Category: James Krenov: Leave Fingerprints

The following is excerpted from “James Krenov: Leave Fingerprints,” by Brendan Bernhardt Gaffney. After years of research and more than 150 interviews, Gaffney produced the first and definitive biography of Krenov, featuring historical documents, press clippings and hundreds of historical photographs. Gaffney traces Krenov’s life from his birth in a small village in far-flung Russia, to China, Seattle, Alaska, Sweden and finally to Northern California where he founded the College of the Redwoods Fine Woodworking Program (now The Krenov School).

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“I remember my first trip up north,” John began. “In ’24 I took a post as a schoolteacher in a small native village about two hundred miles up the Kuskokwim river. It was a dreary place, and the work was difficult. A teacher in Alaska is a sort of guardian to the natives under his care, being in fact doctor, minister, counsellor and sometimes even policeman. But he must first of all be the natives’ friend. For he can get along only if they trust him, and he in turn tries to understand the strange ways of his charges. There is a peculiar fascination and pride in this sort of work. It grows on one, as does the north itself.”*

*An excerpt from an unpublished short story “The Forgotten Stones,” by James Krenov, written in the late 1940s or early 1950s. Krenov had a habit of interspersing autobiographical details in the short stories he wrote in his 20s and 30s, often switching his name or details for that of his fictional character, as he does here for the character of John.

The Krenovs arrived in Seattle on Oct. 29, 1923, with $100 each, “just enough to be allowed to land,” as Julia notes in her memoir. An immigration document lists their place of residence on arrival as the Commerce Hotel. This inexpensive room in a hotel along First Avenue helped the couple stretch their meager funds. With a short amount of time before their pocketbook would be empty, the two of them set out to find work. Dmitri’s initial job in a factory left him with a finger injury and perhaps a greater wound to his pride; this employment was well below his qualifications as a lawyer. While working or out looking for work, the two left their young son at a daycare; the nurses complained that Krenov refused to nap or eat, and instead “stood on his cot and screamed at the top of his voice.” Julia decided that she had to find employment with a family that would allow her to keep her son with her during the day.

At The Young Women’s Christian Association of Seattle, Julia met a young woman who offered her employment as a live-in nanny and housekeeper, taking care of a young boy the same age as her son. Her pay for this work was only $7 a week, with room and board in the family’s home. Julia served their meals and, only after the family was done eating and out of the house, she would clean up then cook for herself and her son. The young woman’s husband was a traveling salesman selling footstools, and while their home and status was above that of the recently arrived Russian immigrants, they didn’t provide Julia with adequate food for her and her young son; Julia remembered spending most of her salary providing for her and her son’s basic necessities. Over the course of a few months, the young woman slowly lessened Julia’s pay until she and her family left Seattle to live with her parents, apparently broke after the failure of her husband’s business. Their house was repossessed by the bank, and Julia was back to looking for work.

Julia found a second job, this time as a live-in caretaker for a seven-room boarding house for factory workers run by a Norwegian woman. She and her son had no room to themselves, instead sleeping on a sofa in the parlor, only after the workers had finished their card games late in the evening. The environment was bad for a child, Julia thought, but her son was enamored with their Norwegian host. Krenov fell ill during his stay in the boarding house, which Julia blamed on the “horrid lavatories with faulty plumbing and obscene scribblings on the walls.” Krenov recovered from this illness, but Julia was desperate to find another option for the family.

While she was working at the lodging house, Julia met a sea captain in Seattle who made regular visits to Alaska. After hearing about their time in Siberia among the Chukchi people, the captain prompted Julia and Dmitri to seek employment with the Bureau of Education in Alaska. At this time in Seattle, work was short, especially for recent émigrés from Russia, who were arriving in droves; an appointment for permanent employment, especially one that capitalized on their experience from Siberia, was a saving grace for the family. After visiting Mr. W. T. Lopp, the chief of the Bureau of Education, Alaska Division, and taking a short class in nursing, the Krenovs received an appointment from Washington to an outpost in Sleetmute, a small settlement in the interior of Alaska several hundred miles up the Kuskokwim River. Dmitri and Julia were hired as representatives of the United States government in the small village, and Julia became the sole schoolteacher of the village. The pay and conditions were marginally better than those they had lived through in Seattle, but the family was together, having been separated during Julia’s work as a nanny and boarding house caretaker, and Dmitri and Julia were able to use some of their advanced education in service of the natives.

In the summer of 1924, Dmitri, Julia and their young son sailed up the Pacific coast to Bethel on the Caroline Frances, an old schooner operated by Captain Worth, who became Jim’s friend during the journey. The Captain entertained the toddler on the bridge, showing him the navigational charts and compasses. Already, Krenov was showing an interest in boats and sailing, one that took root and grew over the course of his childhood.

At Bethel, a large settlement and trading post at the mouth of the Kuskokwim River, the Krenovs switched from the schooner to the “prehistoric flat-bottomed boat ‘Tana’ with an enormous wheel instead of a propeller,” as Krenov notes in his later writings. After a month sailing up the coast, they were now sailing up the river on a delivery boat, which stopped along the way to deliver cargo and trade at the villages on the banks of the river.

“To take Jim to the North from China was a crime,” Julia wrote in her memoir. “But so was life in Seattle in the homes of strangers. We had to survive somehow, seize the opportunity offered, risky as it may be, make the best of it. Adventurers like myself had no right to have children.”

When the family arrived in Sleetmute in 1924, what they found was nothing like Uelen and the Chukchi, with whom Julia had found comfort and camaraderie. Sleetmute had been established as a trading post with the Yupik natives by early Russian settlers in the 1830s to trade for furs and locally mined whetstones and ore. In the century since its founding, the indigenous people in this area had traded much of their traditional homes, clothing and food for that of the traders and settlers, which were ill-suited to the region’s harsh climate.

“The warm igloos were replaced by poorly-built drafty log cabins,” Julia noted. “Instead of fur parkas and moccasins, they wore imported out-of-fashion coats made of cheap cloth, calico dresses and high-heel shoes.”

With those changes and exposure to the European settlers came tuberculosis. Of the 25 families in the village, Julia remembered only one older man who had never shown signs of the lung hemorrhages associated with the illness. In their first spring in Sleetmute, the entire population also suffered from influenza, and the family’s sole occupations were fetching water, cutting firewood and tending to the sick. Julia also cared for a young boy with meningitis in the same season. The illnesses were a seasonal occurrence, and though she had attended nursing classes in preparation for their assignment in Alaska, Julia was overwhelmed by the work. Her treatments were also subject to some scrutiny by the native people. That same spring, upon the outbreak of influenza and the case of meningitis, a local shaman arrived, but only after Julia had started the boy’s treatment with western medicine. The shaman refused to treat the boy, “once the white woman had been at the boy’s bedside,” and the 5-year-old died of his infection. By Julia’s account, the mournful parents had shown little faith in either the shaman or the Western medicine offered; their unfortunate position between the two cultures had left them without a comfortable place in either.

Sleetmute was not only set upon by the trials of “acculturation” and illness but also by natural disasters. The Kuskokwim river flooded its banks in the Krenovs’ second spring, due to a dam caused by an ice jam downstream from the village. For 48 hours, the villagers who had been in the town when the flood began had to float in an improvised raft. The flood killed one child and devastated the village’s buildings, having risen well above the windows of the poorly built structures; it took months to rebuild and rehabilitate.

The next year, a forest fire sparked by a forager’s careless bonfire upstream threatened the town’s existence. Sleetmute’s residents managed to save the town by digging trenches and using buckets of water to douse the flames that leapt from the pines and firs surrounding the town, but Julia remembers several weeks of uneasy sleep in the wake of the fire.

Julia’s main occupation at the village, when she was not functioning as an impromptu nurse and caretaker, was as a teacher in the one-room log schoolhouse. Though determined at her post, she was discouraged by the listless and inert pupils in her charge. After school, Julia made her rounds to the households of the village, caring for any of the sick and checking in with the families. Her presence was appreciated by the oft-unwell villagers whom she joined for tea, sitting on the floors of their log cabins.

Julia also took to recording and translating the stories of the people of Sleetmute, befriending an older Russian-speaking woman, Palageya Adrianova, whose family had settled in the village when Alaska was still a holding of Russia. It was Palageya who, at a young age, had been given the privilege of lowering the Russian flag at the settlement when Alaska was purchased by the United States from Russian in 1867, nearly 60 years earlier. The old woman spoke an old dialect of Russian alongside the local native language, and was able to share these old stories with Julia, which included creation myths, stories of famed chiefs and shamans, fables and local lore. These legends came to form a significant presence in her young son’s mind; later in his life, Krenov recalled these legends as an important part of his mystic considerations of the natural world around him.

James Krenov, the well-known furniture maker born in Russia, author of the hugely influential “A Cabinetmaker’s Notebook,” for 21 years the lead instructor of what is now the Krenov School in Fort Bragg, Calif., and who died at 88 in 2009, was not always revered. When my late wife, Carolyn Grew-Sheridan, and I met with him in 1974, in a suburb outside Stockholm, Sweden, he had been rejected for a teaching position at the School for American Crafts at the Rochester Institute of Technology and thought himself to be in exile. His wife, a native of Sweden, was supporting them as a high school teacher of economics. His professional world was a tiny basement with small machines and a bench where he made his signature handplanes.

While cleaning out several old boxes, I recently found notes from our trip to Scandinavia. Carolyn and I had taken a six-week backpacking and youth hosteling trip to visit woodworkers, museums and schools there. We had just finished a 14-month apprenticeship with Karl Seemuller and Andy Willner at the Peters Valley School of Crafts in New Jersey. Arrangements for that placement, which saved us huge tuition bills, had been made by Dan Jackson, a creative genius who died far too early.

On May 15, 1974, I wrote the following short notes without the benefit of a tape recorder:

A four-and-a-half-hour visit to a meticulously maintained shop. A chance to hear master cabinetmaker, James Krenov, formerly of Seattle, talk about wood, furniture and, most importantly, people. We made the appointment on the recommendation of the editor of FORM magazine, Kirstin Wickman.

I wrote that “he lives in a pleasant house 25 minutes outside the city. Huge high-rise complexes built for the commuter rail line surround his detached house and others in the area, but the overall feeling in May is of light and sunshine. He met us at the train and immediately showed himself to be on the defensive. He asked me why I was wearing hiking boots, ‘those heavy things.’ Well, I didn’t want to tell him that I used to own a pair of shoes like his Wallabies, but they hurt my feet. So I just said that my boots were comfortable for our traveling.

“This short, strong, grey-haired man then led us toward his house while our attempts to make conversation failed. But that didn’t stop him from talking. It simply meant that there was no exchange, at least for a while, until things warmed up. We were offered the hospitality of cake and coffee and a tour of his workshop. We found his basement space to be immaculate, with perfectly sharpened tools and handmade planes. Everything was in its assigned place. He had a few of his pieces there, including a clock with one hand.

“Krenov appeared to Carolyn and me to be working on a delicate scale with discipline and consistency. He made only minimal, preliminary sketches and did not believe that woodworkers have to know how to draw.

His opinion was that “they can respond to the wood. Too many students get lost in their drawings and find themselves only able to think on paper.”

During our conversations he apologized for his being antagonistic, but said that he didn’t know how people felt about him, or his methods and style of work. He was tired of being a curiosity. He was defensive. We heard (and he confirmed) that in Scandinavia young people were not interested in training to be cabinetmakers. New companies like IKEA were being created. (We brought home as a souvenir the first IKEA catalog). He felt that he himself needed only simple tools and machinery. He loved and treasured his wood collection.

He was not accepted for a teaching position at the School for American Crafts at RIT after teaching and auditioning there. He came to the conclusion that the school drove out the sensitive students, was trying to be everything to everyone and, as a result, was not serving its purpose. The curriculum was not congruent with his philosophy and techniques.

He was critical of other prominent furniture makers and not content within his own work. Krenov singled out Art Espenet Carpenter, founder of the Baulines Guild in the California Bay Area. “Beauty doesn’t come by the pound,” he said. In addition, I noted that he called Carpenter’s work “amateur dabbling” and regretted that Carpenter had been such a big influence on the West Coast.

He felt that Wendell Castle, also teaching at Rochester and who was becoming a towering presence in sculpture and woodworking, was ignorant about wood as a material and a bad teacher. “Castle made too many Wendell Castles,” he said. He emphasized that when teaching at RIT he wouldn’t even grade some of the student projects that were Castle-influenced. He accepted Castle as a sculptor but he thought that he was not responsive to the wood itself and that he should be working in another medium. This was in reference to Castle’s stack-laminated and carved work. (Krenov was unaware that Castle received an MFA in cast bronze sculpture.)

He was fond of my informal mentor at the Philadelphia University of the Arts, Dan Jackson. He thought that Jackson had a lot of sensitivity and ability. At the same time he said that the school encouraged too much originality and “razzmatazz.”

When talking about his own work he mentioned the importance of achieving “the singing drawer” in a cabinet. The fit of the drawer in the finished cabinet. He thought this was a crucial quality that needed be discussed and understood. For him a completed piece has to be good from every side and should not contain plywood. For a woodworker the “joy is in taking a piece completely through each step,” in contrast to industrial line production where the employee has to do the same thing over and over.

He thought that the quality of tools in Europe and the United States was declining (this was in the early 1970s) so he recommended Japanese saws, which were then new to us. In addition, he had a collection of older tools and plane irons. The specialty tool makers that we know today did not exist then.

It was his experience after being in many shows that in Scandinavia those awarding commissions did not often think of ordering a cabinet for a specific space. Usually such work went to weavers or painters. However, Krenov felt that in the United States a buying public for works in wood could be developed if the buyer was able to appreciate the cost of the time in the work.

For someone whose worldwide fame was still in front of him, but very close, we noticed how worried he was about how much longer he would be able to work. He worried about his strength and alertness, even though he was only 53 when we met him.

Unfortunately, we took no pictures of our visit with James Krenov. In the months that followed we finished our second summer as assistants in the Peters Valley wood studio At the same time, Carolyn, who had worked for three years after college as a book editor, attempted to organize Krenov’s thoughts and notes into a publishable format. Eventually she sent her files back to Krenov, who found a publisher for his best-selling “A Cabinetmaker’s Notebook.” We started our Grew-Sheridan Studio in San Francisco. It seemed to us to be the cheapest city in the country in which to find working space. There was no “tech.”

Some notable Krenov quotes from the visit:

“Americans want to design a piece on Tuesday and have it ready on Saturday.”

“They want originality. There is none.”

“Craftsmanship has its own justification”.

“Craft must be able to offer something that factories cannot.”

“It is a fallacy to say that a craftsman can make a better joint than a factory.”

“There is a need to explore questions of value and aesthetics.”

“I enjoy teaching.”

“I don’t feel that the best craftsmen will survive but the most aggressive will.”

“I don’t like curves that are just part of a circle. Too boring.”

“Asymmetrical work should be subtle not forceful.”

“No tool is a magic key.”

We had been traveling to see “Scandinavian Design.” Krenov thought it was “living on its past laurels.” IKEA was just getting started. The future of studio furniture making was in the United States.

— John Sheridan

“James Krenov: Leave Fingerprints,” the biography of James Krenov by Brendan Bernhardt Gaffney, is available here.

One of the first furniture images in “James Krenov: Leave Fingerprints” – Brendan Gaffney’s biography of a 20th century woodworking icon – is the “Pagoda Cabinet” that Krenov built in 1971 from European cherry. David Welter, a student of Krenov’s then a long-time faculty member at the school he founded (now called the Krenov School), chose it to showcase in his foreword for the book because it’s one of his favorite furniture pieces.

The Pagoda Cabinet, which remained in Sweden for 50 years, was recently acquired by a former student of the Krenov School, who turned it over to Welter for cleaning and conservation. In June 2022, Welter gave a talk to the school on the cabinet and his process. Watch it below, courtesy of the Krenov Foundation.

The following is excerpted from “James Krenov: Leave Fingerprints.”

James Krenov (1920-2009) was one of the most influential woodworking writers, instructors and designers of the 20th century. His best-selling books – starting with “A Cabinetmaker’s Notebook” – inspired tens of thousands of people to pick up the tools and build things to the highest standard.

Yet, little is known about his life, except for a few details mentioned in his books.

After years of research and more than 150 interviews, Brendan Bernhardt Gaffney has produced the first and definitive biography of Krenov, featuring historical documents, press clippings and hundreds of historical photographs. Gaffney traces Krenov’s life from his birth in a small village in far-flung Russia, to China, Seattle, Alaska, Sweden and finally to Northern California where he founded the College of the Redwoods Fine Woodworking Program (now The Krenov School).

“James Krenov: Leave Fingerprints” brims with the details of Krenov’s life that, until now, were known only to close friends and family.

In the fall of 1981, 22 students arrived at the new building at the end of Alger Street in Fort Bragg to begin the first year of The College of the Redwoods Fine Woodworking Program. The small shop was equipped with all of the elements Hoke and Kavanaugh had procured to Krenov’s specifications. The northern end of the building housed a wood room with two bays (one for exotic woods and one for locally sourced lumber), a small office, a supply room, a bay of lockers that would be swapped out for a small kitchenette after the first two years, two bathrooms and a neutral entry space that housed a table for informal lunches and the school’s library of craft books. In the middle of the building was the heart of the school, a large bench room, outfitted with 22 new cabinets, stools, bench lights and workbenches. Through the back doors on the eastern side of the bench room was a small field that backed up onto a bluff overlooking Pudding Creek; out of the front doors on the western side was a small yard, in which a volleyball court would soon be installed. Through double doors at the southern end of the bench room was the machine room, housing a number of new machines: a drill press, an 18″ planer, a large jointer, band saws, mortisers and table saws. These were joined by a few of Krenov’s machines from his basement workshop in Bromma: a small planer, jointer, band saw and combination table saw/mortiser.

The school’s layout and arrangement would hardly change in the coming decades. A small outbuilding for storing air-dried planks and a small finishing and storage room attached to the southern end of the building would be the only significant additions to the building’s footprint through the years. The environment built out in that first year remained almost unchanged over the next four decades, visiting alumni often remarking on the time capsule-like quality of the space.

Down the eastern and western sides of the bench room, carefully placed windows and skylights allowed a flood of natural light, raised above the level of the tool cabinets and out of a direct line that would cause unwanted glare. Each source of natural light was outfitted with a shade that could be drawn to cover the window, allowing for slide presentations and more controlled lighting when work was exhibited and photographed. At the front of the bench room, just inside the main entrance, was the teacher’s bench, where Michael Burns, Crispin Hollinshead, Robert Lasso and Krenov would begin lecturing and teaching.

The first cohort to attend the school came from a variety of backgrounds. Some, like Paul Reiber, were local craftspeople, thrilled at the prospect of an affordable education in fine woodworking, not necessarily drawn to the program by Krenov’s presence. Others, like Hoke, had upended their lives to come to study with Krenov on the remote Mendocino coast, and many had been excitedly awaiting the program’s opening. There was an overwhelming feeling among the first class that they were a pioneering group, entering at the ground floor of what was, by all accounts, a new kind of woodworking program. Nationally, the school was novel in its affordability, being a community college education. Furthermore, Krenov’s name and reputation would be a unique draw for the school, one that would save another key expense in opening such a program: advertising. Krenov’s presence would prove to be enough to attract a wide audience, augmented in part by the thriving local craft scene and the craftspeople relocating to the area. Furthermore, the program was affordable. For California residents, the program cost $100 for the two-semester program; for out-of-state attendees, the program was just more than $3,000, well less than the tuition of established programs elsewhere.

In addition to its affordability and high standards, there was also the emphasis on Krenov’s “quiet expression and enjoyment and sensitivity,” as he told a reporter covering the new program. That emphasis was different from other schools. It was more concerned with personal pursuit and enrichment, and acknowledged that it was not strictly vocational training for professionals. While there was an air of excitement and novelty in the introductory year, it was attenuated by the consideration that the school’s faculty and students were still gaining their footing. Hoke, Burns, Hollinshead and Lasso were learning Krenov’s process and peculiarities. There was little disagreement among the faculty about Krenov’s work and philosophy, but each of the faculty members was still learning how to interact with Krenov as a colleague. Krenov could inspire and raise the spirits of a student doing his or her best work, but it was often the other instructors who would bolster those students struggling with the high standards put forth by Krenov’s demanding eye and approach. Krenov made no attempt to disguise his judgment of the choices made by students, and encouraged them to pursue the same rigorous and uncompromising goals he had set for himself.

“A woodworker first must learn the alphabet,” Krenov told the Sacramento Bee in 1986, speaking about his prescribed steps in beginning a woodworking practice. “Then a little spelling, then a little grammar. Then maybe you will write a little poetry.” Krenov was wary of some students’ desire to move too quickly, or to begin exploring less conservative or traditional approaches. To temper this overextension, the first projects were limited in scope; they had to be “simple, small, solid (not veneered) and ‘sweet.’”
Students who arrived with the aim of studying with Krenov had a wide variety of impressions of the man they met. Those with the most idealistic impression of Krenov’s philosophy were often surprised by Krenov’s forceful emphasis on technique and an unwillingness to compromise his standards when applied to student work. In the environment of the Mendocino coast, which proffered an egalitarian philosophy of inclusion, Krenov’s teaching style might have been perceived as an older and more “top-down” approach. Of course, the school had been built around his presence, and he was explicitly placed as the lead instructor and lecturer at the school.

“Some of them clearly had difficulty dealing with Krenov’s sometimes temperamental nature, especially after having formed an image of him based on his writings,” wrote Paul Bertorelli in his 1983 comparison of Krenov’s and Wendell Castle’s different teaching approaches for Fine Woodworking. “‘I think we all went in expecting a guru of woodworking,’ [Ken] Walker said, ‘but we found Jim to be a real person with all the same problems, conflicts and idiosyncrasies as the rest of us.’”

Michael Burns became a source of encouragement for students who had difficulties with Krenov’s critique; while Burns held a high standard and perception of the work the students could attain, he also took on a role of mediator and motivator. When a student encountered resistance or a negative critique of their work from Krenov, Burns often invited them out to the back of the school for encouragement or a beer.

“Most of his students, once past the first terrors of His Judgments, just call him Jim,” Glenn Gordon wrote in his 1985 profile of Krenov and the school for Fine Woodworking. Those who were able to endure Krenov’s demanding standards and frankness in feedback were rewarded by his talents as a lecturer and his “ability to enable students to do their best,” as one alumnus of the school remembers. Many students from the first years encountered a sensitivity and passion in his teaching that bolstered and raised their own considerations of what they could accomplish. In Krenov, they saw the spirited and impassioned craftsperson from the books, no less idealistic in person. Many came with the expectation to work in concert with Krenov’s philosophy and approach, and accepted a narrower focus of aesthetics and processes closely aligned with Krenov. Krenov did not demand that students emulate his exact aesthetic; in fact, he was often most critical or demanding of students who reproduced his designs, which rarely met his standards.

“If you’re going to do something that someone else has done, because you really like it, then maybe the best thing to do is not to tinker with it too much and start from scratch instead,” Krenov would later say in a 1994 lecture. “Just say, well, okay, I’ve got this thing in the back of my head, but what I’m gonna do is going to be different enough, and good enough, to where it will stand on its own and it’s not just a bad imitation.”