I spent yesterday in Hay-On-Wye for the first of many field trips for the John Brown book. Picturesque Hay, home to the renowned book festival and equally renowned (if somewhat more niche) spoon festival, is halfway between the village where Chris Williams’ (my co-author for the project) lives and Birmingham, so it makes for an ideal location to meet up and formulate a plan of attack for the book.
And we are very much at the planning stage currently. To do this book properly (which is the only way we want to do it) it’s going to be a huge endeavour, with a significant number of interviews with John’s friends, family and woodworkers, not to mention field trips to locations significant either to John or to Welsh stick chairs, and of course the chairmaking itself. With so many moving parts, having a clear roadmap from here to publication is the best way to stay focused on the key threads, and to make sure that nothing important falls by the wayside.
So over the past couple of months we have been engaged in a constant dialogue about what we want to achieve, and how best to go about it: Who to interview, what to make, where to visit and what to read. Yesterday was the culmination of that dialogue, not to mention an excellent opportunity to spend a day talking woodwork with someone who has spent more than 30 years working in the woodcrafts, and who personally worked with John for many years.
Slowly “The Life & Work of John Brown” is swimming into focus. What has become very clear over the time that Chris Williams and I have been discussing the book, and even more so yesterday, is that, for both of us, it is important that we honour and embody John’s ethos as a chairmaker. What that means is that the chairmaking section of the book must make building these fascinating chairs accessible to everyone, with an emphasis on the minimal use of specialist tools or hard-to-find timber. That is not only consistent with John’s “Anarchist Woodworker” philosophy, but will also hopefully contribute to the longevity of a relatively uncommon chair form.
A drawing from John Brown’s book, “Welsh Stick Chairs.”
This is all very well and good, but how will we achieve this? Well, one of the ideas currently being kicked around is starting the chairmaking section not at the workbench, but at the timber yard. Timber selection can be a truly daunting experience for the inexperienced woodworker — I still remember my first trip to the timber yard, and how the choice was almost crippling. Many woodwork books tend to assume that you already have material and are standing at your workbench ready to start work, but to our minds the timber yard is where every build starts, and to start anywhere else would be omitting a key step. By having Chris Williams guide the reader through timber selection for a stick chair, we hope to remove one of the greatest hurdles to chairmaking.
We are also considering building chairs with pieced and carved arm bows rather than steam-bent bows. While English and American Windsor chairmaking traditions use steam bending for arm bows, Chris Williams tells me that due to the social function of stick chairs there was little or no tradition of steam bending in Wales. The pieced arm bow is very striking, and relies on techniques and tools common to most woodworkers. So it’s accessible and historically accurate — perfect.
These snapshots are really exciting to us, and I hope that by sharing some of the processes behind the book we can encourage more dialogue about John and his chairs, and also share our enthusiasm for the project. This is just the start of the process, and plenty is likely to change as we continue to work. But as the framework for the book starts to fall into place I can see how it will hang together, and what an important contribution this could be. There’s a lot of hard work to do over the next couple of years, and I hope that you will all join us for the ride.
Acclaimed craftsman and woodworking instructor Robert Wearing was formally trained at Loughborough College (now University) in Leicestershire, England. It was there, during the late 1940s, that a physical education teacher said a sentence that Wearing has embraced throughout his long and fulfilling career: “For teacher and pupil, a lesson should be an enjoyable, purposeful activity.”
For Wearing, his childhood lessons in the building of things came from his father, a sailor, and a model construction kit.
Both sides of Robert Wearing’s family came from the south of the United Kingdom’s Lake district. “After WWI my parents married there, but jobs for young officers were hard to find,” Wearing says. “So my father, like the rest of his family went to sea.”
Wearing’s father sailed in Atlantic liners, first to New York and then later to Rio de Janeiro, a six-week voyage. Between trips his father would spend two weeks restocking for the next voyage. The family moved into a house vacated by a family member in the port of Liverpool. This way, when Wearing’s father was on land, he could take the tram home each night to be with the family.
“He was not a craftsman,” Wearing says. “I would call him a useful handyman with tools bought in New York.” Wearing’s father enjoyed building models and mechanical devices with “Meccano,” a model construction system created in their hometown of Liverpool by Frank Hornby. Wearing’s father taught his son how to solder. And while at sea, Wearing’s father would compile lists of parts to convert. “I think I owe a great deal to Meccano, which taught me the basic principles of design,” Wearing says.
Also while at sea, Wearing says his father would design wireless sets, tracing the components on a board and then, once home, build up the circuits. “We had quite a number of sets before manufacturing set up,” Wearing says. “Early ones had headphones. I still remember the first horn-like speaker and its extension to various rooms, including my bedroom when I had a cold.”
Wearing attended a grammar school in Liverpool, learning a variety of subjects, including Latin, German and Spanish, but learned little about woodworking.
When not in school Wearing and his family spent holidays at Windermere in the Lakes. “We wandered the small fells nearby, developing the love of mountain walking,” he says. “When at home there was nothing exciting (to us) to do. I puttered in my little garden shed workshop and began my permanent interest in photography using a Vest Pocket Kodak and processing in the blacked-out bathroom, not popular in my family.”
Wearing, serving in WWII.
Wearing served in WWII and after the war, the British government offered a Further Education and Training grant to ex-service personnel, whose training had been interrupted by the war. “Mine had not been but an exception made in the case of teaching,” Wearing wrote in an essay we published here. “There was an acute shortage, since many teachers had been killed and young men were conscripted before they could go to college.”
Wearing visited his old headmaster to inquire about an occupation. “He brought out a copy of every report written, and after perusing these said, ‘You seemed to excel at woodwork. Have you thought of teaching that? It is pleasant work: no preparation, no marking. How little did he know,’” Wearing says.
Wearing’s headmaster summoned a young man who had recently applied for a similar job. Wearing says the man’s advice was short and succinct: “Go to Loughborough. Don’t even think of anywhere else. They will make a craftsman out of you.”
“I like to think they did,” Wearing says, who studied at Loughborough from 1947 to 1950. “This was a pivotal point in my life.”
Wearing wrote in a previous essay that the application to Loughborough required making a teapot stand, “a rather elaborately jointed mitered frame, holding a 6” x 6” ceramic title. I made this in a little garden shed workshop with what tools I had and little knowledge and went for the interview. It was accepted and I was in.”
Wearing’s dovetailed tool box.
Before arriving Wearing says he also had to make a dovetailed tool box — three boxes were fitted under each bench.
In those days Loughborough was mostly students studying engineering, and the rest were education — half woodworking and half physical education.
Wearing studied ancient and medieval history, English literature, education, handicraft and technical drawing. His first project from a supplied drawing was a small book rack made from agba, an African hardwood.
“It was a climate of excellent design and high-quality craftsmanship in the company of highly dedicated and motivated fellow students,” Wearing says. “But then we were not normal schoolboy entrants. We were older, some were married and some had children. We had seen the world and not the nicest parts.”
In the workshop, education was informal, and students were left alone to work on their approved drawings. There was a tutor available for consultation. “Each workshop also had a very competent cabinetmaker, who maintained the equipment,” Wearing wrote in his essay. “He was a mine of information and was always most helpful. That was Mr. Finch, who was always referred to as such. Nowadays he would be a technician of varying quality.”
Wearing’s next project was a small mahogany side table with a drawer. Because of timber rationing in the years surrounding the war, finding wood was difficult. But still, students needed wood. In addition to designing and building their own work, they had been tasked with building furniture, designed by renowned craftsman Edward Barnsley, for the college’s proposed library. So the students went to auction sales. A large Cuban mahogany dining table with extending leaves and massive rails proved quite useful. The legs were cut up for turnings. And the table became a paneled bookcase with sliding glass doors. The bottom of railway wagons, destroyed by bombings and deeply embedded with coal and dust, became a source of oak.
“When I took some pieces to the college sawmill, I was rudely sent away to first plane off the top charred ¼”, by hand,” Wearing wrote in his essay. “The boss later relented and agreed to saw and thickness them as the last job before the saw and blades were sharpened. In fact, it proved to be quite nice material, out of which I made several nice pieces in the garage of my hall of residence including a small circular table, which I still have. Also, a small wall hanging bureau.”
All of Wearing’s tutors were former Loughborough students, except for Cecil Gough who was the former foreman of Gordon Russell of Broadway, Gloucestershire. A man by the last name of Ockenden was the head of the department. He trained at Shoreditch College, which Wearing says rivaled Loughborough in terms of excellence. Barnsley gave several lectures and advised students on their individual designs.
Wearing says all the physical education students studied craftsmanship at a lower level and the crafts students studied some physical education. “We were all ex-service men from WWII and so was our physical education tutor who knew full well that we all thought that we had already done enough physical education for a lifetime,” Wearing says. “His slogan, which I have endeavored to follow was, ‘For teacher and pupil, a lesson should be an enjoyable, purposeful activity.’” Another slogan from this teacher? Coach, Correct, Encourage, Praise. “This works for all subjects,” Wearing says. “Although we were craft students, we enjoyed his periods.”
Wearing writes in his essay that there were few machines in the workshops, although they did have a band saw and lathe. He often wished for a circular saw. Wearing’s final project was an oak sideboard, planed by hand from 1” to ¾”.
Years later Wearing visited his son, David, at school. As he entered the school’s workshop Wearing said, “There has been a Lobro (Loughborough) man here.” His son confirmed this. “Though the man had gone, the atmosphere remained. But for how long?” Wearing says. “I wonder.”
After graduation Wearing taught at an independent school. “There was no local authority telling me what to do and what was forbidden,” he says. “I would have resented this by a person who knew less than I did and was a nonperformer.”
Long before computers were common, Wearing set up a press using a 19th-century treadle machine and moveable type. “I had a lot to learn here,” he says. “We printed programs, fixture cards and internal school stationary with some invention.”
Wearing also began teaching individual students at woodturning. “A Chinese girl excelled at this and sent home to her father a pivoting dressing table mirror in English oak with sycamore inlay stringing,” he says. “It arrived intact at Kuda Lampung in Indonesia. He wrote to the headmaster for confirmation that this was made by his daughter, not her teacher. His letter was passed on to me. I was able to confirm and sent a color photograph of her at work on the mirror.”
While teaching Wearing says he made few pieces for clients, who, he says, generally wanted bespoke furniture for factory-made prices.
Wearing excelled as a teacher, and a writer. There’s an ease to which he describes the craft, in words both spoken and written. “Writing is not difficult if you know your stuff and have the opportunity to see your pupils or readers at work,” he says. “My education in English as a boy and as a student was good.”
As for the art of teaching? “The key is conversation,” Wearing says. “Did you ever have a conversation with, say, your math teacher? Children are not good at talking to strange adults, generally because they have nothing to say.” In the workshop, though, Wearing says talking is key. “This is an unnoticed service which the workshop supplies training in conversation skills.”
Wearing found his life purpose after WWII, when his old headmaster suggested teaching craftsmanship. And it’s a vocation he’s enjoyed for more than 50 years. “You must really know your stuff and have a job on the go,” Wearing says. “A head of department told me he never made anything and had no tools but used school tools. Can you imagine a violin teacher who never played for his pleasure and had no violin, but used a school instrument? Or a physical education teacher who had no football boots and could not swim?”
Wearing spent his career not only teaching but also writing about the craft, in magazine articles and books. After owning several cameras, he decided to build one specifically for the technical subjects he was writing about. “This produced 3-1/2” x 2-1/2” color transparencies of good quality,” he says. “Editors liked them so much that they increased my fee. Then disaster struck — digital. Everything had to be digital and I couldn’t make a digital camera.”
In 1988 Wearing published “The Essential Woodworker” with Batsford. For Christopher Schwarz, this book, which he bought on a whim for about $5 in the 1990s, was deeply influential in his study of the craft. “I read the entire book in one siting (it took only a couple hours), but in that short period of time, Wearing assembled all the random puzzle pieces I had collected for years about handwork,” Schwarz wrote in 2010. “He filled in all the missing details about dozens of basic processes, from laying out door joinery to truing up the legs on a table.”
Although it took several years, Schwarz and John Hoffman reprinted the out-of-print book in 2010, and consider it still one of the best books on hand-tool usage written in the post-Charles Hayward era today.
Wearing’s conversation with me was via mail, in handwritten form. He ends his letter with an anecdote:
“I was working one evening when two boys passed the workshop; (it was a boarding school). They saw the lights on and came in. They asked, ‘What are you doing?’ ‘I am going to glue up a drawer.’ ‘Can we watch?’ ‘No.’ Their faces fell. ‘But you can help.’ They found and adjusted the cramps, made and fitted the cramping blocks, tested the diagonals and tested for twist, applied the glue and cramped up. Then we left. Next day they came in and asked, ‘How did it go?’ ‘Have a look it’s under the dust sheet over there.’ They tried the drawer, pushed it in and out, tried it upside down, saying ‘That’s fabulous.’ I said ‘No, that is how it should be and you can do the same if you take care and follow my instructions.’”
For teacher and pupil, a lesson should be an enjoyable, purposeful activity.
Planemaker and author Matt Bickford in his home shop in Haddam Neck, Conn.
I imagine a lot of people had Matt Bickford figured out.
Born in the Binghamton, N.Y., area (specifically Endwell) Matt lived there through the 8th grade, along with his parents, and his older brother and older sister. When the IBM plant shut down there was a mass exodus from the area, which included Matt’s family (his father worked for IBM). They ended up in Hyde Park, N.Y., in the Poughkeepsie area.
Matt played sports. Mainly football and lacrosse. A little basketball. “Being tall was always a handicap because you ended up being the first picked and it led to a lot of disappointment,” he says, laughing.
Matt attended Yale University, played football (he was a lineman) and intended to study math or economics. But through friendships with older football players he learned that he could get the job he wanted without spending four years immersed in math. He liked history, reading and writing, so he declared history as a major. “Going off to Wall Street was the goal,” he says. “Medical school, law school or Wall Street was the general goal of everybody that I was acquainted with at school.”
And so, that’s what he did. Three months after graduation he landed a job at a prestigious finance firm in Philadelphia where he worked his way up to becoming a market maker. He worked as a proprietary trader in most circumstances, but as a block trader in others, where folks from hedge funds or mutual funds would call Matt and ask for a price on varying sizes or larger lots, ranging 50,000 to 100,000 shares of stock or larger. Using the company’s owners’ money, Matt and his colleagues directly participated in making the literal market. And he was good at it.
“The company that I worked for was actually a pretty awesome company,” Matt says. “The way that they taught risk tolerance, taking on and betting and playing the market, was through poker.” Keep in mind that this was before the poker craze of the mid-2000s.
The company didn’t seek out finance majors or economics majors. Rather they wanted employees with a clean slate of knowledge who were willing to adopt their strategy — people who played sports (like Matt), or were into games like poker, backgammon, Magic the Gathering and chess. They recruited from the World Series of Poker and gaming conferences. And in the beginning of Matt’s employment, he, and all his colleagues, were required to play poker — against each other and their bosses — for hours.
“Most things were taught at the poker table,” Matt says. “Whether it was risk tolerance or betting strategies or just learning how to gauge not only what you’re doing but what you think the other person is doing or what you think the other person thinks you’re doing. All that back and forth of thought and being able to follow your thought process to define your own thought process, all that was done through hours and hours and hours of seven-card stud.”
Matt married his wife, Molly, in June 2001. Molly grew up in a small town in Connecticut called Haddam Neck, and Matt likes to joke that 10 percent of its population is related to his wife. Because of this, Matt and Molly made the trek from Philadelphia to Haddam Mack often, visiting Molly’s family.
Let’s pause here. Near the end of our interview Matt was talking about his future and his interest in custom mouldings. Even in high-end construction, stock moulding is the norm. But for a nominal amount of money, Matt says, it’s easy to make custom moulding that fits a room. The angle of presentation for moulding can and should vary in a room with an 8-foot ceiling versus a room with a 10-foot ceiling versus a room with a 12-foot ceiling. It’s just that most people don’t realize it.
End pause. Matt and his family are making week-long visits to Haddam Neck several times a year. During one of these visits they see a longtime family friend — Don Boule. Don had a workshop and in it, he was building a sleigh bed.
“It was just one of those things that I had never considered, despite how many museums or houses I had been in,” Matt says. “It just never really occurred to me that you could make these things.”
Up until this point, Matt was stock moulding. He was a good student, who played sports in high school and college, attended Yale University and landed an impressive job at a Philadelphia finance firm. He and Molly were growing their family with kids. He was living the life he had dreamed of, the life everyone thought he would.
But the visit to Don’s shop changed Matt. On the way home to Philadelphia he bought a miter saw. He soon added a router, table saw, jointer, planer, band saw and dust collector. He started making things and then, during his family’s week-long visits to Connecticut, he would spend the week working in Don’s shop, knocking off corners and sanding.
Don favors Dunlap-style furniture. He had made several armed Chippendale chairs, and one of those chairs became Matt’s goal. “Every project that I made as a hobbyist was geared toward being able to make a chair like that with the joinery and the carving and everything else,” Matt says. “It’s funny, because I really like the style, but it’s more that I like making it, I guess, than actually having 24 or 36 ball-and-claw feet around my house. It’s just fascinating to be able to make something that has that level of detail and intricacy. I’m just still fascinated that you can make this stuff by hand.”
Nine of the ball-and-claw feet Matt currently has in his home.
The further Matt got into his hobby, the more he found himself copying — copying grain direction, proportions, curves, carvings, everything. But he couldn’t always copy mouldings. Even though he owned 20-30 router bits, those bits weren’t able to produce everything. And so he’d have to make sacrifices.
Through Larry Williams (who is now a planemaker with Old Street Tools Inc.) Matt became aware of hollows and rounds as a means of being able to make any moulding. Matt bought a half set of antique hollows and rounds, which he tried to tune — but he could never get them working the way he expected them to work.
Then Larry, through Lie-Nielsen, came out with a DVD on making moulding planes. Lie-Nielsen also started producing and selling tapered moulding iron blanks and floats. Something clicked. “Just like I had never really considered making furniture by hand, up until that point I had never considered making moulding planes by hand,” Matt says.
Around this time Matt had major back surgery. “I wasn’t able to lift anything for months and months so I decided to make my own planes because it was a small enough piece that I was able to lift it and work with it,” Matt says. “I made a bunch for myself and the first ones that I made for myself worked better than any antique tool that I had tuned up to that stage.”
During this time Matt was a member of the Montgomery County Woodworkers’ Guild in Pennsylvania. Matt took his planes to a meeting and there he met Chuck Bender (now of 360 Woodworking), who asked Matt if he’d make him some. “I said, ‘Nope. I’m never doing that again. I have mine and I’m not going through that process again.’”
About two years later Matt ran into Chuck at a Woodworking in America Conference in Philadelphia. Again, Chuck asked Matt if he’d make him some planes. This time, things were different. The day before, Matt had quit his job.
“Some people last six months and some people last an entire career,” Matt says about the field of trading and finance. “I lasted 9-1/2 years before I decided that I had enough. I kind of concluded that nobody should feel the way you would sometimes feel at 9:35 in the morning. I enjoyed the arguments. I enjoyed the back and forth and the swings of emotion earlier on but towards the end the good days just weren’t as good as the bad days were bad. So I walked away from that.”
It was 2009 and Matt was going to take a one-month vacation. He and his family were going to do all the things in Philadelphia they never did while living there, before moving to Molly’s hometown, Haddam Neck, Conn.
But Matt never took that vacation. Instead he made planes for Chuck in exchange for carving lessons. “I was never really able to translate the acanthus leaves that I saw in the Philadelphia Museum of Art into my own work and he was running his acanthus workshop at the time so I went up and carved with him in the mornings and then I would go home and work on his planes at night,” Matt says. “Never really got the house ready for sale,” he adds, laughing.
Matt and his family moved to Connecticut, and all the while Matt was trying to figure out what to do with his life. He decided to contact the six people who had reached out to him over the years, asking him if he would make them planes. He contacted them all at once, hoping one would say yes. Five said yes. “I was immediately overextended and much to my parents’ chagrin I stopped looking for a job and started doing this.”
In a world where so many think stock moulding is the only option, Matt recognized the importance of the angle of presentation based on the height of the ceiling in a room. Matt was stock moulding in room with 12-foot ceilings. It wasn’t right.
Seven years later, Matt’s still making planes.
“It is awesome,” he says. “I’m amazed that it’s working out. As is Don, my parents, and everybody involved,” he adds, again, laughing.
Molly, Sheldon, Thaddeus, Roger and Matt Bickford, visiting Lost Art Press in November.
Today Matt, Molly and their three boys, Sheldon (11), Thaddeus (9) and Roger (6) live in Haddam Neck, Conn., on an acre of land with six acres of fields behind it and woods behind that — a far cry from their home in Philadelphia with houses 15 feet from each other. And they know most everyone. “Everybody in town jokes that [the town] is a throwback to the 1950s,” he says. “It’s a great town in that the relationships are cross-generational.”
His wife homeschools their children, which allows the entire family to travel together when Matt teaches plane using and making across the United States. Matt keeps defined shop time — 8 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. on weekdays plus a half day on Saturdays. Often, he’ll tack on another few hours after dinner.
Matt’s shop in Haddam Neck, Conn.
The family’s lifestyle allows for frequent contact, despite Matt’s sometimes long hours. The morning of our interview Matt’s son Thaddeus was in Matt’s shop, making a little handheld crossbow. “I tried to encourage him to make something [with me] so he learns about grain direction and everything else because he had it all backwards and it will break this afternoon,” Matt says. “One of these days he’ll sit down and we’ll go through the process but he’s more interested in making it at this point than learning. He’ll eventually learn through failure.”
Another view of Matt’s shop in Haddam Neck, Conn.
Matt averages two planes a day, although he doesn’t work from beginning to end on two each day. “It doesn’t get tiring,” he says. “I will say that when I started doing this I was concerned of when it would get tiring but I don’t foresee it. … Whether I’ll be doing this for 10 years or 20 years is to be determined, but I’m still fascinated with the tools, I still like making the tools. Every tool that I send out, every one is the best one that I’ve ever made. It’s still pretty neat. I’m fascinated with what the tools can do and I’m fascinated with what people can do with them.”
Matt also is one of the four members of the Haddam Neck Woodworkers’ Guild, which meets any time there’s a fire call or medical call during the middle of the day, because they all also are volunteer firefighters (and the only people in town during the day). They also meet every Tuesday night, and given that they’re all professional woodworkers they make it a rule that on Tuesday nights they can only work on projects for themselves. Matt is currently trying to inspire himself to build a highboy.
In addition to traveling in conjunction with teaching gigs, Matt and his family enjoy skiing. They visit Vermont a lot. Matt swims every morning. He coaches a Little League team, despite never having played baseball in his life. Matt’s oldest son, Sheldon, enjoys shooting so the two go shooting every Friday together. “He’s better than I am, so it’s getting less fun for me,” Matt says, laughing. He wants to make a grandfather clock someday.
Matt published his book, “Mouldings In Practice,” with Lost Art Press in 2012. “I became aware of hollows and rounds as a means to being able to do anything and once the tools are in your shop you soon realize that just because they can do anything doesn’t mean you’re able to do anything,” he says.
An article in Fine Woodworking in the 1980s by Graham Blackburn was one of the only how-to articles Matt remembers reading on the topic. And while Graham starts using a hollow on a square and using a round on a chamfer, Matt uses a round starting with a rabbet and then, being steered by the rabbet, uses the chamfer to guide the hollow. “The hollows and rounds are steered by the rabbets and the chamfers and you get a much more predictable, desirable result,” Matt says. “I’m not really sure how I came up with it. I’ve always just been somebody who learns in their basement and so I never really took any woodworking classes or was involved in reading about it on the internet. I was just somebody who went home and figured stuff out in my basement. My table saw safety probably leaves a little to be desired and the same with some other tools.”
Going back to how he came up with his hollows and rounds method, Matt says “I think I probably did Graham Blackburn’s method, the way he teaches it, and I probably did it backwards one time and maybe just dumbed my way into it.”
Matt began using his method regularly, and then began explaining his method to customers. Don McConnell (a partner planemaker with Larry at Old Street Tool Inc.) came out with a DVD using hollows and rounds in a similar fashion — which to Matt, verified his method.
“Everybody has different methods,” Matt says. But he hopes the way he describes his method simply allows a newcomer to hollows and rounds to produce desirable and repeatable results. “The more somebody uses the process and uses the tool the less I imagine they’ll follow the exact process that I describe in the book just because the more experience you have with the tool, the more adept you become at steering the tool and manipulating the profile the way you want.”
For now, Matt is content making planes and teaching. He has no plans to make furniture for a living, calling it a tough game. But he’s intrigued about the idea of someday working with architects on custom moulding. “Everything is a stock 45°,” he says. “I think for a nominal amount more somebody who is involved in that trade and has customers that are looking to invest [a lot of money] in something, to actually present them with different profiles and show them something truly custom for their house — that would be interesting.”
Which, in many ways, is exactly what Matt did, for himself.
“Live and let live,” he says. “I don’t know what makes you happy more than you know what makes me happy. To grant that permission and freedom to somebody is really what’s important to me.”
Peter Galbert, working at the Lie-Nielsen 2014 Open House in Warren, Maine.
Peter Galbert, author of “Chairmaker’s Notebook,” is widely considered to be one of the finest chairmakers alive today. He’s also a sculptor and painter. And teacher. And writer. He’s an inventor of clever chairmaking tools, which have propelled several prosperous toolmaking businesses. He’s lived in Manhattan, in upstate New York and central Massachusetts, raising goats and chickens, and in Boston. He cooks. He travels (most recently with his partner, renowned landscape architect Stephanie Hubbard, to Baja where they dreamed of another life spent rescuing Mexican street dogs together). Nick Offerman, in his book “Good Clean Fun,” dedicated an entire chapter to him. The man is not yet 50.
And yet, he’ll probably cringe when reading this.
A self-described introvert, Peter says he feels like he’s already received more exposure in life than he should. Fellow woodworkers joke, using the word “hate” when talking about him, which is actually another word for “admire” (tinged with jealousy). For Peter is a rare human — talented, yet approachable. Intelligent, yet unpretentious. And he’s a strong believer in the importance of connecting with others — a belief that stemmed from several isolating stints in high-end furniture and cabinetmaking shops in Manhattan.
But first, the beginning.
Peter was raised in the northern suburbs of Atlanta, before it became the definition of urban sprawl. His neighborhood was surrounded by farmland and plenty of wooded space. “We didn’t have the Internet then, so we played in the creek a lot,” he says. In his immediate family he has a sister and two brothers, but then he mentions a half-sister and says he’s very close to her half-brothers. “When we get together, there is a lot of us,” he says, laughing.
Early on Peter showed an interest in drawing and making things, pursuits his mother always encouraged. It wasn’t the typical teenage comic book art, although he says he imagines he would have enjoyed that. Rather, even at a young age Peter was most interested in depicting things realistically, transposing the world around him.
Peter attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he studied drawing and painting, and did some sculpture work as well. He dropped out for a couple years, worked and travelled, and then enrolled at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, “mainly because I knew I wanted to be a college graduate,” he says. He majored in photography, while continuing his art studies, and graduated in 1995.
Without a broad skill set but an eagerness to learn, Peter moved to New York City. His friends were there and it was the mid-1990s. Things were booming and rent, even in Manhattan, was reasonable. “It was a very positive time to be there,” he says.
Peter landed work in a cabinet shop, but it was physically demanding and mentally isolating. He knew he wanted — needed — something else. He hopped around a few places, even landing a gig with the Smithsonian, building everything from pedestals to grass huts to help display extraordinary artifacts and art. He describes that work as amazing — simply because he was able to be so close to objects he loved — and yet he wanted a more intimate relationship with wood.
By chance Peter noticed a “for rent” sign one day while walking the streets of Manhattan. Inside was a 20’ x 12’ storefront workshop, partly occupied by a guitar maker, Justin Gunn.
“He was so capable of building his whole guitar on simply a benchtop with hand tools and I was so impressed with how organic the process was,” Peter says. “The fact that he took wood and transformed it into something that was quite appreciated for more than just its structural ability or its surface appearance, it was there for its tonal quality, too, and the way that he built it, I was super jealous. I wanted something like that.”
Peter paid $400 a month to share the space with Gunn (who later fell in love with a Dutch woman, moved to Holland and became a musician). Given the space, the fact that he could only use hand tools, and his desire to build something both beautiful and functional, chairs made most sense. And so, Peter became a chairmaker.
Fan Back Side Chair by Peter
Continuous Arm Settee by Peter
Comb Back Rocking Chair by Peter
“Woodworkers are notoriously a romantic lot,” he says. “They pour their heart and soul into it and get pennies out. It’s a very tough, tough business.” Chairs required little overhead. “You can make them essentially for nothing, the materials are almost free they’re so cheap. And then the question was: Could I get the buying public to respond in such a way that I could start to capture back some of my input in the form of their purchase? And then it just became about communication. The more they could understand about why I was committed to doing things the way I was and what I was doing the more they started buying. So I found that education was one of the biggest components to what I was trying to do.”
By 2000, the low-rent-in-Manhattan gig was up. Peter was faced with a choice: rent another workshop way out in Brooklyn and continue to struggle with the lack of materials (trees) or move to the county. Two hours north he found a farmhouse with 50 acres that he could rent for the same amount of money he would have spent on workshop space in Brooklyn.
At first, Peter lived the country life only part time. He and his wife at the time commuted back and forth each weekend. But when his then-wife became fed up with corporate life in New York City, and they recognized the fact that they were never very happy on the return drive each Sunday, they took it as a sign and moved to upstate New York for good.
Peter with his partner, Stephanie Hubbard.
In 2010 Peter moved to central Massachusetts, lived there a couple years, divorced, and lived there for a couple more years. In the last few years he met his partner, Stephanie, and last year he moved to Boston, where she worked and lived.
Peter’s lathe.
Peter’s home workshop in Boston.
Peter’s view from his home storeroom and workbench area.
Despite it being city living Peter has a small yard (where you can find him barbecuing most summer evenings) and there’s a separate garage. He works in a 20’ x 20’ workshop, listening to classical music or operas he can’t understand, or Sherlock Holmes books on tape. The location is ideal, as it’s close to North Bennet Street School, which is where he’s spending most of his teaching hours this year.
Eventually he says he’d like to get back to the country. “I love that life, it’s an amazing life to live, it’s really charmed.” But for now, he’s happy.
When I spoke with Peter he was at the State University of New York at Purchase, where he had been since early October, experimenting with new work thanks to a grant.
“This is way more than I could ever ask for,” he says about life in general. “I can do a lot of what I love doing and like right now, this thing I’m doing in New York, getting paid to explore anything I want to do which is crazy but it’s come my way because of my efforts in chairmaking and writing — people want to see me do creative things.”
One of Peter’s sculptures, a cherry log with an embedded object.
Peter’s residency ended in mid-December. While there he worked mostly on sculptures, carving logs while also splitting them to make it look as if objects were embedded in them. “It’s a fun, interesting way to re-approach the split log,” he says.
He also dabbled in chair work, hoping to develop new methodologies to use at home, and taught three hours a week. His workspace was completely accessible to students all day long. He admitted it was weird at first — he had become quite used to his private hovel, but he says the experience enabled him to break open some long-held habits that weren’t necessarily positive. “It was very inspiring,” he says, when asked about interacting with the students. “They’re very creative and thoughtful people.”
One of Peter’s chairs at the Lie-Nielsen 2014 Open House in Warren, Maine.
“It’s a strange business,” he says. “People want to quantify it somehow. I simply engage the craft. I don’t see myself as a furniture maker. A lot of other things I do now fund what I do. They all complement each other.”
Throughout the years toolmaking also has complemented Peter’s work. “When I first started I had to make a bunch of my own tools,” he says. They weren’t commercially available, they weren’t designed for chairmakers (rather they were being appropriated for the craft) or they weren’t good. “Plus I didn’t have a lot of money so I just started making my own tools because I needed the jobs to get done that I was doing quicker.”
Peter says he also was suspicious of the amount of tools for sale. “In woodworking, they’ll sell you a tool to help you open the doorknob to get to the shop.” He wanted to be closer to the process than simply flipping through a catalog.
Claire Minihan produces the travisher.
Charlie Ryland produces the drill bits.
Tim Manney produces the adze and reamer.
Peter developed a travisher, reamer, adze and drill bits, which he has since handed off to dear friends who have further developed and improved the tools, and now sell them as their own businesses.
Claire Minihan produces and sells the travisher, Tim Manney produces and sells the adze and reamer, and Charlie Ryland produces and sells the drill bits.
The Galbert Caliper provides a constant, accurate reading of a workpiece’s diameter while it’s being cut.
The Galbert Drawsharp is a simple and helpful jig for sharpening drawknives.
Peter also developed a caliper and a sharpening jig for drawknives, which he sells. Next up? Maybe the sightline ruler he writes about in his book. He has an opportunity to do a short run of them — something he’s considering for 2017.
Illustrations from Peter’s book, “Chairmaker’s Notebook”.
While Peter says folks have been overly enthusiastic about his book, writing a tome of that scale (he spent three years hand-drawing more than 500 of the book’s illustrations) was exhausting. And yet, he’s proud of it, and is open to more (smaller) book-writing projects.
When asked to choose a favorite woodworking book, he spoke of the difficulty in that but then mentioned Eric Sloane’s “A Museum of Early American Tools.” “That really was a huge influence; exciting me about what could be made with simple tools,” he says. “My drawings are just sad imitations of what he did. It’s just the most stunningly descriptive book in drawings and that’s what inspired me to draw my book.” Peter says he aspires to Sloane’s economy of means, being able to create textures and visual awareness in simple drawings — in Sloane’s drawings, Peter says it’s easy to differentiate what’s wood, what’s metal, what’s shiny, what’s matte.
When not building chairs or developing tools, or sculpting, painting, teaching, speaking, drawing or writing, Peter says he enjoys Scotch. And visiting museums. And traveling. He and Stephanie have been all over California, Mexico, Toronto and Australia. I asked him for a favorite place. “It’s more about who you’re with than where you’re going,” he says.
For a man who seemingly has everything, what does he want most from life? “Just to continue to develop and share my own interests and abilities,” he says. “At this point I feel so lucky for what I already have that I feel guilty for wishing for more, but I definitely feel that it comes down to tailoring your efforts so they both maximize your joy and then connect with other people through it. Because that’s the one thing I learned early on — when training and observing, the isolation is really intense. And even though I’m an introvert by nature — I need a huge amount of down time in between social encounters — I was really disturbed by how isolating that trade was. One of my biggest priorities now is my connection to Tim, Claire and Charlie, and so many other people I have come to adore. That’s my community, and that’s huge.”
Editor’s note: As we revealed yesterday, we’re excited to announce that Lost Art Press will publish a book on the life and work of the late Welsh chairmaker, John Brown. Here, the author, Chris Williams, shares how he met John Brown in the late 1990s.
— Kara Gebhart Uhl
I never knew his name at the time, other than there was a mythical chairmaker from the western seaboard side of my native homeland of Wales. He made chairs by hand without the aid of electricity and lived in his workshop. In the early 1990s, with some research, I found out that he had written a book called “Welsh Stick Chairs.” It was being sold in a bookshop less than an hour’s drive from me.
I drove to Newport Pembrokeshire to buy a copy of the book. I later learned that the man I had held the door for on entering the bookshop was John Brown. He had just dropped off a box of books for them to sell. The owners were very enthusiastic at my interest in the book, and I was ushered into a side room where they showed me a chair that John had made them.
The book was a revelation to me. It was so informative on this little-known subject and included a photographic chapter that was truly inspiring. I was hooked on the chairs and the author. I read John’s monthly articles in Good Woodworking magazine fervently. His writing was great — nothing of the anorak in his articles. And I thought his take on life was so different than the norm.
My day job as a carpenter and joiner was a varied one, but the chairs were deep in my psyche by now, and I dabbled somewhat with them for a few years. Looking back they were poor. I hadn’t yet been fueled by the Zen-like teachings which were to come.
Several years later my partner, Claire, and I were in Australia and New Zealand on a gap year/working holiday. I enjoyed the change of scenery and meeting new people but something was missing. There is a word in the Welsh language, “Hiraeth,” which loosely translates to a longing, with a sadness, for an absent something — not homesick. By chance I picked up a copy of Fine Woodworking (the Nov./Dec. 1997 issue) in Melbourne in which there was an article on John Brown — a great article. It was at this point that I realized it was time for me to head home to make chairs, and to meet John Brown in person.
It was with some trepidation that I telephoned him. To my surprise, his number was in the phone book. The conversation was a blur — lots of nerves on my side. But it must have gone OK because a few days later I head west to John’s home. I was given clear instructions on the whereabouts of the workshop, but alas I got lost in the wilds of North Pembrokeshire. I eventually found the workshop down a long narrow lane under the shadow of Carn Ingli, which translates to “mountain of the angels.” It was a truly beautiful landscape of small fields with stone-walled boundaries and small wooded valleys meandering down to the Celtic sea — a landscape that obviously inspired John. The undersides of John’s chair seats were embellished with a simple Celtic cross for which the area is famous for.
I was greeted politely but hurriedly by John as he was in the process of gluing up a chair. I watched him work but also took in the hand tools that were everywhere, neatly placed in various racks and shelves. Photos, paintings and poems also adorned the walls of the workshop. I had truly come across a different type of life, at least one in contrast to my conservative Welsh upbringing. It felt more like a home than the cold and soulless workshops that I had spent years in. I felt at home when I was offered a cup of tea. Two pots later, it was it time to leave. I left buzzing after the experience and little did I know then what adventures the next 10 years would bring for both of us. It was far from a happy-ever-after story but one that would change my life profoundly forever.
— Chris Williams
Photo courtesy of Tim Bowen Antiques.Photo courtesy of Tim Bowen Antiques.
