Lost Art Press

Category: Welsh Stick Chairs by John Brown

Molly Brown to Illustrate ‘The Life & Work of John Brown’

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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.

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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.

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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.

— Christopher Schwarz

The Acceptance Speech

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Whenever I finish an important project, I feel I should give a cheesy “acceptance speech” like you see for awards programs (“I’d like to thank all the world’s mentally defective sea turtles…”). Though my speech (said quietly to myself) always thanks certain tools and fellow woodworkers.

Were I a wanker, I would post photos of my latest chair and say things like: Check my new design, brh. Then a series of acronyms – FISKET and YAMLO. Then the hashtags – #gravycouncil #billyraycoochierash #sponsored.

But that’s not fair. Every piece of furniture is the culmination of the designer’s experiences, influences and previous work. We’re just the blender that takes these ingredients and frapps the frothy result. And so I try to acknowledge these influences whenever possible.

For this chair, the most obvious inspiration is the later chairs of John Brown, author of “Welsh Stick Chairs.” In learning more about the life of John Brown, I discovered Christopher Williams, who worked closely with Brown on these chairs to refine and lighten the historical examples. (We are bringing Chris back in 2019 for at least one – maybe two – more incredible classes on building his chair.)

Chris’s chairs are very dramatic (and I say that in the best possible way). I don’t have the stones to use the rake and splay he does on his legs. So I started with an 18th- or 19th-century Welsh chair shown in a Shire booklet on Welsh furniture that was written by Richard Bebb.

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Here’s where some of the other elements of the chair come from. The raised spindle deck is a design feature I’ve been playing with for a year or more. I developed it out of frustration, really. I have always tried to get a crazy-crisp gutter between the spindle deck and the seat. And I’ve never managed to make myself happy. So by raising the spindle deck, I get that sharp shadow line I want.

The armbow is a typical three-piece bow. On historical chairs, the thicker section usually has a decorative detail on its ends – a bead, ogee or some such. I decided to use a 30° bevel to repeat the bevel on the underside of the seat and the underside of the “hands” of the armbow. Nothing earth-shattering.

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The “hands” of my armbow aren’t from any particular source that I am conscious of. Many Welsh chairs have rounded hands, something I wanted to avoid. But I wanted the hands to get wider so the armbow didn’t look static, like a steam-bent armbow. So I used a French curve to accelerate the radius on the armbow until the hands were wider. Then I used a French curve to add a slight arc on the front of the hand to tip my hat to the rounded hands of historical chairs.

I beveled the front of the underside of the hands at 30° so the sitter had something to do while listening to a relative drone.

The crest rail is smaller than I usually make – only 1-3/4” tall. I did this so that it will be easy for other people to make this crest if they don’t have access to thick stock or steam-bending equipment. This crest is cut easily from solid material. The front of the crest is – surprise – a 30° bevel, repeating the other bevels on the chair.

The finish – black over red milk paint – is a process developed by Peter Galbert.

I am sure that there are other influences running through this design that I’m not conscious of. But I am told we have to cut for a commercial break.

— Christopher Schwarz

Stick Chairs of the World, Unite!

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I’ve long been obsessed with Welsh stick chairs. But if you’ve known me for more than 5 minutes, you know I’m going to prod the historical record to see what else might be lurking in the dim corners of early homes.

Stick chairs can be found in many cultures. In fact, every culture that researcher Suzanne Ellison and I start investigating has some variant of this chair.

This is no surprise. A stick chair is a logical answer to the question: How do you build a chair quickly with few tools and few materials?

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For this blog entry, I pulled some of the photos we’ve collected from Western Europe. What I love about these examples is how the same idea is interpreted slightly differently. Some of these are – to my eye – sublime (even if they are intended for night soil).

— Christopher Schwarz

‘Welsh Stick Chairs’ Now Shipping

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Our warehouse began shipping pre-publication orders for “Welsh Stick Chairs” yesterday and is working on getting the remainder out in the mail today.

I’m going to be a bit of a wiener here and say that I think our edition exceeds the quality of all the previous editions. This had little to do with me and everything to do with our prepress agency, the special printing press we used for this job and the press operators.

In comparing the images among all the editions of “Welsh Stick Chairs” I own, I can find no image degradation in ours. The text is, of course, super crisp because we reset the entire thing using the original fonts and line spacing from the first edition (even replicating a number of typesetting errors in the interest of accuracy).

The biggest manufacturing improvement is that we sewed the signatures in addition to bedding them in adhesive, making for a permanent book.

John Brown’s words are, of course, the same and cannot be improved upon.

Even if you decide to pass on purchasing this book, don’t worry. We’ve made sure our edition will be around for generations to come when you (or your children) decide to pick up a copy.

“Welsh Stick Chairs” is $29, which includes domestic shipping (yes, even to Alaska and Hawaii).

— Christopher Schwarz

Why Add Stretchers to a Chair (And Why Not?)

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A fair number of the stick and staked chairs that I make lack stretchers between the legs. But some of my chairs have them. So I get asked regularly: When do you use stretchers and why?

The simple answer is I add stretchers when the customer wants them. But that’s not a helpful answer for those getting started in designing and building chairs.

First a little history: Chairs don’t have to have stretchers to survive. I’ve seen plenty of chairs that have survived 300 years or more without stretchers. And yet, because most modern chairs have stretchers, a chair can look odd or alarming without them.

Stretchers add rigidity to the undercarriage and make the lower area of the chair visually balanced with the stuff above the seat – the spindles, arms and other hoo-ha. And they really aren’t a lot of labor to add to a chair. I’d guess that the stretchers add about an hour to the construction time of a typical chair.

So I guess the question then becomes: Why would you omit stretchers? A lack of raw material? Stylistic reasons? A lack of skill by the maker?

I think those reasons are unlikely.

The best explanation I’ve read is in Claudia Kinmonth’s “Irish Country Furniture: 1700-1950” (Yale). She begins her explanation with a description of the damp and earthen floors in a typical cottage. Then she adds:

Uneven floors have a bad effect upon seats with legs rigidly joined by stretchers. Except for mass-produced chairs, the majority of locally made stools and chairs had independent unlinked legs, which could be individually removed and replaced by the householder whenever they become worn or loose. This lack of stretchers combined with the common use of the through-wedged tenon to attach the legs to the seats, meant that chairs could survive inclement periods for long periods.

Kinmonth then goes on to describe several historical examples of stools and chairs that have had repairs.

To me, ease of construction and repair makes the most sense. If anyone else has a better explanation, you know what to do.

— Christopher Schwarz

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