Our pottery supplier ran out of our glaze colors for our latest batch of 20-ounce steins. Because we weren’t sure when the potters would get our color back in, we tried a new glaze combination: red over a dark blue.
Of course, as soon as these red/blue steins arrived here, the pottery was able to get our old glaze color.
So we are left with one batch of about 100 steins that are red over blue. Instead of trying to stock two colors or something equally complicated, we decided to simply sell this small batch at a significant discount. Normally our handmade steins are $39. We are selling these for $24.
These are handmade by individual potters in Minnesota. They are not in any way defective. In fact, they are dang-near perfect. They are just not in the color we’ve been using.
Click here to order the ones on sale for $24 plus shipping.
Izzi the dog with Dan in his office, where he keeps his drafting table and library.
Dan Phillips doesn’t advertise or have a website, so when Christopher Schwarz suggested he’d make a good subject for a profile, adding “he has a great eye,” I looked him up on Instagram. Here’s a guy who doesn’t give a fig for the accepted wisdom about social media, I thought; Daniel’s feed is a colorful mix of drawings, paintings, home interiors, music, kids and woodworking tools, all with a good dose of irony. Scattered among the variety you’ll find images of dovetails, other joinery details and finished furniture pieces. Not for Dan the segregation of woodworking from “life” or any of the other interests that characterize it, a different Instagram account for every one. How refreshing.
Painting. “Girl Sitting at a Chair.” Gouache on paper.
Given what I saw, I wasn’t surprised to learn that Dan, who goes by D.H. Phillips, is the son of artist parents. Born in Dallas in 1976, he’s the middle of three children. His father, Harvey Phillips, shifted from visual art to architecture early in Dan’s life. “For as long as I can remember that’s what he did, and still does,” Dan says. His mother, Susie Phillips, remains a practicing artist in paint.
Dan’s dad was also a professional carpenter who always had a woodshop of one kind or another. “As soon as I was old enough to work a bit, he would take me, first, to demolition sites,” says Dan. “Then I learned to frame houses and sheetrock and all that stuff. I really liked being in the shop more than at somebody’s house.” As he grew more interested in design, H.C. Westermann, a sculptor and two-dimensional artist, became a strong influence. “I wanted to learn that more fancy woodworking stuff, and that wasn’t really in my dad’s [wheelhouse].” Ambitious, he made a dovetailed box on the bandsaw “with lots of wood putty.”
Dan’s former wife is a paper conservator. One of her grad school teachers had trained in the book-binding program at North Bennett Street School. He looked the place up, took a two-week class in fundamentals of fine woodworking and says “That was it.” He applied to the full-time program. He was still motivated by two-dimensional artistic interests, “but once I was there, furniture making totally took over.”
Dan attended NBSS from 2005 to 2007. “I loved finding out about the early American decorative arts. We’d go on museum trips, and I loved the furniture. But all the other stuff – the quilts, paintings, folk art – that whole classical early American thing really did something for me,” he says.
Bar. Inside, there’s storage for beverages. The cabinet is mahogany, the doors are redwood burl and the top is granite.
Couch and lounge chairs with coffee table. Walnut, with the end panels on the couch of crotch walnut. House of Vonne, an upholsterer friend in Portland, Ore., made the upholstery; the cushions are removable.The coffee table base is ambrosia maple.
Built-in end tables of crotch walnut, detail.
Rear view. Walnut burl panels. Dan sought out the golden tone of the sapwood for contrast.
“There’s an aesthetic that carries through the periods,” he continues. “A piece of scrimshaw looks just as awesome to me as a federal secretary. That pre-industrial stuff…. You can see the hand in everything. I love to draw – I don’t use computers for drawing – so maybe there’s something there…a tactile thing, a certain crudeness, no matter how fancy something might look. You can tell it’s handmade, and I love seeing the transition through the periods and the details that stick, the things that change.”
After his time in Boston Dan moved back to Dallas in 2007 and set up in his dad’s shop. Slowly, at first, he began to get commissions; the first was a coffee table for his mom. Then, he says, “It just kind of snowballed. It’s been pretty steady.” There are times he’s overwhelmed and others when “my fingers are crossed that something’s going to pop up. I just sort of made furniture making my reality, whether commissioned work was actually happening or not.”
“From my scrimshaw fascination,” says Dan of this top piece, reminiscent of a sperm whale. White gouache on black paper. The bottom one is a photograph of a walnut sculpture Dan made, approximately 36″ long x 6″ tall.
Whales in black ink, painted with brush, on paper. This is the interior of the cabin in the gallery, mentioned in the text below. You can see glimpses of the three furniture pieces as well.
A comic depicting a true event, with Dan’s father reminding him to wear safety glasses when working on the table saw.
Dan’s work comes mostly through word of mouth. Although he posts work on Instagram, he says “I’m not sure how much business I get from it.” He always asks people how they found him. It’s usually from a friend, or they saw something he’d made.
Today he makes mostly residential stuff – desks, sideboards, wall units, beds, chairs but mostly “loungey” chairs. “I don’t know that I’ve ever made any dining chairs.” There are dining tables…some work for offices, such as desks, about which he remarks, “you can have some fun with all the drawers and hidden compartments.” At present his favorite thing is case pieces.
Sideboard, detail. Mahogany with a granite top. The drawer pulls are metal; Dan had them made for another job and had ordered a few extra. The moulded corners keep things from rolling off the top. “In my drawing I felt like it needed one more little bump, and that’s what I came up with.” He had the granite fabricators drill holes for dowels based on a template.
He works in mahogany and walnut, primarily darker woods and says, “I draw the piece and it will become obvious what wood to use.”
Mahogany high chair. Dan made this one for his daughter.
Dresser in mahogany with olive ash burl drawer faces. The handles are from an antique store; Dan was experimenting with unconventional placement.
He’s still a very active painter, too. His paintings, he says, “have evolved over time. I first did them as train graffiti tags, then moved to paper.” He paints in watercolors and washes but sometimes reverts to colored pencil and watercolors. Most are gouache on paper.
Painting of a mirror, life-size. Gouache on paper. Dan didn’t build the mirror; the painting represents one of the objects he “wish[es] people would commission.”
He sells in a gallery, though recent work has been commissioned. “I never just ‘make art.’ I’ve got to have a reason. There’s someone who’s commissioned a piece, or I have a show coming up. The furniture scratches so many of those itches. I do a ton of drawing, so I never miss out on drawing stuff,” he says.
Dan’s shop is in a former Ford Motor Company manufacturing plant, a huge building near Fair Park in Dallas. He’s been there about 10 years. Before that, he worked in a Quonset hut. “That was not good! Whatever the weather was outside, that’s what it was in there. I couldn’t make fancy furniture.” He moved into a friend’s jewelry studio, but it became too cramped. He currently has about 5,000 square feet in the whole shop, but that includes a couple of office/bench rooms, a storage room, a machine room and more. A Plexiglas fabricator uses half the space; Dan and his dad use the other.
Home is near the shop. In fact, Dan says, most of his existence takes place within about a 7-minute-drive circle. Even his kids’ school is within that radius.
One of the few times Dan has repeated himself and made a design again, after the original commission. These chairs are of walnut, with channeled leather upholstery.
Dresser in walnut with maple drawers. Asymmetrically cut-out pulls.
Jewelry box. Mahogany with painted black details. The long black horizontal strips are drawer bottoms, protruding at the front and intended to function as pulls.
Drawing on the Past Dan looks to antiques as a starting point. He has no interest in making period furniture as such but incorporates details he likes in his own work. “It’s an opportunity to participate [in furniture making] the same way the old guys did. You get these pattern books from Sheraton or Hepplewhite and use them as a starting point. The proportions…they worked it out! [Master those proportions, and your piece] already looks good. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel,” he says. Dan draws in pencil on printer paper and keeps refining designs, then makes a scale drawing and adjusts accordingly; for example, seat height is important when he’s making one of those “loungey” chairs, so he’ll base it on that.
He refines his drawings, which he calls doodles, until he’s satisfied. Then the challenge is “trying to get things to look like my ‘doodle.’ Sometimes things in the doodle are totally unrealistic, so I’m just trying to figure out how to get the same visual effect in the drawing. I like to draw stuff, and draw a lot of it. I’ve just developed a certain style from doing that. I probably have 8,000 drawings of furniture.”
Dan’s father’s wife gave him these notes her own dad had taken. He thought they’d make a good background for his own drawings.
Home & Family
From left: Mugsy, Jackie and Velena; the kids are sitting on Paul McCobb chairs.
Dan lives with Jackie Dunn Smith, an artist who paints and does tattoos, devoting about half her work time to each. They have two children; their daughter, Velena Phillips, is 10. Their son, Mugsy Smith, is 14.
Dan’s mother’s family moved to north Texas from Pennsylvania via Oklahoma. His father’s side came from Kansas, where they were asparagus farmers; then, in a turn of events worthy of his arch Instagram feed, his paternal grandfather won a contest held on the radio that came with flying lessons as the prize. After training, that grandpa became a pilot, flew in the Second World War and went on to a career as a pilot for now-defunct Braniff International Airways. That’s what brought his father’s family to Dallas when his dad was in high school.
Their home is furnished with all sorts of things, many of Dan’s own making. For one show he built a 12’x 18′ cabin and furnished it with a bed, blanket chest and lounge chair. The installation was for sale, but it didn’t sell, so he ended up with the three furniture pieces. He also has furniture he made in training. As for the family dining table, he got that back from a client who moved and couldn’t use it; the client thought that Dan might be able to sell it, but there were no takers. He wanted to keep it, and in the end, they said he could. The rest of their home is furnished with a mix of antiques and IKEA.
When asked to sum up his work as a furniture maker, Dan says,
Simply, it’s what I do. If I had to analyze it I’d say that I like the place I’m in, where people are aware of my thing and that they are choosing me for the thing they want. There is no shortage of available furniture. It’s almost ridiculous to be making more. But I’m glad to be doing it. I love the art form. I love hearing what the client wants and the spark that goes off in my brain and the subsequent pencil to paper to hash out the general idea. I love the first impression and the miles of yellow tracing paper refining the design. I love making a presentation drawing for the client to look at. Once they say yes, I love getting out the big paper and using the drafting table. I love the problem solving of turning the doodle into a set of working drawings. I love figuring out how much wood I need and looking at the available wood that will work.
I loathe figuring out how much something will cost. But then they say yes and the wood shows up and you agonize about how to break it down and then you break it down and then it’s a mad fever of strategy and efficient work flow until you don’t have anything else to do but get some photographs made and deliver it. Pretty damn fun. Glad to be able to participate in a centuries old way to make your way.
A friend of mine who has lately begun to keep bees is finding them a great source of new interest. He steals down to his garden to have a look at them whenever he can snatch a moment from his work. It is like peeping into another world, he says, and it sends him back to his work feeling refreshed and stimulated. There are worlds within worlds in this complex universe of ours, and so much of the time we go on our way ignoring everything but our own particular little one. It seemed to me when I was first introduced to his hive on a lovely day in June that his garden must be a bees’ paradise. It stretches away down a hillside, a great part of it left as much as possible in its natural state. This part shimmered with the blossom of late flowering thorn trees, while underfoot were blossoming wild strawberries, trefoil and wild thyme, and through and over it all was the contented hum of bees, little master craftsmen with an amplitude of good material at hand.
•••
It made me feel how much we all need other worlds in times like these, each man according to his own needs or tastes, whether we find it in study, or in some special activity, like woodwork, or like my friend who chanced upon a little world of Nature’s, to find that it lifted him right out of the worries and anxieties of the present. We let so much remain a closed book to us when we come to adult life, whereas as children we found the whole world fascinating. It would be good for us all if we could do so still.
— Charles Hayward, The Woodworker magazine, 1941, excerpted from “Honest Labour“
Left: Joined chair from Vaive Parish in Cesis District, 19th c., drawing done in 1928 by Olgerts Erdmanis, collection of the Latvian National History Museum. Right: Bentwood chair drawn by Johann Christoph Brotze, late 18th c., collection of the University of Latvia Academic Library.
The Turned & Joined Chair
Production of the joined chair began as a cottage industry in the last quarter of the 18th century in Briezi and Striki (western Latvia). The start of chair making as a main source of income was likely due to the shortage of land suitable for farming. Chair making spread to other areas and it is estimated that each year a family could make 70-100 dozen (840-1200) chairs for sale in Kurzeme, Estonia and parts of Russia.
Left: Chairs for sale at a Limbazi market (northeast of Riga), 1920s, Limbazi Museum. Photo from “Folk Art 1840-1890” by Inese Sirica in “Art History of Latvia, vol. 3, Book 1, ed. Eduards Klavins. Right: Limbazi chair, dated 1773, collection of the Ethnographic Open-Air Museum of Latvia.
In the Home Industry section of “Woodworking in Estonia” Ants Viires wrote, “As regards chairs, the Latvian product sold at all the fairs was predominant in Estonia for many years.” He described the chair as “mostly of turned wood with a straw seat, later also a wooden seat.” The estimated annual output by Latvian craftsmen was 12,000 chairs.
As you can see, the biggest difference between the Latvian chair and many American examples are the thin back sticks instead of back slats. The seat of the chair was woven from reeds gathered from lakes near the chair making areas. The weaving was done in various patterns and usually by women. This chair is still made today both by hand and in factories.
Left: Birch chair, early 20th c., collection of the Ethnographic Open-Air Museum of Latvia. Right: More recent examples of the chair.
In 1980 the BDM (Ethnographic Open-Air Museum of Latvia) asked chairmaker Eduards Tanne (born 1897) to make one of the traditional turned and joined chairs. Tanne, age 82, gamely took up the request. The video was digitized and subtitled and you can watch this wonderful craftsman make a chair, from chopping down a tree to weaving the seat, here.
Eduards Tanne, Chairmaker.
The Bentwood Chair
This is an odd duck of a chair. The first documentation of the chair was by Johann Christoph Brotze late in the 18th century. Brotze (Johans Kristofs Broce in Latvian) was German and after completing his studies arrived in Riga in 1768 to teach at the Riga Imperial Lyceum. For the next 46 years, until his death in 1823, he traveled the country documenting, drawing and painting all that he saw. His trove of everyday life is in the University of Latvia Academic Library. One page dedicated to the bentwood chair.
Brotze’s (Broce’s) page describing the bentwood chair.
I can barely read Brotze’s handwriting and relied on the description of the chair in “Latvie Tautes Dzives Pieminekli” written by Saulvedis Cimermanis and published in 1969. According to Cimermanis, four pieces of ash or hazel, each no more than 5 centimeters in diameter, are used (the length of each piece is not provided). Each piece is notched where it will be bent. The ends must be carved to a conical shape so that after clamping into the appropriate notch (or bend) the end does not slip out. Brotze’s letter-sequenced diagram shows how the four bent pieces fit together. As for the bending process, we know that steam bending had long been used by coopers, wheelwrights and shipbuilders and to make sled runners. I imagine Brotze saw this bentwood chair as very unusual compared to the joined and staked chairs with which he would have been familiar. Fortunately, he not only wrote about it, he drew it.
When I first found the diagram of this chair I sent it to Chris Schwarz for his opinion. His answer was he would love to see a surviving example of a chair made in this manner. It turns out a bentwood chair from Rucava (far southwest corner of Latvia) marked with the year “1890” on the back was in the collection of the Ethnographic Open-Air Museum. This proved the chair was still being made late in the 19th century and had been made as shown in Brotze’s diagram. Chris’ response: “Oh wow. Just wow.” And, how.
We don’t know how far back this method of chair construction goes. Also, I don’t know if the chair in the photograph (Cimermanis’s book was published in 1969) is still intact. Cimermanis noted one other example of this type of chair construction and cited the work of Polish ethnographer Kazimierz Moszynski. In Volume 1 of ”Kultura Ludowa Slowian” Moszynski had a drawing of a bentwood stool that originated in west central Russia, approximately 800 miles east of Moscow.
OK, I have to add one more chair. There are thousands of brettstuhls in museums in Europe and North America. The backs often have intricate piercings and carvings and they have never appealed to me. However, I have taken a fancy to a 19th-century Latvian chicken-backed brettstuhl.
We are delighted to announce that “Euclid’s Door: Building the Tools of ‘By Hand & Eye’“ – the latest artisan geometry offering from George Walker and Jim Tolpin – is now at the printer. We’ve made the order page live in our store so that you can sign up to be notified when it’s available. (Just click the “notify me” button on the book’s page – Christopher Schwarz has written more about that new feature here, should you wish to read more about it.)
“Euclid’s Door” is an illustrated how-to journey through building eight wooden tools (tools that have been around since ancient times) that should be in every furniture maker’s toolbox. As you work your way through the making, you’ll also learn how to tune each tool to an incredibly high level – lessons that will be useful in all your work. (And the geometry really is easy to follow – even I, a mathphobic – had no trouble with it.)
As are all Lost Art Press books, “Euclid’s Door” is being printed in the United States. It will be a cloth-covered hardbound 115-page book, with a sewn and glued binding for durability.
