happens.”
Mary still lives in South Carolina, but not with the man who initially convinced her to move down south. (There is a lovely story about how she met her now-husband, Stephen, in her book.) For the last 16 years she and Stephen have lived on a couple acres in the country on St. John’s Island.
When they bought their home, it was falling apart. “The person who built it was about 4’11”, and all the ceilings were short,” she says. “He basically built it to fit his height.” So Mary and Stephen, who works as a private contractor, completely redid the house. “It was a fun process,” Mary says. “My husband did a lot of the restoration and renovation. We only have a few items in the house that I actually carved. It’s really like the cobbler’s house.”
And whenever Stephens’s work was slow, he would work on Mary’s workshop, every couple of years adding another extension. “It’s a beautiful little workshop,” she says.
These days, Mary’s work consists of teaching, at different locations and occasionally in her workshop, working on her online videos and working on commissions. Last year, finishing up her book added another layer of work on top of her busy schedule – she found herself up until midnight, 1 a.m., 2 a.m., sometimes 3 a.m., every night plus weekends. “I’m still recovering from that,” she says. The work did, however, prompt her to take a one-week-long cruise with her sister. “Then my sister convinced me to do a back-to-back cruise, so we did another week and it was very irresponsible. It was one of those things I used to do before I was married.”
Her days are often similar. The mornings are reserved for computer work. She helps Stephen with his bookwork, does his invoices and catches up on email. Then she heads out to her shop to work on her commissions. “Sometimes I can spend 5 hours or 10 hours a day, depending on how critical the deadline is,” she says. “Occasionally, if I’m working on a commission, I like to video it so I can include that as a project and a lesson on my online school.”
She’s not good at taking breaks. “I sort of forget and five or six hours later I realize that I haven’t stopped,” Mary says. “But it’s funny because I had some students here taking classes and at 10 a.m. in the morning they wanted to take a break and I was like, ‘What do you mean?’ And they asked, ‘Where are some chairs to sit in?’ And I said, ‘Chairs? What do you mean? We don’t have any chairs around here.’ And I realized, oh my goodness, I don’t stop. So I went to the Dollar Store to buy some chairs so they could sit and take a break.” She laughs.
Filming her work requires three cameras, all of which are set up in her workshop. “They’re just on tripods,” she says. “I’m pretty much here by myself.” She likes it that way. She has a computer in her shop and because she’s by herself, she says she can take as many takes as she wants. “When I mess up I don’t have to waste anybody else’s time,” she says.
Mary’s oldest stepson, Caleb, is her video editor. “He’s the one that makes me look good,” she says. “He did say he’s saving all the bloopers. I’m not sure what I’m going to get, a blooper reel? He takes all of them and he does a great job of making sure whatever camera angle is correct and zooms in and it’s all pretty much real time. It’s in-house. I do the videos and Caleb does the editing. We keep very busy with that. We do a video every week. It’s going really well. There’s a lot of interest and I’m excited to see a lot of beginners get into that.”
When asked about her hobbies, Mary says she enjoys gardening but she’s not very good at it. “I’ve been asked, ‘What do you do for fun?’ And I’m like, I have to think of something clever. The first thing I thought of was carving. ‘What do you do for fun?’ My career. I thought it was sort of the best answer I could give. I really couldn’t think of anything else.”
She still loves to travel. “We’re kind of homebodies here,” she says. “But I like to travel and I hope to travel a lot more. My husband likes to come with me occasionally when I teach in different locations.”
And thinking both in terms of flexibility and creativity, Mary has been considering a new idea – a mobile workshop, that would allow for travel, videos on the road, interviews and workshops in different parts of the country. “If I have too much time on my hands, I can see different ways to steer it,” she says.
Mary finds satisfaction in all her work’s dimensions. “Carving itself is very enjoyable and I get to lose myself for hours,” she says. “There’s a different type of satisfaction when you’re teaching. And there’s still something different of just being able to share – other people get just as excited. I get the occasional email from students and I’m thrilled with what they’ve done. I love that part of it.”
When looking back on her life thus far, Mary gives God a lot of credit. “I acknowledge that God gives us gifts and I think you need to realize where the gifts come from and my gifts do come from God,” she says. “I think ultimately life is a challenge but you can take those challenges on and actually turn them around as an enjoyable adventure. I think that’s probably how I have survived as many years as I have doing what I really love to do.”
— Kara Gebhart Uhl