Caleb Rogers lives in a spot that, while enviable at any time, seems especially so in the midst of a pandemic: a cabin of around 500 square feet, close to California’s Joshua Tree National Park. From his desert home he can see just three houses within a space of many miles, and of those three, two are abandoned.
He mentions his surroundings by way of illustrating why, beyond what he calls his addiction to the news, the pandemic has not affected him much. He sees his cat and does his work. Once or twice a week he drives to town to buy food, puts on a mask to go into the store and goes home. Once or twice a month, when making deliveries, he gets a glimpse of how the pandemic is affecting other people. He drives to Los Angeles to deliver a piece and sees the lines at the supermarket, “a line of 40 people waiting to get into Trader Joe’s, wearing their masks, and everyone’s on edge. We just don’t have that here [in Joshua Tree]. We have the wind. That’s the movement we have here. I feel like a tourist when I go into the city and have a peek at the way people are living. And all the shops that are closing! Rodeo Drive! I was in awe of all the boarded-up shop fronts. The city is really taking a hit. People seem to be so divided. Thank goodness I’m still working, I still have jobs. I’m really grateful.”
Born in 1974 on a small horse ranch near Albuquerque, New Mexico, Caleb grew up moving around a lot. His parents separated when he was 4. Because his mother, a writer, has always been “a bit of a gypsy,” Caleb and his sister often found themselves in a new school.
Sometimes they moved far afield. “What I remember about growing up,” he reflects, “was living in England. That was the first time I felt settled, the first time I recall seeing my mother happy where she was.” His mother had taken the family there for a holiday, then stayed four years, from the time Caleb was 10 to age 14. It was the longest time he’d spent living in a single place.
Caleb (right) with his sister and mother, probably at his grandmother’s country house in Chappaqua, New York, circa 1980.
His mother’s love of travel rubbed off on him, and his own love of travel has had a deep influence on his work. By the time Caleb took up woodworking in his early 30s, he’d left junior college and hiked 500 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail, moved to Guadalajara and hitchhiked to Guatemala. There he met a young woman from England. Smitten, he followed her back to London and eventually on to the cathedral city of Winchester.
As a practicing Buddhist, Caleb’s girlfriend had a butsudan, or Buddhist altar, in their home. Butsudans come in a variety of forms, from simple raised platforms to elaborately decorated cabinets. Despite its significance to its owner, the cheaply made object puzzled Caleb, who “thought it needed to be replaced….”
“It was more of a personal aesthetic,” he says – an aesthetic informed by the conviction that a piece’s form should express the values or ideals it represents. Inside the altar is a scroll that symbolizes the soul; it’s a focal point for meditation. “But her butsudan was particleboard veneered with walnut!” he explains. “Sweetheart,” he told her, “I get the practice, but please let me build you something better.”
Butsudan in poplar with asanoha (hemp leaf) motif.
“I see it everywhere,” he continues, referring to how cheaply most things today are made. “Part of my drive, to this day, is to strike that balance, to remind people of the importance of living with something that’s beautiful, that’s handmade. That really does drive me to get here to work every morning. I find that the quality of one’s life goes up, the fewer things one has and the more personal those things are. Most people have a lot of stuff; that takes up a lot of space. For myself, I find living with a few things that have been made by hand enriches my life. It makes life easier in so many ways. I don’t seem to need as much, to go out and buy something new. I get so much satisfaction from the things that I do have.”
Inner and outer doors of a tall butsudan in poplar and western red cedar.
But back to that first butsudan. Caleb knew nothing about woodworking when he decided to build it. He simply thought he could make something better. At the time, he was working in a pub; one of his customers was a woodworker. “He saw my doodles for the altar,” Caleb says, “and showed up the next day with a box of hand tools, everything I needed to get going in our spare bedroom. I picked up a pallet – there were always pallets at the back of the pub – and in a few days I was able to finish the butsudan that I had drawn up.” He calls that first piece “relatively crude” but is glad to know it’s still in use.
After Caleb and his girlfriend broke up, he traveled some more. He taught English, music and art in China and wandered through Morocco, France and Spain. In 2012 he got married and moved to Peru with his wife, then back to China for another couple of years. “No matter where I was, however, I was always thinking about building my butsudans. Something about it seemed urgent to me.” So in 2014 Caleb and his wife returned to the United States and he decided to try making a living as a woodworker, specializing in butsudans. “It took a while before I got my first order,” he says, “but fortunately I’ve been working consistently ever since.”
He moved to Joshua Tree in 2017, when he and his wife separated. It was a way “to rehabilitate myself. [Being] somewhere where other people were not” made it a good place “to get my head straight.” He immersed himself in work. His shop is a rented garage about 20 minutes away from his home, also in the desert. The shop has no air conditioning. “It is hot,” he allows. “But I get very focused when I work, and whether it’s hot or cold, it all seems to blur together.”
Business, Wood, Joinery & Tools
Some commissions come through his website. Before the pandemic, he was doing a lot of work for clients in Europe. Now he works for clients in Los Angeles and closer to home, with most jobs coming by word of mouth. A few clients have become patrons, furnishing their homes with his work. Friends see it and place their own orders.
Tansu in pine and alder with chrysanthemum motif.
Every commission starts with a conversation, followed by numerous emails, and sometimes phone calls. He likes to see photos of the clients’ home, to get a feel for the space and their tastes; that helps with deciding on scale, lumber species and finishes. “My favorite commissions are the ones where my client feels they have a genuine problem which they want to solve,” he says. “I love the idea of organizing space, getting something tidied up.”
When first starting out, he worked in domestic woods. Poplar was readily available; for a while he used it almost exclusively, occasionally substituting alder. Recently he has been using oak and sapele, among other species. When teaching classes he uses pine. “I love the knots, the squirrelly nature of it, the smell.”
Freestanding partition with bending kumiko in poplar, alder and washi.
A distinguishing feature of Caleb’s work is the absence of nails and screws. “I like the challenge of designing things knowing that all the connections have to be in wood,” he says. When he does use hardware, as he did for a recent shoe cabinet, he prefers it to be traditional Japanese stuff. (One source is Hida Tool of Berkeley.) And all of his pieces are knockdown, built with traditional joinery, which he finds endlessly rewarding. “You take the classic mortise and tenon,” he suggests by way of example. “There are so many variations. One joint I use a lot is the dovetail that’s locked into place with either a through-tenon or a blind tenon. It’s very easy to put together, very easy to take apart. It seems to be very strong.” Furniture that can be broken down to flat parts has helped him get commissions from clients beyond Southern California. “At first [clients are] daunted, but some email me saying ‘That was so enjoyable!’”
An example of how Caleb uses a tenoned member with a wide shoulder to lock a sliding dovetail in place for a knockdown piece. Once the tenon is fully home, its rail tied into a larger puzzle of interconnected parts, it prevents the dovetail from being pulled out.
Detail of kumiko.
Caleb is self-taught. Returning to the woodworker who was his customer at the pub in England, he says, “We never built anything together. He just gave me some tools and magazines. Everything I’ve learned is something I’ve figured out – looking at furniture and wondering how it’s put together, how it could work. The tansu, for me, was always such a source of mystery: ‘How do you get a corner to go together like that?’ My love of joinery is a love of problem solving. I like joinery to be hidden as much as possible, a mystery, so you don’t see how the cabinet’s put together. It’s a personal thing. I tend to revisit the same joints over and over, to build the same forms, mostly Japanese-style tansus and butsudans.”
Tall entryway cabinet in alder and birch.
Caleb still has the three Sheffield steel chisels he started out with, gifts from that customer at the pub. He has added a few power tools, such as a contractor-grade table saw for ripping; as a custom woodworker who lives primarily on commissions, he has to respect the time constraints imposed by sometimes-modest budgets. Select power tools help him find the balance between a client’s budget and the time he can afford to invest. Even so, he estimates about 80 percent of his work is done by hand, with Japanese handplanes (known as kannas), Japanese chisels and Japanese saws. “I love being able to cut on the pull stroke. All Japanese tools are designed to be used on the pull stroke, drawing the work in toward yourself, using your body as a clamp or a stop. It feels more intimate somehow,” he says. He appreciates the mobility granted by reliance on so few tools and attributes this preference for minimalism to his childhood – “a few tools in a box, get to a new place, unpack and get to work.”
In addition to commissioned work, Caleb teaches classes at his cabin. In his tansu-building class, students work outdoors, exclusively with hand tools, to build a complete cabinet in one week. “The idea behind it was to get people involved in woodworking,” he says. “People who have an interest in it but felt ‘I don’t have the space for it, I don’t have the tools.’” The class is designed to show them how much they can do with an improvised workshop, outdoors. Most students rent an Airbnb in Joshua Tree.
“One thing I enjoy about doing the classes when we’re outdoors and only using hand tools is moving with the rhythms of the day and the weather, and being quiet,” he says. “The name of my business is Esho Funi Butsudans. It’s the idea of the oneness of self and environment, of how inseparable the two are. When you’re working with your hands and building a piece of furniture, that line disappears. This thing I’m making is very much me. In building it, working with the wood, considering where the knots are, and how the wood may behave five years from now, it bleeds over into me. The two things are just the same. When the piece is finished, it has its own personality, its own character. To me that is…I can’t think of anything, short of having children. Sharing myself. Growing. It’s a therapeutic thing to do, to build something with your hands and return to it every day.”
Lighting
One of my favorite Caleb Rogers creations is not cabinet or an altar, but a light fixture. Floating in the dark, its undulating organic form calling a jellyfish to mind, it’s a delicate confection in tissue-covered reed.
“I’ve always loved lighting, playing around with light. My mother designed sets for the theater for a time. She was brilliant at creating a mood using light.” He describes the process of making these lights: “I start bending the reeds and hot gluing [them] here and there. And then I’ll take tissue paper and white glue and cover the whole thing with tissue paper and put a light in it, and gradually layer that tissue paper until the quality of that light coming through is just right.”
One light he made for a client in Los Angeles was so large that he had to cut it in half to get it in his Nissan Sentra for delivery. To get a feel for the space and the kind of light he wanted to design, he’d spent a night on the sofa at his client’s house, staring up at the space in the ceiling where the client had said he wanted the lamp to be. It took Caleb six hours to stitch the light back together so that it looked just right.
He tries to work quickly and prolifically, to keep his work affordable and the commissions coming in. “Before I start a piece, I build it in my head, maybe 100 times, before I pick up a tool, so that when I do start on a project, I know what I’m doing. I don’t take breaks; I don’t eat lunch.”
Asked how he prices his work, Caleb responds with a reflective question: “How do you price something? What are you willing to sacrifice in your life so you can do this [kind of work]? I keep my bills as low as possible. I don’t have any debt, I don’t have credit cards. I want to be able to do my work and keep my prices reasonable. I try not to think about what, on an hourly basis, I’m making. At first I was making butsudans for whatever someone could pay, just so I could keep working and put the photos on my website.” That generated more work. “I’ve been able to do this as my sole source of income for going on five years. So I’m very fortunate. I don’t have fixed prices. It has a lot to do with the client, what they can afford. I want to build the thing I have in my head and I don’t want to compromise just because I might have to work a little harder or a little longer for a little less money.”
He’s grateful to have a few clients he considers patrons, who commission dozens of pieces for their homes. “For somebody like me, it makes all the difference in the world. If you have money out there, there’s really nothing better you can do than supporting an artist you like.”
As a young child, David Finck, author of “Making & Mastering Wood Planes,” took ceramics classes through Pittsburgh’s parks and recreation department and loved it. At UC Berkeley he discovered a pot shop that was open to anybody to use. And so, for a second time in his life, he started to get really into ceramics. During his junior year David was regularly showing up to class spattered in mud and clay. A woman sitting next to him noticed, as she was also interested in ceramics. She told him about some summer workshops she had taken in Mendocino, and how she discovered she liked making the carved wooden implements and tools more so than the ceramics. While in Mendocino she inquired about a woodworking school and was told one had recently started up, in Fort Bragg, run by a guy named James Krenov.
David was intrigued. He recognized Krenov’s name from his father’s bookshelves. And because David was a California resident and the school was run through a community college, the program was essentially free.
“Now my plan at that point was to get through one last year at Berkeley and then go back to West Virginia and hang out in the woods with my folks and make guitars,” David says.
But now his head was spinning. Krenov was a well-known woodworker and David knew he’d be better off learning some new woodworking skills. It never occurred to him at the time to go to guitar-making school. But even if it had, it wouldn’t have been practical. Few existed, and the ones that did were expensive. So David bummed a car and drove up to Krenov’s school.
“I was swept up in what was happening,” he says. “There was so much amazing work being built. I hung out for a full day and talked to people. The atmosphere there was really good. There was a lot of energy and Krenov was there all the time and I just remember feeling so magnetically drawn to the whole atmosphere. I was blown away by the quality of the students’ work. But at that point I just had one kind of half-assed guitar that I made on the seat of my pants, so I had no idea how I was going to get into that school.”
Turns out Krenov took the community college part seriously and always kept a few spaces open for someone who was retired and someone who was young and promising.
“And then the other 20 spots were going to people who were, you know, amazing,” David says. “Krenov had created this pent-up demand for his teaching through his books so you had people that were steeped in his writing who had been hard at it for 10, 15, 20 years. People would come from all over the world to study with him. So I was very anxious to go to school there.”
David put together a portfolio. “It was one photograph of my crummy guitar sitting on rumpled blankets on my bed,” he says. “And I wrote a pretty maudlin letter about why I should get in.”
David visited a second time and spoke with Krenov. This time, he brought his guitar and showed it to Krenov in the parking lot.
“That turned out to be lucky because he had a soft spot for guitar making,” David says.
David was placed on the waitlist, but pretty quickly got a spot. “I was over the moon,” he says.
Back in West Virginia, in between Berkeley and Krenov’s school, David panicked. “I remember thinking, Oh my god. I don’t know anything about furniture making. I’ve never cut a dovetail in my life.”
But, it turns out, the structure of the class was good. After spending four to six weeks on fundamentals, students were given the freedom to continue with fundamentals or move on to more sophisticated projects. David thrived. And at the end of the first year, he wanted to stay.
Two pieces David made as a first-year student at James Krenov’s school, displayed at a show held in San Francisco in 1985.
“I was very lucky to come for another year,” he says. “That was an incredibly talented class and there ended up being six people that wanted to stay – and at that point they had never taken more than four. Everyone is just so real and good-hearted there. They couldn’t be bureaucratic about it. They had to bring us all in and we were having a roundtable and discussing, and I remember sitting there and talking with my bench mate who had come from north of the Arctic circle. And we were like, ‘Oh, Dave, you should be the one’ (his name was David, too) and he was like, ‘no, Dave, you should’ and finally they were like, ‘Oh, we’ll just keep everybody.’ It was really sweet. But of course that meant two other students couldn’t come for their first year. But at any rate, it was such a great class. It was very much a highlight of my life – being exposed to a lot of incredibly unique people and Krenov himself and associate teachers.”
During his second year there, David also met his wife, Marie Hoepfl.
Marie Hoepfl and James Krenov
“She was a student in the class and I could gaze longingly at her while at the workbenches,” he says, laughing. “We hung out and got together pretty quickly.”
At the end of David’s second year he moved back to West Virginia and Marie began her second year at Krenov’s school. They ended up spending that year apart, then Marie moved to West Virginia to be with David.
Galleries & Shows
Marie was a middle-school shop teacher at the time, and one of her motivations in going to Krenov’s school was to be a better woodworking teacher. After moving to West Virginia she taught shop for several years across the river, in a rural high school in Woodsfield, Ohio. But as the population dwindled and students moved away, the woodworking program was shut down. Marie took that opportunity to go to graduate school, get her doctorate and eventually provide teacher training in technology education.
While Marie was teaching and in school, David worked as a speculative woodworker (you can view examples of his work here). Krenov had set him up with a gallery in Long Island.
“It was pretty exclusive and an awesome place to have represent you at that time,” David says. “But instinctively, I don’t have a great flair for design. I think to make it as a speculative woodworker you’ve got to have so many things lined up in your alley and that was probably my major weakness. So I was batting like 500 with speculative gallery sales, which ain’t good enough. You’re spending half your time not getting paid and after three years I was getting kind of desperate.”
David’s dad, Henry Finck, in the shop they built together. This photo was taken years after David left home, but reflects the aesthetic.
David shared a shop with his dad, and for a while David and Marie were living in the woods on David’s parents’ property in a 10’ x 25’ garage-type structure lined with books on both sides, with a woodstove. They lived there for about five months then moved to New Martinsville, West Virginia, living halfway between Woodsfield, Ohio, where Marie taught, and the shop David shared with his dad. Once Marie lost her job and started grad school in Morgantown, West Virginia, they rented a house two miles away from David’s parents’ place, where David lived during the week, and they rented an apartment in Morgantown, where Marie lived during the week. For four or five years they made this living arrangement work, coming together on the weekends.
One of David’s lanterns.
Needing to find other outlets to sell his work, David started exhibiting at American Craft Council shows, selling what wasn’t selling in the galleries, and in the process earning himself some nice commissions. He also developed a wholesale item, a limited production run of an Asian-looking lantern – a good bread-and-butter item, he says. He was becoming more well-known, with more commissions coming from around the state, including a substantial commission to design and build seven major pieces for a Roman Catholic church undergoing renovations in Parkersburg, West Virginia. The job, which included an altar, presider’s chair, lectern and more, took more than 18 months to complete.
Diane Lane held this box, which David made, in the movie “Nights in Rodanthe.”
By this time Marie had finished her doctorate and was job hunting. Their first daughter, Ledah, was born. Marie found a job in Pittsburg, Kansas, and in 1994, when Ledah was three months old, the newly made family of three moved.
Writing ‘Making & Mastering Wood Planes’ While Parenting
Marie loved her new job and David became a stay-at-home dad. Marie would get home from work fairly early and the two would switch. Marie would watch Ledah while David worked in his basement shop.
This continued for three years, during which Willa, their second daughter, was born in 1996. But Kansas did not feel like home. David and Marie missed the mountains. Marie got a job at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, and they moved back east.
Now with two kids in tow, David was struggling to keep his hand in the craft while also caring for a baby and a toddler. By now he had been teaching the Krenov approach to woodworking in adult education classes at colleges and through craft centers for 11 years. He had gained a lot of experience teaching planemaking, specifically. It was always a popular course and folks were encouraging him to do a more in-depth study of the topic.
“So I just hatched a plan to basically give my weekend workshop in book form with as much detail as I could muster. Whenever the kids were napping or being quiet that was something I could do in the basement shop,” he says. I think it took a better part of a year to do the writing and all the documentation and photography and sketches, and then I ran through five different proof readings with what I call my egghead woodworker friends, just educated people that had either all gone through the Krenov program or were just woodworkers and highly educated. So I got a lot of great feedback from them as well and distilled all that.”
Sterling bought the book. He sent it and, outside of style, his editor had one edit regarding a comma that turned out to be a misinterpretation.
“It was pretty amazing,” David says. “It was already very well vetted when it went off. They took care of it for seven or eight years. And then they finally decided that everyone who wanted to make a wooden plane in the world had done that and their sales were declining so they just gave it back to me.”
David started getting emails from people asking how they could get the book and when was it going to go back in print. Because he had all the computer files, layout, artwork – everything – David decided to self-publish, working directly with a printer in Ashland, Ohio.
“And that worked well for years until I got tired of it,” he says. “Just dealing with the printer and then dealing with boxes and boxes of books and stuff around, and then just filling orders kind of on a daily basis – it’s not primarily where I wanted to be spending my time. So when the final printing dwindled down it struck me that Lost Art Press might be interested in it. I mean, after all, Chris provided the blurb for the back cover. And he showed no hesitation. It was just really wonderful. And I really appreciate the hardcover version, and the nicer-quality aspects of the book as well.”
The Suzuki Method & The Forget-Me-Nots
During this time David was still woodworking in Krenov’s spirit, as he describes it, and building about one guitar a year. Once or twice a year he’d have a booth at a show. He kept teaching, eventually hosting classes at his home shop, which meant more pay and no travel.
Once he finished “Making & Mastering Wood Planes,” David began searching for things to do with his daughters, now 2 and 4. He found a woman, Nan Stricklen, who taught Suzuki violin lessons and so they started taking lessons, along with a 3-year-old friend, on a weekly basis. Ms. Nan did a marvelous job with the younger kids and had a total knack of making it fun while getting information across, David says.
David’s daughters learned to play violin through the Suzuki method.
“I really did enjoy working with them on stuff and the Suzuki violin philosophy encourages that quite a bit where the parent acts as a teacher, especially in the younger stages,” David says. “So it was very much just quality time together, playing with the instrument and trying to get across the concepts the teacher was working on. And we were just consistent. We never pushed it hard or anything like that, but we got our 10 or 15 minutes in most every day for years.”
Four or five years in, David began introducing the girls to regional folk music, “just kind of the heart of Appalachia Old-Time music,” he says. “There was just music everywhere, especially at all the folk festivals all throughout the summer. So they had a lot of exposure to that, especially when they were little. And then, somehow or another, before I knew it we had a family band.” David backed up his daughters and their friend on his guitar. The Forget-Me-Nots played Celtic music throughout western North Carolina.
The Forget-Me-Nots perform in North Carolina.
“I never had a performing gene and this was definitely not a case of stage parents, but rather we’d just play in the park and people would see us and the next thing you know we’re giving a little concert in the park, and then somebody asks and before you know it we were doing 30 or 40 gigs every summer. These girls had a full-fledged band.”
The girls continued to play through middle and high school, with both daughters attending University of North Carolina School of the Arts (UNCSA) their senior year – a pivotal time for both of them.
“All the way through they were kind of standouts for music for what they did, but as far as classical music goes, which is their primary focus, it’s like, OK, you’re in the top 1 percent – that’s wonderful, but that doesn’t get you a job. You’ve got to be in the top .001 percent to win an audition and be in a symphony, and be even better than that to be a soloist. But that takes the tiger mom or dad and long hours of practice, and none of us were willing to do that. But when they got down to UNCSA, and really perceived all that in a visceral way, they made that decision on their own. That was the year that both of them started practicing three to four, five to six hours a day. They just skyrocketed. And they had great teachers.”
David’s First Violin
In 2011, David’s dad passed away. A year later, Ledah, still in high school, won a collegiate violin competition, giving her the use of a really fine, contemporary-made instrument on loan for a couple years. Now those years were ending and Ledah needed another good instrument.
“I didn’t have the arrogance or naivety to think that my first violin would fit the bill because it’s just an incredibly sophisticated craft in so many various ways,” David says. “But it was just something I wanted to do at that time and see what happened. My dad having passed, and having access to all the information he had put together, mostly in books and clippings, and all the wood and tools, it just seemed like kind of a neat memorial for him.”
David’s dad, by the way, finished that first guitar and had even begun working on his viola da gamba.
“I never really got a clear answer on why he didn’t complete that instrument other than the fact that he was into a million different things on their homestead. And then his health deteriorated and it was never completed. So my memorial to him was going to be to finish that instrument, and then make a violin, maybe for each girl. We were very close, and it was just kind of an extended grieving period and it just felt right to do that. But my wife, who’s very practical, gave me one of her looks and told me to just skip the gamba and go straight to the violin. Because ‘Who knows?’ she said. ‘You might get lucky.’”
So David built a violin.
“It was really remarkable,” he says. “It was kind of like the same experience I had with the guitar but here it was, more than 20 years later, and I had a much better understanding of woodworking but also the kind of energy and passion that the guitar building ignited within me to begin with. I was just really feeling that with this first foray into violin building.”
David’s first violin for his oldest daughter, Ledah. He named this violin “Gelibt” (beloved) and his second violin, which he made for his daughter Willa, “Neshomeh” (soul). Both names are in honor of his father.
At the time, Ledah was studying at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, still using the violin she had won. She had won another competition to be a soloist with the Durham Symphony, and David had just finished his violin. David and Marie traveled to Durham to show it to Ledah, to see if she liked it.
“We went into a big room and she tried it,” he says. “At first she played her other one and then she picked up mine and played it. And we’re just gasping in disbelief at each other because the sound coming out of that violin was un-freaking-believable! Oh, it was just like my heart stopped. And just to see her play so beautifully. It was just immediately evident this was a special-sounding instrument. So she had no hesitation to give the other one back and a week later she was playing my violin as a soloist with the orchestra. It was just a phenomenal way to get introduced to the craft. And truly inspirational for me and just so wonderful on so many levels.”
Of course, having another daughter dedicated to violin playing meant that David had to try his hand at violin making again. He finished his second violin a couple months later.
“Interestingly, Willa’s violin didn’t have the same immediate reception,” David says. “Ledah had no hesitation, she just loved every aspect of it. And I don’t think of Ledah as a capricious person. Willa, she’s a studied person. And, of course, she’s only 15 or 16 at the time. She took it and said, ‘Yeah, I like it. I’ll try it for a couple days.’ And two or three days later, just out of the blue she came to me beaming and says, ‘I love it.’ So that suited her just fine, too. And within that year she also started winning competitions, really significant ones. She had a great run of performances, auditions for these concerto competitions. So it was all the encouragement I needed to drop furniture and dive on in to violin making.”
That was 8 years ago, and violin and viola making is all David has done since.
“I know a lot more now and I’m more confused than ever,” he says, laughing. “It’s such an expansive field and there are so many different ways to do things and the acoustics are this crazy thing and then there’s the finishing and it’s just endlessly absorbing for me.”
And while it’s one thing to please your daughters – even when they’re serious musicians and critics – it’s an entirely different thing for a stranger to plunk down a big chunk of change and walk away with one of your instruments, David says. And yet, that’s exactly what musicians are doing. And they’re thrilled.
The pandemic, as it has for many craftspeople, has put a damper on sales. Folks are no longer coming by David’s shop to try his violins, and direct marketing at schools and with symphony players isn’t happening. So David has gotten creative, offering home trials, sanitizing instruments before shipping them out and giving them rest periods upon their return and before shipping them out again. He’s also donating 10 percent of sales to musicians’ charities for the duration of the pandemic.
Layers of Understanding
These days David is in his home shop whenever he’s not having dinner with his wife or tending to other chores. The shop is lovely, a basement walk-out with plenty of windows, and a short commute.
David’s home shop.
“One thing about violin making, there are certain tasks, especially shaping, doing the final carving, shaping the back and top and even the scroll, when it really helps to have a completely darkened shop and then just a single harsh light to really highlight the shadows. And I find, as my eyes are getting older, it’s just harder and harder to see those contrasts that really tell you how good a job you’ve done shaping. So it’s definitely a task I like to do late at night.”
David says probably half the time both he and Marie are working on Saturdays and Sundays. “But, at least in my case, it never really feels like work,” he says. “I just feel so incredibly lucky, incredibly lucky but it’s an obsession I guess, whether it’s magnificent or miserable, I don’t know. But it definitely works for me and just to have something that keeps drawing you in and keeps revealing different layers of understanding. And I feel like I’m just kind of scratching the surface at this point. A lot of the technical stuff I’m pretty comfortable with though violin making is pretty distinctive from other types of woodworking. I’m definitely still picking things up there, kind of putting it all together acoustically. Finishes are a challenge for me.”
David says he was definitely in the right vein as a Krenov-influenced woodworker because the Krenov finishing philosophy is very minimal.
“It’s never been a strong suit of mine so that suited me well,” he says. “But that is definitely not the case when it comes to violin finishing. It can be a very complicated process to end up with something both very beautiful and with the right appearance to it, and also acoustically appropriate to the instrument as well. So there’s a lot of artistic instinct to really pull it off beautifully. And that’s a challenge for me. It’s definitely been an area I’ve put a lot of effort into but still see that I’ve got a long way to go. So if things will allow me to do so, I definitely will continue pushing that area especially hard.”
David talks a lot about luck, and areas he needs to improve.
“I don’t know what it is. I think I just have a feel for wood through long exposure maybe and the guitar influence, but I just had really, really good luck with the acoustic side of the instruments.”
But any outsider looking in would not describe David’s success as the result of luck. Instead, they would point to the hundreds, if not thousands, of hours he has spent in his shop, his dedication – near obsession – with the craft, and an artistic instinct he sometimes claims to not have, but clearly does.
Some proof: Today, Willa, 24, and Ledah, 26, both professional violinists, prefer his violins over any others.
David and his family, 2014
A 2018 graduate of Eastman School of Music, Willa joined the first violin section of the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra during her junior year in 2017. In addition to playing with RPO, she is the founding member of Copper Hill, a Rochester folk-art band, and in November 2019 she released a solo album called “Ask Me Why” with jazz pianist Sterling Cozza and jazz trumpet player Nathan Kay.
Ledah recently earned her master’s degree in violin performance from The Peabody Conservatory and is currently a member of the Mannes School of Music’s Graduate String Quartet in Residence, Bergamot Quartet, in New York City. She is also a member of the jazz quintet Atlantic Extraction, led by Nick Dunston, and earspace ensemble.
For David, the best compliment is to overhear one of his daughters say, “My dad made it,” when another musician asks about their violin.
Earned Praise
“I’m not an overly confident person, especially in something that has such a grand tradition,” David says. “My goal is simply to make really high-quality instruments for classical players.”
David’s home shop is out in the woods in the mountains of North Carolina – not a lot of high-end players waltz in and out every day. In addition, not having much contact with other makers makes it sometimes difficult for David to figure out where to position himself. But to understand the quality of work, one just needs to listen.
A few years ago, David attended workshops presented by The Violin Society of America at Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio. The workshops, quite famous in the violin-making world, David says, serve as a way to get excellent instruction and also “kind of just be with your people.” People come from all over the world to attend. One of the workshops was on acoustics.
“Some makers are interested in that but a lot are not,” he says. “They just kind of go with shop practices that are handed down and end up building fine violins but they don’t necessarily need to know the frequencies that something is vibrating at.”
David brings up a blind study that was done pitting instruments by Stradivari, Guarneri and other famous names against more contemporary ones. The results showed that the contemporary instruments were, actually, slightly favored. The study appeared in a peer-reviewed journal on acoustics and received some flak for its design. So two years later the study was repeated, this time in a more rigorous manner. The results were the same – well-known and talented players and listeners slightly preferred the contemporary instruments.
Back to the workshop: For educational purposes they did double-blind listening tests with musicians and luthiers serving as judges. Players wore dark welding glasses and played behind a screen so the audience couldn’t see what they were playing. In the mix were violins from makers like David, who make a handful a year, and violins from world-famous luthiers.
“There were maybe 30 people in the room and when the violinist played this one opening everybody kind of gasped,” David says. “This was a stand-out sound.”
What David didn’t know was that the violinist was playing his violin.
“I was in a state of shock, as were most of the people there,” he says. “It really was just an incredible shot in the arm. A boost, to say, you’re doing alright.”
David says he doesn’t know why he’s having this luck, thinking maybe it’s a combination of knowing how to work with wood, a long association with it and just really caring about it. Whatever it is, “it’s producing some good results,” he says.
Now 59, David says he never wants to retire. “I just want to do this until I drop over,” he says. Ever since he began woodworking at Krenov’s school, David says he feels like he skipped the work part and just went straight to retirement, spending his life doing what he wants to do with his hours. He thinks back to when he strayed from environmental science, choosing a path of woodworking instead. He credits being able to string woodworking along for all these years in large part, he says, “to my ever-patient and supportive wife. We make a really good team. She understands my motivations having been through that experience herself. So we definitely support each other.”
In the March 2019 issue of Fine Woodworking, David wrote a From the Bench column titled “The Family Violin.” It includes a short video filled with wonderful old photos called “My Father’s Dream.” In the column, David writes: “My personal story is about endings and beginnings, father, son, and daughters, completing one circle and starting another.” And, as David recently discovered reading his grandmother’s memoir, those circles go generations deep and will continue generations on, an interconnectedness much like the beginning and ending of a song.
It’s mid-July and David Finck has just finished reading his maternal grandmother’s memoir. The youngest of 13 children, she grew up in Czarist Russia and was a pianist and top student at St. Petersburg State Conservatory. She gave recitals to Czar Nicholas II and Czarina Alexandra, hung out in the Winter Palace, met Rasputin and walked hand-in-hand with Grand Duchess Anastasia.
“It’s stunning,” he says.
David’s aunt, a gerontologist, helped write the first-person memoir. It reads like historical fiction, David says. Which is interesting, because after spending a couple hours talking with David, and seeing the circles and ties to generations past, present and future, one could almost say the same about his life, too.
Many know David as author of “Making & Mastering Wood Planes,” a classic in woodworking circles first published by Sterling and now sold under the Lost Art Press imprint. But since David first wrote that book he finds himself in a different place entirely, making violins and violas beloved by musicians. He talks a lot about luck but between his words is a lot of time, talent and skill. It’s a story that begins with his grandparents and now rests with his daughters. It’s about paths chosen and paths neglected, finishing what was left behind and following passions, all interconnecting to form a beautiful tale.
A Childhood Filled with Art & Music
David’s paternal grandfather, a paint chemist by trade, was a hobbyist woodworker. His grandfather also wrote, acted and directed Yiddish theater, and was founder of the Vagabond Theater in Baltimore, Maryland, the nation’s oldest continuously running community theater. His paternal grandmother was a trained sculptor. David has a couple little dovetailed boxes his grandfather made, with chip carving on them by his grandmother. David’s maternal grandfather, a doctor, was trained in St. Petersburg and cared for immigrant families in Baltimore’s Canton neighborhood.
David Finck and his father, Henry Finck, on a hike about 50 years ago.
David grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His father, Henry Finck, had a small woodshop in their basement and his mother, Paula, had an art studio in their home. David’s dad, academically gifted, was a professor of anatomy at the University of Pittsburgh Medical School, although academia didn’t suit him.
As a child David recognized his parents were unique. His mother, a substitute art teacher, always had projects for him and his two older sisters. He laughs, remembering how they used to melt packing peanuts with candles, creating all sorts of things with long strings of burnt plastic in the basement of their old house, a dungeon-like space with low ceilings and thick cut-stone walls. They would play with clay and origami. With a friend, David would use cardstock from old computer programs to create taped-and-glued-together cars for play.
“I was into making stuff as a kid but it was just a part of life, something you didn’t even really think about,” he says.
In high school, he took a woodshop class taught by “a very nice man who didn’t know a lot about woodworking.” While his teacher spent much of the class dealing with discipline issues, David managed to build a few projects.
“They were laughably bad, really bad,” he says. “No portent of the future came out of that shop class.”
David’s first foray into music was the recorder. At the time, his parents were secular Jews. While his mom was still interested in some of the Jewish traditions, his family didn’t belong to a temple. When David’s friends began attending Hebrew School, his mom gave him a choice: He could go to Hebrew school or learn to play an instrument. Hebrew School was a three-day-a-week proposition, 4 p.m. to 6 p.m., following full days of school.
“Guess which one I did?” he says, laughing.
He took recorder lessons for about a year – then something introduced him to the world of string instruments, which would become a significant part of his life ever after. That something? The movie “Deliverance.”
“I don’t know why my folks let me see it but I had watched ‘Deliverance’ with my dad when I was about 11, which is pretty intense, but you know the scene in the beginning where the Appalachian kid is sitting on the porch playing banjo and one of the characters starts backing him up on the guitar? Well, I just thought that was the most incredible thing I had ever heard.”
Later, David learned there were issues with that scene: While the music you hear is Scruggs-style three-finger bluegrass picking, the kid on the porch is playing a totally different style. What David did know at the time was that he wanted to play that tune. “It totally inspired me,” he says.
So his folks bought him an inexpensive plastic banjo that sounded, actually, pretty good, he says. It was the early 1970s and Pittsburgh was experiencing a folk revival – in fact, his sister, Tina, was playing guitar, mandolin and accordion in one of the city’s first old-time string bands. David began taking banjo lessons at a local music shop. Six months into them he realized there were different styles of banjo playing, and that he was never going to learn dueling banjos from his teacher, from whom he’d been learning a style called frailing (also called clawhammer). David was disappointed. And he probably would have found a new teacher and kept up with banjo had his dad not taken a sabbatical that resulted in his entire family moving – to New Zealand.
Dunedin’s Star Basketball Player (For a Short While)
Watergate and the Vietnam War filled the news. David’s parents, who were pretty liberal, wanted to leave the U.S. His father found a part-time job at a university on the South Island of New Zealand, in a town called Dunedin. New Zealand, David thought, offered a kind of paradise. This feeling was dashed a bit when the family arrived only to be greeted by a rare traffic jam caused by, of all things, the opening of a Kentucky Fried Chicken. His parents, believing they had left U.S. culture behind, were chagrined. They also were unsure about New Zealand’s political future.
Years later, David came across a passage in one of his father’s many notebooks about their time in New Zealand. His dad was a prodigious collector of clippings, pasting hundreds of them into dozens and dozens of composition notebooks, along with his own comments.
“There were a series of newspaper clippings related to Watergate that he had clipped out of the New Zealand newspaper,” David says. “And he was teaching anatomy at this university and he’s writing, ‘I can’t wait to be done with this. I want to do things with my hands. I want to make things that are tangible.’” (Eventually, he would.)
Grades were organized differently in New Zealand, by forms. The form David was initially placed in proved to be a little too easy; they moved him to the high school, which proved to be a little too hard. But there was a bright spot: For a short time, David was Dunedin’s star high school basketball player.
“I think basketball had been introduced in New Zealand three or four years earlier and I was one of the few people in the nation, it seemed, that knew how to dribble,” he says. “They put me on the varsity basketball team. I was like 100 pounds, 5’2”, 11 years old or something. But I could dribble circles around all these people. No one else really had any kind of dribbling skills at that point, but I quickly got beat up pretty bad by these much older kids and they put me in JV. But for a little while there, I was reveling in my athletic prowess. It was pretty thrilling.”
David’s true athletic passion had always been baseball. It was the early 1970s, the heyday for Pittsburgh teams. And in Pittsburgh, David lived two miles from the old Forbes Field. Like most 11-year-olds he wanted to be a major league baseball player – woodworking wasn’t even a thought. “The only trouble was I wasn’t very good and didn’t know it,” he says.
After a year in New Zealand David’s dad realized his part-time position wasn’t going to become full time anytime soon. So the family moved back to Pittsburgh, where David finished high school.
A Crooked Course Through College
“I hated high school,” David says. “But coming from an intellectual, academic-minded family, I was totally geared to go to college because I didn’t have anything better to do. And I sure wish that was not the case. I wish I had figured something else out.”
At the time Pittsburgh had a scholars program, which essentially meant starting high school in eighth grade if you maintained a B average – and David was a straight B student. He completed his high school courses by 11th grade and, not wanting to spend a year in high school taking AP courses, he graduated. Without a real plan he enrolled at the University of Pittsburgh.
“My parents were really laissez-faire when it came to guidance,” he says. “Either that or I didn’t seek them out and they didn’t impose their will on me. I don’t remember having heart-to-heart talks about this sort of thing at all. I just sort of plotted my own course in a really poor way.”
David, 17, was miserable in his big introductory college classes. But then he met Tom, a guy in his late 20s who had just earned his undergraduate degree in marine biology in Santa Barbara, California. David already had a vague interest in marine biology. Jacques Cousteau was big at the time. And David had spent several summers in Cape Cod, mucking around in estuaries and mud flats, and snorkeling while his dad worked in a lab at the Oceanic Institute. Tom told David he should go to UC Santa Barbara and study marine biology. And so, David did.
He ended up in a house with friends of Tom’s, all in their late 20s. A quarter-mile from campus, the house was two blocks from the beach and half the guys were surfers. It was paradise, David says, really beautiful. But yet again he found himself in huge general science classes. The beach was distracting and he worried he wouldn’t be successful in the environment.
He got in touch with a cousin who lived in Big Pine Key, Florida, about 20 miles from Key West. David’s cousin was taking marine technology classes at a small community college. Instead of sitting in auditorium-style classrooms, students at this college were out on boats doing sampling.
“Man, that sounded like a great idea to me,” David says. “So I took a leave, got myself all the way down to Big Pine Key, Florida, in time for the winter semester.” The problem? He hadn’t read the course catalog – no one was out on boats doing sampling in the winter. Despite this disappointment David continued his studies and spent a nice six months with his aunt, uncle and cousins in Florida.
Still unsure about his path in life, he decided to pursue a liberal arts education, and he transferred to UC Berkeley. Unfortunately, his guidance counselor told him a liberal arts degree didn’t exist. Together they came up with environmental science, and despite all the jogging around, David graduated with an environmental science degree four years after starting college.
David’s First Guitar
Before David and his family moved to New Zealand, his father had started – and stopped – building a classical guitar. The guitar was intended to be a stepping stone. After completing it his father wanted to build a viola da gamba. And if he accomplished that, he’d build his dream project: a violin. The move to New Zealand had interrupted the next step in the guitar, cutting a channel in the edges for inlaying the binding. After returning to Pittsburgh, David’s father, a cautious man with myriad things on his plate, found ways to put that step off for close to 20 years.
“It was during high school when I really started bugging him to finish that guitar because I thought it was good,” David says. “He was very meticulous.”
At the time David was a fan of James Taylor and Cat Stevens. He began playing pop folk on guitar, eventually moving to classical guitar and taking lessons. Another reason David wanted his dad to finish the guitar? He wanted it.
“It would have been way better than the hand-me-down guitar I was playing,” he says.
With a dream to join the back-to-land movement, David’s dad hunted for years for a farm. The family finally found a place in West Virginia, about 110 miles south of Pittsburgh. The plan was to spend six or seven years fixing it up, then move there once David’s dad retired. But a year later, his father had had enough of academia. He quit his job and David’s parents began a new life in West Virginia.
Throughout college David and his sisters would visit and help out on the farm. David and his dad turned one of the outbuildings into a shop and in it sat the unfinished guitar, along with all the forms that had been used to build it, a how-to book and extra wood. Having grown tired of trying to convince his dad – who had plenty of other work to do on the farm –to finish it, David decided to build his own.
“It was nothing I was passionate about,” he says. “Just when we had a little bit of down time it was something to do. But I really think at the heart of it I was still trying to manipulate him to finish his own instrument. I had a lot of confidence that it would be a nice, playable instrument and I thought this might inspire him to get started.”
David says his dad was a good craftsman – the kind who could take construction lumber and build a really nice trestle table with well-fitted joinery. He built a floor loom once, with six harnesses, because one of his interests was weaving. Without a background in fine woodworking, his dad simply figured out how to do stuff, building all sorts of things including small kit sailboats in the family living room. He also suffered from a bad back and spent a lot of time on his back reading – he was incredibly well-read. And busy. David mostly built the guitar on his own.
Turns out, he loved it.
“It was just inspiring for me,” David says. “Really, it was the first time I found something I was as passionate about as baseball. It just really felt like a real love, not just like, ‘Oh, this is kind of interesting.’ It was something like a bonfire, pushing me ahead.”
Comparatively, environmental science offered him little to no passion. He remembers a “horrible” work-study job at UC Berkeley, working with a young hotshot professor.
“He had a gazillion little surf creatures preserved in formaldehyde and I had to peer between the legs of each little one of them and tell him if it was a male or female and I would do that for 10 hours a week and it drove me nuts.”
Fortunately, while at UC Berkeley, a fortuitous meeting with a young woman changed the course of his life.
In Meet the Author: David Finck (Part 2) (coming December 9) you’ll learn about David’s switch from environmental science to woodworking, the birth of ‘Making & Mastering Wood Planes’ (while caring for two young children), his family band and pivot into violin making.
It was Peter Follansbee who suggested I consider interviewing Ed Maday for the Lost Art Press blog. “We’ve only met once, before I ‘knew who he was,’” he wrote in a note a few weeks ago.
Back when I worked in the museum field, one day this ordinary tourist type was slumping around. Belt & suspenders, shorts, shirt not tucked in. I happened to be hewing a bowl from a catalpa log and when this fellow made his way to my spot, he told me he used catalpa a lot, as an instrument maker. Made the backs of non-traditional violins from catalpa & loved the sound it makes…didn’t get his name. It was a short interaction. Probably 7-10 years ago.
Some time later, I was at Connecticut Valley School of Woodworking w[ith] Bob Van Dyke. When I’m there, we usually have dinner with Leslie Dockeray, a friend/student/collaborator there. She teaches violin to children in NYC. My twins had just started violin lessons, and we were generally talking violins. I mentioned this man, and his use of catalpa. Leslie exclaimed “THAT’S ED MADAY!” – which meant nothing to me. Then she went on to tell me he’s one of the best violin-makers in New York.
He’s amazing. I can make all manner of household junk out of wood – but it doesn’t make a sound. Ed’s things come to life.
At the corner of Broadway and Johnson Place, in the playground of Woodmere Public School on Long Island, N.Y., a catalpa tree grew three stories high, Ed recalled. Always among the last trees to form leaves, it blanketed the ground with popcorn as the end of spring semester approached. On close inspection, each exploded kernel revealed an orchid-like form – creamy petals surrounding a magenta- and gold-flecked throat. In summer, the tree’s dense canopy of bright-green leaves, each shaped like a heart, offered shade and a backrest to readers. It littered the playground with long brown seedpods just as children began to dream about costumes for Halloween.
“In the 1960s, we all played under this tree,” he said. The living landmark had stood over the monkey bars even when his father was a kid at the same school.
The playground was closed when the school expanded its library in the mid-1990s. The authorities took down the tree.
“When I saw the tree down,” said Ed, “I went up there that night with my Chevy Astro van. My wife went…with me. We rolled the logs in.” His brothers Jimmy and Albert set their band saw mill in the yard and cut up the tree with help from Ed and their eldest brother, Joe. “From this catalpa tree I’ve made about 80 instruments so far,” said Ed. “It’s a little like black walnut in density. It rings like a bell and has this beautiful grain and is perfect for instrument making. It’s even great for violins. [Most] people will choose Bosnian maple, but this catalpa makes a beautiful sound for fiddles, for old-time music.” So beautiful that he made a model of Maybelle Carter’s 1929 Gibson L5 as a gift for Nashville-based bluegrass musician Molly Tuttle (the first woman awarded an International Bluegrass Music Association’s Guitar Player of the Year) in 2019. “I knew her from going to the bluegrass festivals,” he continued, adding that he has always loved the Maybelle Carter Gibson. He also made a cello from the catalpa for Madeline Fayette, who plays with the Orpheus Chamber Group (you can hear a performance of hers on the Maday catalpa cello here); her sister, Abigail, is a professional musician who plays a violin Ed made from Bosnian maple.
The arch top guitar Ed made for bluegrass musician Molly Tuttle, a model of Maybelle Carter’s 1929 Gibson L5.
Tuttle with her guitar.
The headstock of Tuttle’s guitar.
Catalpa back of Tuttle’s’ guitar.
Ed, 63, earns his living by making highly customized string instruments, from the daintiest of fiddles to the most sonorous double bass. To date, he has made some 350 of them; his repertoire also extends to viola dagambas and mandolins. Many of his customers know him from his time repairing and restoring antique instruments; in addition to work for well-known musicians, he performed basic sound adjustments to his customers’ preferences. “I’ll make [an instrument] play to the way they want to hear it and feel it,” he explains. “[All instruments] are affected by weather changes in the wood. Mostly people come here…because they know me, they like me.”
Ed used Bosnian maple for the back of this violin.
A vielle with the back and sides carved from a single piece of catalpa.
The top of the catalpa vielle.
His customers select their preferred wood, partly for looks but mainly for sound. Ed buys Lombardy poplar, a common wood for cellos and violas, from Italy. Most people who come to him for a classical instrument want flamed Bosnian maple for the back and sides, and spruce from Italy or Bavaria for the tops (i.e., the front). Some come to him for custom dimensions; it’s critical that the instrument fit the player’s body. Almost all want something “really cool that’s not commercial.”
One commission was a rebec he made for a client who wanted her instrument to resemble Rocinante, Don Quixote’s horse. A predecessor to the violin, used from the 13th-15th centuries, the rebec is carved entirely from a single block of wood, as you’d carve a spoon. Some customers ask him to carve a head at the scroll; several months ago, during the pandemic, he carved a John the Baptist head, complete with a beard and eyes looking to heaven for guidance. An upcoming job will have a dolphin instead of a human head. Once, a lady in Portugal commissioned an instrument with the head of a dragon. As Follansbee observed, these are musical instruments: they not only demand an artist’s skill in carving; they also have to sound good. Ed assured me, “I get ’em to sound nice.”
A customer taking curbside delivery of his new John the Baptist cello.
Detail, John the Baptist head.
The carving of Rocinante, with finish.
The Rocinante rebec, with case and bow also by Ed.
Back of peg box, viola dagamba.
For the past 2-1/2 months Ed has been working on a double bass for a teacher on Long Island who plays jazz. Ed carved the back from catalpa planks, though these didn’t come from his childhood tree. At 44″ long in the body and requiring two 3″-thick pieces, each 10-12″ wide, he needed something more substantial. That catalpa came from his friend Jimmy Koehler’s yard. “His tree is big enough to make double basses out of,” he said. Ed has carved the neck and scroll, and dovetailed the neck to the body. With luck, the piece will be ready for varnish in the next three to four weeks. He’ll finish it with a traditional violin maker’s varnish made with fossil amber (also known as Baltic amber), the same material used by Dutch masters in the 17th century. He cooks the amber with linseed oil and rosin for 4-5 hours, until it polymerizes – that’s the process that makes it dry – and colors it with pigments made from natural materials such as madder root and walnut husks, “pretty much the way it was done in the 1700s.”
Viola d’amore in a barn wood case.
The barn wood case.
Family
Ed, the second of five children, was born in Woodmere in 1957. He has lived there his whole life. Today, he and his wife live in the house where he grew up, a place his parents built in 1960 that’s less than a half-mile from the Woodmere Public School.
Ed (left) with siblings Johnny and Jane.Most of Ed’s family, when Ed and his siblings were kids. Left to right: Ed, “Papa,” Jane, Jim, Joe and Johnny.
Ed’s father, who was born in 1930, grew up in the house next door. He owned an auto body shop in Woodmere but was a lifelong woodworker who spent hours in a shop converted from a garage, building boats, carving wood and making furniture for his family. He always encouraged Ed and his siblings to join him in the shop and make whatever they wanted; Ed recalls making balsa airplanes. The only catch: They were not allowed to use power tools of any sort, because their father had lost four fingers on his left hand in a woodworking accident at the age of 16.
Another influence Ed mentioned is the traditional culture of Woodmere Bay (also cited on maps as Brosewere Bay), which was historically home to clam diggers and farmers. Along with many others who lived near the bay, his family had a bay house on stilts where they spent a good part of each summer. At a time when much of America was abandoning traditional ways of living for new conveniences, from electric washers to frozen dinners, and the nation’s evening ritual became relaxing in front of a black-and-white TV, these bay houses had no electricity; kerosene lamps provided light, and coal stoves generated heat. “Everyone did stuff by hand,” Ed said. Those summers made a deep impression. Sadly, the Madays’ stilt house was washed away by Hurricane Sandy, but its echoes linger in Ed’s cluttered shop, which he likens to Geppetto’s.
Another generation. Janet (Ed’s wife) with children Elizabeth and Eddy Jr. at the bay house.
After Ed came Johnny, followed by their sister, Jane, then brother Jimmy. Albert is the baby of the family. Everyone played the violin except Joe, who played banjo. Ed has played violin since third grade. Their mother worked at their school, first as a kindergarten aid and later as a library assistant. “She played folk guitar and sang songs around the house. At family gatherings everyone would hang out in the kitchen and sing,” said Ed.
His parents didn’t push him in any particular direction, which was nice, considering that he knew he wanted to be a violin maker from an early age. He made his first violin at 15, after three years of reading library books on the subject and experimenting with materials and techniques. In the mandatory meeting with his guidance counselor to discuss further education and possibilities for a career, he expressed his interest in making violins. “She didn’t know what to do with that,” he said. She suggested he should first learn a bit about business and talked him into studying accounting at Hofstra University.
He applied to Hofstra and decided to major in business, but flunked out of business after two semesters. “The courses I did really good with were music, English, philosophy, arts. Any of the arts: the humanities.”
Meanwhile, he had never stopped playing violin. His violin teacher, Olga Bloom (best known as the force behind Bargemusic, a floating concert venue under the Brooklyn Bridge), was one of his professors at Hofstra. She encouraged him to stick with music. He won a scholarship to play violin, which got him parts in chamber group sessions and playing in the orchestra pit for the theater department.
Throughout his time at college he built and repaired instruments on the side. Three or four nights each week he also played fiddle on stage in Long Island and the metro area, and sometimes in New York City – early style jazz and swing with The Uptown Radio Cowboys, bluegrass with the Jumbo String Band – sometimes working ’til dawn. It was the mid-’70s – a time, said Ed, when there was “a bluegrass wave.” He could see a future combining bluegrass and swing with violin making.
In the end, he didn’t graduate from Hofstra. He took a part-time job in the produce department of his local Key Food grocery store, where his work ethic made such an impression on his employers that they offered him the position of produce manager, a regular job with 40 hours a week and grown-up benefits. “I remember looking at the guy and saying, ‘No, man, that’s not why I’m here.’” A pivotal moment came soon after, while he was eating a slice of pizza on his lunch break. He spotted an ad in the Long Island Newsday for a scholarship at Molloy College, which had recently added a music department. “It always bothered me that I didn’t finish college,” he says. “I walked over to the payphone, put in a quarter and called.” They scheduled him to audition on violin. He won a full scholarship and graduated in 1984 with a degree in violin performance.
Within a month and a half of graduating, he found a job with Kolstein’s, a well-respected business that repaired and restored string instruments. Ed “did a lot of repair work,” much of it for musicians with household names. He met Percy Heath and George Duvivier, who played for jazz greats Coleman Hawkins and Sy Oliver, as well as more widely known stars such as Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland and Lena Horne. Beverly Peer, who played bass for such stars as Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Barbra Streisand, Johnny Mathis and Bobby Short, was a customer. “He’d come over and stick a couple of bucks in [your] shirt pocket and say ‘Get yourself something nice for lunch.’ All these cool old guys would come in there. So I’ve always kept in touch with the Kolsteins.”
Still, Ed wanted to make violins. His friend Joe Tripodi, whose place Ed had taken at Kolstein’s when Joe left to open his own business, hosted quartet parties in his home once a week, where he and his friends got together to play Beethoven and Mozart. Joe had trained at the Cremona International School of Violin Making in Italy, where 17th-century master Antonio Stradivari had made violins; he was steeped in the Italian method. Around 1984 he offered Ed a job he couldn’t refuse – it was, said Ed, “a super-great opportunity for me to learn. Joe taught me a whole lot of cool stuff.” (Note the typical Ed Maday understatement.)
One of Joe Tripodi’s friends, Stan Schmidt, was a Chicago-based painting conservator. Because his clients were museums, he was seriously interested in original pigments used in the 17th and 18th centuries. Stan’s enthusiasm spread to Ed and Joe, who began to research historic Italian varnishes. Ed quoted a widespread belief to underscore the importance of finishes in string instrument making: “The varnish is the secret of the sound.” Stan showed them how to precipitate pigments and make varnishes as an artist would, rather than using methods common among furniture makers. Historically, Ed pointed out, varnish makers were a separate guild from violin makers. Thanks in good part to Stan’s encouragement, Ed’s varnish today is as historically accurate as possible.
“Joe was very anti-capitalist” in those days, Ed said. “He wanted everyone to be treated fairly. When repair work came in, he’d ask, ‘Who wants the job?’” Joe might take 10 percent of the cost of the job, but the rest went to the person who did the work. Ed appreciates the respect for workers inherent in this m.o. but said “it didn’t really work out. Joe wasn’t making any money, and nobody else was [either].”
Ed left Joe’s shop in 1990 and went to work at his childhood home. He’d always kept a work area there, routinely putting in 20-30 hours a week after his regular job. (He’s had his bench, a gift from a neighbor, since he was 12 or 13, and still uses it for carving.) He expanded the shop, and when his parents moved out in 1997, he and Janet bought the place and moved in. “Now,” he said, “the whole house is stuffed up with instruments and wood” – not so surprising when you consider Janet’s a cellist who gives lessons in their home. A devoted instructor, she teaches well into the evenings – from 2:30 in the afternoon to 9:30 or 10 at night in the school season. With the pandemic, however, “everything’s done through Zoom,” said Ed. “It makes it hard, because some of the younger ones can’t physically manage their cellos yet.”
Pandemic-protocol curbside pickup. Arch top guitar made for Nick Albanese.
Despite the pandemic, Ed’s business is thriving. He has six instruments on order after the double bass that’s currently on his bench; his customer has been talking for three years about hiring Ed to make the instrument. “All the musicians I know, they’re out of work. They’re taking on any odd jobs they can find to make money. Some of the greatest musicians. Around here, in New York, they have no work. The ones that would work in clubs, bars, little venues, that’s all out the window. [There’s] minimal work here and there, but not enough to make a living.” For college students who hope to make a living playing music in orchestras, hopes have dwindled. “It’s kind of depressing,” he said. “It’s not good for the music.”
As for that stash of catalpa from his beloved childhood tree, he says, “I have a lot of it. I don’t think I’ll ever get through it all, ’cause I’m 63 now.” Whether Ed uses it up or not, the playground catalpa lives on in the music brought to life through the instruments he makes.
Ed, Eddy and Janet.Elizabeth, Ed and Janet.
A recent picture of Ed’s mother with one of his instruments.
From the vantage point of 2020, it’s jarring to recall a time before you could Google the length of a human colon while taking a bathroom break, share shots via Zoom in real time with friends in another hemisphere or ask Siri for the latest update on the Kardashians. (Then again, why would you want to do any of these?) Has Facebook really been around for just 16 years? Instagram no more than a decade? In fact, the internet itself only became publicly available in 1991.
In the primitive age that preceded this era of often-superficial connection, woodworkers and their fellow artisans had other ways to communicate and show their work to potential buyers. Some published paper catalogs sent to thousands of prospective customers by U.S. Mail. Some bought ads in newspapers and magazines where they might also be lucky enough to have their products featured. Others displayed their work in what we now call brick-and-mortar galleries, in exchange for a cut of the price – often as much as 40 percent. But one of the most affordable ways to show and sell work was at art fairs and craft shows.
After a strong start to 2020, shows, conferences and in-person performances of all kinds have been cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, demanding that those whose livelihoods depend on such events find new ways of teaching, entertaining and selling their wares. Given how challenging such pivots can be, Vicki and Lance Munn have found a silver lining of sorts in the timing of their unexpected retirement in late 2019. For 40 years, they’d supported themselves by making furnishings, from Japanese-style vases, wood-framed mirrors and wall-hung artwork to freestanding cabinets, desks and tables, all of which they sold at shows throughout the Midwest and on the East coast.
Vicki and Lance in 1972, before they began doing shows. (The photograph is water-stained.)
Lance and Vicki met in 1969. Lance, who’d been drafted, was stationed at Fort Riley, Kansas, where Vicki had a job in the post exchange. Lance was lucky to avoid deployment to Vietnam; he served in the States as a member of the military police. “The Army made him grow up,” says Vicki. “All of a sudden you’re not special. You get your head shaved, you wear a uniform. You’re only what you are inside, not the projected image others see.”
After completing his term, Lance moved home to Indianapolis to live and work with his parents, who were in the restaurant business. Vicki earned a degree in political science at Kansas State University-Manhattan while continuing to work part-time at the post exchange. She lived in her employer’s basement. (“At the time, I didn’t realize I was poor,” she says of the arrangement.) She graduated in 1971, packed up her belongings in cardboard boxes, shipped them to Indianapolis on a Greyhound Bus and took a plane to join Lance. Shortly after, they were married.
At first they each worked two jobs, a logistical feat considering that they shared a car – and it was more than 20 years old. Lance returned to college while working part-time and graduated with a degree in biological science from Purdue University. Meanwhile, Vicki worked her way up to office manager in her job at an electrical supply office. When she asked for a raise in keeping with her increased responsibilities, her employer told her the job was only worth the $100 a week she was already getting – not much on which to build a future. With no prospect of advancement, she gave her notice. That would be her last regular job until 2020.
While renting a house on the western outskirts of Indianapolis, they decided to put in a garden. They saved up for a Troy-Bilt tiller; once they’d bought it, they realized they owned a potentially valuable asset, so they ran a classified ad for tilling services in the local paper. Business took off, and before long they needed a pickup truck to move the tiller. “Now we’re in the hauling business,” Vicki remembers thinking. They added moving services to their repertoire and trucked junk to the recycling center for people who were clearing out garages. When winter brought a major ice storm that downed trees, blocking streets and closing the city, they invested in a chainsaw and worked to clear limbs.
Around this time a friend who’d moved to Hawaii sent them a gift of some puka-shell necklaces. Where others saw a cool bit of jewelry made of natural objects, Vicki and Lance saw opportunity: They invested in some shells and made their own necklaces to sell at art fairs. At one show they spotted some wooden planters backed with mirrors – another item Vicki suggested Lance could make. “We had tools,” she says, “because we did everything for ourselves.” The planters sold even better than the jewelry. That was their start in wood.
Their son, Peter Brian, was born in 1977, followed by their daughter, Kelly, two years later. It was time to look for a piece of property to make their own. They searched in Brown County, an area some 60 miles southeast of Indianapolis known for its forested hills and history as a home to artists since the early 20th century, but found nothing affordable. They looked on the outskirts of Bloomington, home to the flagship campus of Indiana University, which draws students and faculty members from around the world. Also unaffordable. From there they set their sights farther to the south and west, in Greene County, where for $40,000 they found a property of 50 acres “with an old farmhouse at the top of a hill and a garage that stood at a slant.” The owner was willing to sell on contract, which clinched the deal. They made the down payment in cash, because that was how people paid for purchases at art shows in the ’70s. “I think they thought we were drug dealers,” Vicki laughs. “We had no business sense at all.” It was 1979. Vicki was 29, Lance 31.
A major show in Indianapolis’s Broadripple neighborhood was coming up in May. They plugged their tools into an outlet in an old shed on their new property and worked in the yard to prepare. Shortly after, they had a 40’ x 40’ pole barn built for a shop. They still weren’t making furniture, but looking back, it’s clear they were headed in that direction as they ventured into simple wooden table bases topped with Italian tile. They learned about wood movement from their mistakes; before long they had to decide between making a fast buck and doing things right. “We read Tage Frid, we read Fine Woodworking, we read books,” Vicki says. “We never considered ourselves artists; we wanted to be the best craftsmen we could.” They named their business Viclan Designs.
Early on, thinking that a business should have employees, they hired a few to work in the shop. Before long they concluded they were chasing their tails. Having employees proved exhausting; as Vicki says, “it was like I’d gone through five divorces and 10 DUIs without ever having had any of them myself.” On top of that, Vicki and Lance were gone all the time; it looked like their children were going to be raised by a babysitter. It made more sense to let the employees go and do everything themselves.
They added more shows every year, packing up their booth and stock for sale and driving – first, to Ann Arbor, Louisville, Cincinnati and Toledo, in addition to selling at shows closer to home in Broadripple and at Bloomington’s Fourth Street Festival, then increasingly far afield. Things improved. “Lance and I together are such a good team,” Vicki says. “People would buy stuff from us because they liked us. People want to meet the artists. The internet is not the same as talking to the artists and touching things before you buy them.” When Peter was a baby, she put him in a crib under one of the tables in the booth, but having two small children at a show was too much, so Lance did some of the shows by himself while Vicki and the kids stayed home.
Special delivery. Lance carrying in a piece for a customer at the Des Moines Arts Festival.
As anyone who has tried to make a living by doing art and craft shows can attest, their schedule was grueling, their income totally undependable. “Shows are fickle,” as Vicki puts it. They always worked hard, but there were years when they made no money beyond basic expenses.
Vicki with fellow exhibitors enjoying mimosas on a Sunday morning, which she calls “an art show tradition among friends.”
Building the Business
They made improvements to the shop as they were able, starting with a loft for storage, then adding another 600 square feet at the back. Later they added 300 square feet more for lumber storage. In 1990 they built a new house to replace the dilapidated farmhouse. They’d started with antique equipment – a chain-fed rip saw from the 1930s, a ’40s overhead router – driving to auctions and buying what they could afford. Their first piece of new equipment was a wide-belt sander they purchased in the mid-1980s; they took out a loan to pay the $10,000 cost. For their anniversary around 2014, they bought each other a Powermatic band saw – an unusual anniversary gift, but they enjoyed buying things for the business because it made their lives easier.
The beloved Powermatic band saw. “I loved that beast,” Vicki says.“The cabinet was a custom order for a couple in Washington, D.C.,” she wrote when I asked about it. “They furnished their condo with our olive and smoke-dyed tiger maple pieces. Olive was one of my custom colors. We made a dining table for them. We delivered while doing a show in Bethesda, Md. We ate their first meal on the table with them.”
The more they learned, the more sophisticated their work became and their sales improved. Vicki traveled to Japan in 2000; Peter’s girlfriend, a Japanese-American, was teaching English there and invited her to visit. “It was my 50th birthday present,” she explains, adding that Lance took the opportunity to go fly fishing in New Zealand. During her month in Japan, Vicki happened on a thousand-year-old pagoda. “It was red,” she exclaims, which prompted her to wonder “Why can’t we do red?” They started to experiment with aniline dyes.
Red.Vicki says they sold this cabinet for use in almost every room of the house.
Experience had taught them the importance of having smaller, affordable pieces to sell at shows. “If you have an item that sells, that gives you the freedom to make other things that you want to.” For a while they made Craftsman-style picture frames. Vicki was drawn to the Japanese art of floral arranging called ikebana. Ikebana vessels became one of their business staples; she made them until she was sick of them, then kept on making more. She cut out the basic shape at the band saw, then moved to the edge sander. “I’d put on my headphones and step up to the edge sander and go “fifty dollars, fifty dollars, fifty dollars. I know a lot of our artist friends would say ‘how can you do that?’ And I’d say ‘it pays our phone, it pays our gas…’ When you’re selling something for $50 it’s an easier sale then something for $5,000. Pretty soon, as we got into the better shows, we could [afford to] make cabinets.”
Ikebana vessel with yarrow, daylily and garlic scape from the Munns’ garden.
As time went by, the Munns found they could sell more substantial pieces. “Mostly we looked at ourselves and thought ‘how can anybody pay that?’ But as [we did] the better shows, we always seemed to pick up someone who would buy more than one piece, and then they’d call and [ask for custom work]. We made things for people that they couldn’t find. Often in later years we would sell more by order than from the booth.”
In their booth, ready to sell. Fourth Street Festival, Bloomington, Ind., 2018.
Among the unusual features of their work are the wooden pulls they made for doors and drawers.
Pull options: smooth or gnarly.
Lance had made a pull like those on the olive-tiger maple cabinet (in the image with the band saw) for some doors in their house. “I always loved them,” Vicki says. “At first when we got into the cabinets, we offered two types of pulls…smooth and gnarly.” She notes that they “would invariably have the wrong pull on the cabinet the customer wanted in the booth,” a situation that will be familiar to most of those who build to order. “Finally, gnarly won out. [Making those was] a very dirty job on the bullnose of our edge sander. Lance did an excellent job of making matched sets of pulls. I was never able to get two the same.”
Business & Aging
Today Vicki is 70, Lance 72. For most of their years in business, Viclan Designs was organized as a sole proprietorship, but when Lance was old enough to qualify for Social Security, their accountant advised them to incorporate so that their joint income wouldn’t disqualify them for the Social Security they were due.
Vicki working on one of the biggest pieces they ever made, a walnut closet for a loft in Kansas City.
They finished parts of this cabinet before clamping, which Vicki says made things “very nerve wracking as we put it together.”
Lance working on the same cabinet. (For those interested in his excellent tool jacket, please look here.)
When I asked about economic downturns such as the Great Recession, which devastated many furniture makers, Vicki said they’ve always come through relatively unscathed. Some of their artist friends maintained that Vicki and Lance charged too little for their work, but as Vicki says, “We always felt we need to make a living at this,” so they made sure they had pieces that were all but guaranteed to sell.
The Munns’ granddaughter, Piper.
Having started with so little, they spent 40 years investing in their shop and business and were rewarded not just with higher income, but opportunities to grow as designers and craftspersons. With loyal customers who returned yearly to buy from them at shows around the Midwest and on the East coast, in addition to commissioning custom work, they were enjoying a successful season in 2019 and building up stock for the upcoming Fourth Street Festival – Vicki was a longstanding member of the show’s organizing committee.
In the small hours of August 5th, they awoke to the sound of someone banging on the front door. “We have no neighbors,” Vicki remarks, recalling the shock. It was the sheriff, asking “Does anybody live in that building?” He was pointing to their shop.
“The roof was already [falling] in,” Vicki says. A stranger who happened to be passing on the road a half-mile away had spotted the flames and called 911. By then it was too late – the building, the tools, the lumber, the completed pieces ready for the upcoming show and their two shop cats – all gone.
“Every woodworker’s worst nightmare,” Vicki calls this image.
The shock was devastating. They wracked their minds, trying to figure out what had happened. It was August; the woodstove had been cold for months. Nor had they been staining, she was relieved to realize. In their early days, when they worked in the garage at a rented house, they used Danish oil; after working late one night they’d dumped the rags in their garden cart and pushed it out on the driveway. The only thing left of the cart the next morning was the wheels. After that, they’d always been extremely careful with finishes, storing rags in a firmly shut can and finishes in a metal safety cabinet. An inspector suspected the fire had started in the electrical wiring.
Although they’d insured the shop in their early years, the cost of coverage had gone through the roof. First it was $4,000 a year, then $5,000. Pretty soon the premium had increased to $10,000, partly because they heated with wood and used solvent-based finishes, partly because their location was so remote and the local fire department was all-volunteer. They’d decided they would just have to be careful.
Friends organized a fundraiser. “That saved us,” says Vicki. “It enabled us to pay off our bills. We had just gotten lumber on Friday, a delivery of cherry, and the fire was Sunday.” Not only did they still have to pay for that lumber; they also had to return deposits to customers who had commissioned pieces to pick up at upcoming shows – Cherry Creek (in Colorado) and Ann Arbor (in Michigan). “We had some customers who wouldn’t even take their deposits back,” she says, her voice breaking. (Among them were the patrons for whom Vicki and Lance made the olive-tiger maple cabinet in the photo of the band saw.) “It makes you feel good about yourself and thankful for other people.”
“We lost our cats, our bicycles, our kayaks. And all of the little things. We paid off our bills, returned our deposits, and got a grant from CERF (the Craft Emergency Relief Fund) and bought tools.” The maximum grant available through CERF is $3,000. “To us it was $3,000-worth of tools. We didn’t have that money.” This time, they bought smaller tools – a Festool sander, a Domino mortiser, a track saw – that enable them to work on projects around the house, but not the kind of furniture they used to make.
Their daughter offered Vicki a part-time job in her medical office to help her parents make ends meet. They also receive some Social Security income. “We’re not doing anything great, but we’re happy. We’re pleased to have more time for our granddaughter, Piper,” Vicki says, adding “we miss the shop.”
Bundles of joy. Tuck (left) and Kiki shortly, after their adoption.
After decades of not having a dog because they were on the road for so much of each year, they adopted a couple of Labrador puppies, Kiki and Tuck, in July.
Growing up. A more recent portrait.
They took down their website, because most of their inventory was destroyed. “We were in shock for a long time. Then came COVID. But life is getting more normal. If it weren’t for the fire, we’d still be working in the shop…. We have just a few things left that we are showing at By Hand Gallery in Bloomington. Basically, we are starting a new life in our seventies.”
Heading home from a show (with bike on front of truck).
