Inspecting an antique chair at St Fagans National Museum of History.
I’ve known Chris Williams for a few years, and I now feel we are destined to have our lives intertwined for the rest of my days. There simply isn’t anyone else who thinks about chairs in the the way I do. And when I say chairs, I mean Welsh chairs.
I don’t know if I have any real Welsh in my blood. My latest Ancestry.com profile says 22 percent of my DNA is from England, Wales and nearby. While that’s something, I do know that Welsh chairs are etched in my brain.
When I pulled up to Chris’s tidy home in Llanybri late Tuesday I night, I hugged him, and we talked about chairs until midnight. When I left Saturday morning, our last words (before a warning about a tricky turn on my trip) were about chairs.
And the rest of the time in the middle was all about chairs as well.
Chris Williams points out an armbow growing in a tree.
During my visit, Chris was building a chair in his garage, sneaking off at odd hours to fashion its sticks. Plus, he had two recently completed chairs in the guest room. One was a new design he has been working on (follow him on Instagram if you want see its development) and the other was for his book “The Life & Work of John Brown.”
All three are markedly different. So we spent hours (apologies to Chris’s wife, Claire) talking about the details down to the facets, grain lines and fibers.
While we were muddling minutiae, Chris would stop and exclaim: “You couldn’t say something like that in front of John Brown. He’d tell you to (expletive deleted). He was all about the form.”
Like naughty schoolboys, we did it anyway. Apologies to the memory of John Brown.
I’m sitting at Pantry Fields, the homestead where John Brown wrote “Welsh Stick Chairs,” in a massive chair that was built by John Brown. And I’m surrounded by JB’s family and friends, who generously allowed me into their world on Tuesday for a chat and a delicious bowl of cawl.
It’s a scene I could have never even imagined when I purchased a copy of “Welsh Stick Chairs” in the 1990s – a book that changed the course of my life as a woodworker. Across the table from me is Annie Seymour, JB’s ex-wife and potter. To my left is Molly Brown, one of JB’s daughters and an illustrator, and David Sears, Annie’s husband, woodworker, brewer and long-time companion to JB. To my right is Chris Williams, who had brought us all together.
I was in such a shock that I barely spoke for the first hour. Two things restored my tongue.
The first was Pantry Fields itself. Though I was thousands of miles away from the wilds of Arkansas, the environment felt familiar. Like my family and our farm, the people sitting around this oak table had built Pantry Fields from nothing using the materials around them – railroad ties, recycled windows and even two railway carriages.
The second thing was the wooden item in the image at the top of this blog entry. David Sears laid it on the table and explained.
It was a plug for a peephole that John Brown had used. When he heard someone pull up in a car, JB would remove the plug and peer out to see who it was in order to decide if he would answer the door or not. JB had drawn an eye on the end of the plug, which was a delicious touch to a quirky story that explained a lot about the man. I couldn’t help but laugh.
Pantry Fields, as always, is a work in progress. Annie and David are expanding and improving the buildings. There’s a gallery filled with beautiful pottery, furniture, books and prints. Even an ersatz and delightful bar that David has built. It seems as if something is brewing (and not just David’s beer).
This was just 10 minutes of my first journey to Wales, a five-day trip that has been a visual and visceral tsunami. I hardly know where to begin writing about it.
In some small way I feel a bit like like JB, deep in the workshop and looking out through a peephole at the world. And wondering what is coming down the drive in my direction.
I am particularly pleased to tell you that Chris Williams will travel from Wales to the Lost Art Press storefront in Covington, Ky., on May 20-24, 2019, to teach his class on building Welsh stick chairs.
Chris worked with John Brown in Wales for many years, refining the design of this chair while cranking out hundreds of them to sell. I know of no one else alive who knows more about building these chairs than Chris.
After assisting in his class last year, I can say that his approach to making these chairs is remarkable. Chris seeks to teach students how to make these chairs with a minimum of jigs and just a small set of tools. You don’t need a shavehorse, and most of the work is with handplanes.
And because of Chris’s long friendship with John Brown (who passed away 10 years ago) you can almost hear John Brown’s voice in the lessons – “think round,” “think flat” and “I don’t give a monkey’s….” In addition to the lessons in woodworking, Chris is keen on explaining John Brown’s world – how JB approached the craft, embraced handwork and broached no compromise.
Most of all, however, students walk away with one beautiful chair. These chairs are incredibly comfortable, roomy and stout. And this chair is what launched me on my chairmaking journey more than 15 years ago and remains my obsession.
Because of the intense nature of this class, we request that students in the class have built at least one chair before attending. The class can be demanding at times. Your tools need to be sharp and ready to go. This is not a beginner’s course.
For full details on the class, go to our registration page. Registration opens at 10 a.m. Eastern on Oct. 12. There will be only six students, and I’ll be assisting Chris again, so there will be lots of personal attention throughout the week.
I am pleased to announce that Molly Brown, one of John Brown’s daughters, will be creating many of the key illustrations in the upcoming book “The Life & Work of John Brown” by Christopher Williams.
Molly specializes in linocut illustrations, a process that is particularly well-suited to show off the graphic forms of Welsh stick chairs. Linocuts are similar to woodblock printing in that the image is drawn on a piece of linoleum and the background is carved away. Then the image is inked and pressed into the paper.
This week, Molly showed us one of her initial prints. Chris and I are very pleased.
Our plan is to have Molly provide the construction illustrations for the book. That might sound odd if you are used to reading CAD-generated drawings. But computer-created illustrations with precise measurements are the exact opposite of what John Brown liked, as he explained clearly in “Welsh Stick Chairs.”
John Brown thought every chair should be an individual, and we wanted the illustrations in this new book to reflect that.
In addition to the technical drawings, Molly will create spot illustrations that will be used throughout the book, such as tools and details of the chair. Recently, she visited Chris in his workshop in Wales to see his chairs, look over columns written by her father and get acquainted with the project.
Molly plans to show more of the process of making the prints for her book on her Instagram feed. You can follow her here if you’d like to watch the process. If you’d like to see some of her delightful non-chair prints, you can visit her website here.
Chris is working on a new chair design these days, and if you haven’t followed him on Instagram, remedy that here.
We are fast closing in on the publication date of the classic book “Welsh Stick Chairs” by John Brown. This compact book has had a profound effect on woodworkers and designers all over the world. It is the story of a chair that no one had a good name for. And how that chair changed the life of John Brown.
It’s impossible to capture the essence of the book in one blog entry – it’s part history lesson, part autobiography and part practical manual. But the following passage is one of my favorites.
“Welsh Stick Chairs” is available for pre-publication order now in our store. It’s $29, which includes domestic shipping. Full details on our quality edition can be found here.
— Christopher Schwarz
One day I saw a chair in the window of an antique shop in Lampeter. It was like a vision. I had never seen anything that had made so instant an impression on me. To my eyes this chair was beautiful. I had never had any interest in furniture or chairs. Like most people they were just the things you lived with. Now here was this lovely chair. I couldn’t afford to buy it, but I could make one like it. Well, that is what I did. I made one. It took a long time. Chairs of simple form like the stick chair are surprisingly tricky to make. When you’re building them you have to work from points in the air, angles of sticks, angles of legs; there are so many variables. Anyway, I was quite proud when I finished my chair. It looked alright. Of course, I wasn’t able to put a century or two of patina on it. Now, twelve-years-old, it begins to look right. Family “treatment” and a few thousand hours of bum polishing have done the trick!
At this stage I was interested enough to look for books on the subject. There are quite a few, both American and English. I still hadn’t realised that what I had seen in that Lampeter shop was something quite rare and unique – a Welsh chair. Then it was just a Windsor chair. I went to museums. I visited High Wycombe where there is a museum devoted entirely to Windsor chairs. They have a very comprehensive selection of Wycombe factory chairs and English regional chairs. I don’t think there were any Welsh chairs. The English chairs did not have the same spontaneity the same verve as their Welsh counterparts.
I enjoyed my youth. After the valleys I thought England was wonderful. The war started and we could not live in London, and through a series of events of which I have no knowledge, we ended up with a small-holding in the wilds of Kent. (There were wilds in Kent in those days!) We had no electricity, gas or sanitation, we grew much of our own food and kept chickens and a pig. We didn’t realise it then, but we were living the ‘Good Life’. We made few demands on the world’s resources, and I was happy. So, as the Lampeter chair was one step towards my rehabilitation, the building of a tin shed in a field I bought, and a change to the simple life, completed my return. I live very happily without electricity or any other services. I have a workshop, a wood stove and good health. There’s a saying applied to yachts, which applies equally to life, “Add lightness – and simplify.”
A neighbour asked me to build him a chair like mine. I tried to – but it came out different. It was alright, but it wasn’t the same chair. My neighbour was pleased. He has the chair now, he keeps it in the bookshop he owns. It then occurred to me that the reason for the diversity of pattern in the old Welsh chairs was that the makers did other things as well. They were not chair-makers as such, they were wheelwrights, coffin-makers, carpenters, even farmers. When there was need for a chair, somebody in the village made it, or they made their own. They didn’t have patterns and jigs for continuous production. They had no consistent supply of uniform material. They used their eyes and their experience. It was like a sculptor doing his work, they ‘thought’ the chair, then they built their ‘think’. Some of these chairs are a disaster to sit on, most uncomfortable, but they all have a kind of primitive beauty.