My good friend Rudy Everts has just released a short run of handmade prints of a Welsh lowback stick chair by a roaring fire. Rudy is selling them for €50 and ships worldwide.
In addition to being a talented chairmaker, Rudy is also a musician, sculptor and wood engraver. For the last few years, Rudy has focused on his woodblock prints, which remind me of the work of Wharton Esherick.
Rudy showed me this print as he was working on it, and I have been waiting for months him to get this particular print complete so that I could buy one (I ordered mine yesterday). The print itself measures 2” x 3-1/4” and is on a sheet of Simili Japon paper that measures 6.3” x 9.4”. It’s going to look great in my office here at Lost Art Press.
If you like supporting artists who make affordable, handmade things, here’s an excellent one. In addition to this print, Rudy also has other nice woodblock prints for sale in his store.
This fall, we will hold a chairmaking class at Lost Art Press the likes of which I’ve never seen. Six students will be taught by three instructors – Rudy Everts, Klaus Skrudland and me – in a way that will allow students to explore stick chairs on their own terms.
Students will design and make stick chairs using a full range of methods available today, from entirely hand-powered all the way up to full-on electrified. (To be fair, we cannot offer the full gamut of techniques. We don’t have a CNC router, and we will not teach cutting tenons with buck teeth.)
Three chairs by Rudy Everts.
Put another way, we will help you develop a stick chair of your own design using the library of templates at our shop or new shapes. Then you can build the chair using the techniques that you want to learn. Want to split out your parts with a froe and shape them with an ax? Rudy and Klaus have you covered. Want to use a band saw to speed things along? Klaus or Chris will help. Want to batch process hundreds of legs for a production run? Chris will show you how.
Want to learn lathe work? We have you covered. Shaving with a drawknife and spokeshave? Yup. Saddling with an angle grinder? Adze? Scorp? Travisher? Yes, yes and yes. If we know it, we will show you how to do it.
The class should be a bit chaotic, intense and exhausting. Oh, and it will be Rated PG-13. If you have ever read Chair Chat™, then you know that salty potatoes are always on the menu. I also suspect it will be the most fun you’ve ever had while woodworking. Klaus and Rudy are both insanely talented and hilarious. Plus I know lots of jokes about the Tax Act of 1894.
An Irish-y chair by Klaus Skrudland.
If you are interested, here are the details. The class will be held Oct. 10-14 at the Lost Art Press storefront in Covington, Ky. The tuition will be $1,300 per student plus materials (you can bring your own or we can provide them for a fee).
We have room for six students. You must be fully vaccinated against COVID to attend (this building is my home and my business). To make things as equitable as possible, we will fill those six slots via a random drawing. In July, we will open up registration for the class. After registration closes, we will select six students at random. We will post more details about the drawing and the class in the coming months.
But for now, just make sure that you don’t schedule any elective surgeries, weddings or “me time” for that week in October.
Klaus, Rudy and I are very excited about this class. I hope you will consider joining us.
Editor’s note: This chair chat is a work in progress, and we need your help to finish it. We have a beautiful chair but only had two minutes to talk because Chris had to go to the bathroom (number two).
We ask you readers to finish this Chair Chat in the comments. Please keep it civil but also don’t hesitate to post something funny, we all like to laugh.
You don’t see a disclaimer here that salty language will follow – because we didn’t get around to any yet. Feel free to add some.
Chris: Hi guys, let’s do one last very short chat as I have to make a poo.
Rudy: No worries, how about this beauty:
Klaus: Wow, look at that chair. Such a nice stance!
Rudy: I agree, it is very beautiful!
Chris: It is so beautiful that I want to sleep with it.
In our 21st Chair Chat™ with Klaus Skrudland and Rudy Everts, we discuss a primitive stick chair that looks so uncomfortable it would best be used to interrogate spies. As usual, the language is on the salty side. Then again, a chair like this needs a rich vocabulary to be discussed properly. As always, if this kind of entertainment does not suit you, maybe you’ll like this endless horse better.
Editor’s note: After a brief unseasoned interlude, Chair Chat is now back on its high-sodium diet. Please do not read on below if you are allergic to salty potatoes or salty language. Today on the menu is a chair from a museum, served with ocean potatoesand meatballs.
