After graduation, [Jonathan] Fisher married Dolly Battle of Dedham, Mass., and accepted a call to minister to the frontier town of Blue Hill in the District of Maine. Situated about halfway up the Maine coast, Blue Hill is the subject of many idyllic landscape paintings. The jagged and rocky shoreline, salty ocean air and lush forests have long attracted tourists looking to get away from city life.
As welcome a vacation spot as midcoast Maine is today, in the first half of the 19th century it was inhospitable frontier wilderness. Between the notoriously recalcitrant populace and the lack of resources, the isolated frontier was a daunting mission. Kevin Murphy described Blue Hill in the 1790s as “a clutch of rude dwellings surrounded by some rickety tidal mills.” (2) The benefits of serving in a well-established town were not lost on Fisher. Before accepting the call to rural Blue Hill, he also considered a pastorate in Ashby, Mass., “in the heart of a well settled country,” which offered closer proximity to family, better compensation, assistance from fellow ministers and more “temporal conveniences.” For a Harvard-trained minister, the allure of urban ministry was real. Despite this temptation, Fisher felt a divine call to serve in this frontier setting – the “infant part of the country” – because “it [was] difficult for them to find a sufficient number of candidates, who [were] willing even to come and preach among them, and much less to settle.” (3) As one man said, “We are so as it wore out of the wourld that we don’t hardly know wether we do rite or rong but we mean to do as well as we can.” (4)
Late 19th-century Blue Hill historian, R.G.F. Candage, recalled: “In personal appearance Father Fisher was below medium height; he dressed in ancient style, with small clothes, knee buckles and shoes, and a long waisted coat, his head bald and thrown slightly forward, with his whole demeanor and appearance clerical and grave; no one could see him and doubt his profession.” This image of the publicly austere reverend concurs with other contemporary descriptions of him, but reading his journals and personal correspondence one can’t help but be impressed with his warmth and piety. Kevin Murphy’s assessment of Fisher’s demeanor concurs with my own: “Fisher’s public persona – serious, and probably overbearing and too exacting for his parishioners – overshadowed the private Fisher, who emerges from his letters and diaries and from the words of his family as sensitive, intelligent, and inspiring.” (5) Or as Mary Ellen Chase put it: “He mingled authority with love.” (6)
Jonathan Fisher’s life was far from easy. He regularly dealt with migraine headaches, stomach pains, diarrhea and serious injuries from manual labor. Despite these trials, Fisher resigned himself under the hand of Providence. Accounts such as that of August 28th, 1818, are common: “Came on for Bluehill exercised with pain in my side, back and bowels and with diarrhoea. Called at Phin. Osgood’s, Jr. Reached home 10 P.M. Took sop pills and mullein tea. Found the family well, except Josiah, wounded by an ax. Have reason to bless God that we are all yet spared in life, that we have so many comforts indulged us.” Even in the midst of debilitating physical pain, Fisher carried on with the work at hand. On March 17, 1826, his journal reads, “High N.W. scattering clouds, cold. From 9 A.M. ‘till about 5 P.M. exercised with earache, some of the time severely. Tried first camphor on wool, then hot tobacco smoke, then had several drops of West Indian Rum dropped in. This in the first trial gave a little relief; in the second removed the severity of the pain. At intervals through the day planed out stuff for a common ruler, a pair of parallel rulers and modern dividers, finished the latter, A part of the time walked the room in great pain. It is easy to bear pain when we do not feel it, but when it is acute, then to bear it with patience is something.” He was a resilient man. Not owning a horse until late in his life, he was known to regularly travel long distances on foot, even as far as Bangor, 40 miles away.
Fisher’s most active furniture-making years were between 1796 (when he settled in Blue Hill) and 1820 (when he paid off all his home- and farm-building debt). The years between the Revolutionary War and 1820 (when Maine achieved statehood) were formative years for the new nation. This was especially true for the “easternmost countries” of Massachusetts, which were then called the District of Maine. Maine’s struggle for independence during these years can be seen as a “microcosm of the larger quest for national identity.” (7) Politically, demographically and socially, the District of Maine had been an “outpost” of Massachusetts since the late 17th century.
Maine derived most of its cultural influence from Boston in the same way that Bostonians looked to London for the latest fashions. Despite this deep-rooted “Boston prestige” during Fisher’s life, Maine was developing an identity apart from Massachusetts. It is not surprising, then, that Maine’s art during the Federal era often reflects this emerging sense of identity, blending vernacular/folk traditions with the sophistication of academic training.
(2) Murphy, Kevin D., Jonathan Fisher of Blue Hill, Maine: Commerce, Culture, and Community on the Eastern Frontier, University of Massachusetts Press, 2010, p 3. (3) Letter to Ashby from Fisher, October 26, 1795. (4) Harding, Samuel B., The Contest over the Ratification of the Federal Constitution in the State of Massachusetts, New York: Longmans-Green, 1896, p 8, quoted in Banks, Ronald F., Maine Becomes a State: The Movement to Separate Maine from Massachusetts, 1785-1820, New Hampshire Publishing Co.; Wesleyan/Maine Historical Society, 1973, 4, p 9. (5) Murphy, Kevin D., Jonathan Fisher of Blue Hill, Maine: Commerce, Culture, and Community on the Eastern Frontier, University of Massachusetts Press, 2010, p 13. (6) Chase, Mary Ellen Jonathan Fisher, Maine Parson 1768-1847, The MacMillan Co., 1948, p 279. (7) Clarke, Charles E.; Leamon, James S. and Bowden, Karen, Maine in the Early Republic, Maine Historical Society and Maine Humanities Council, 1988, p 12.
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 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.
I’ve been home all week scraping stair corners and running a floor edger, so I haven’t gotten a lot done on my Dutch tool chest book (I would much rather be working on the Dutch tool chest book…). But that doesn’t mean I’ve not made progress! I’m on track to turn it in to my editor (that would be Christopher Schwarz) by the end of March 2021, and will work on the book’s design while he’s reading. With luck – and no floor renovation disasters – it will be out this summer.
One single-bay chest (aka the small version) is done and currently serving as window decoration (it still needs a good paint job); I’m mulling over options for a couple different mobile bases for it. A double-bay chest (aka the large version) is partially done and sitting atop my Anarchist’s tool chest, awaiting my return to the shop. I’ll build at least one more chest – size to be determined – so I can show three different options for the back and lids. And possibly a fourth.
I’ve a folder full of research notes on vintage slant-lid tool chests (and other slant-lid storage), and I’m collecting images from readers for the gallery (If you have high-resolution images you’d like to share, please send me an email!). I think that will be an important inspirational section – I can only outfit so many interiors, after all. And I’m working with Orion Henderson at Horton Brasses to offer a forged hardware kit (I’ll be recommending some low-budget-friendly options as well).
So what am I’m going to do with all these chests and bases? After I finish up the “beauty shots” (for chapter openers and possibly for the cover), they’ll be for sale. If anyone wants to put in a preemptive order, send me an email. Prices start at $850, and vary depending on size and hardware. And you can choose your paint color…as long as it’s not too crazy. Or be crazy. I can always paint crazy atop not-crazy.
— Fitz
P.S. To bring it back to my lead: Has anyone reading this used PoloPlaz Primero 275 VOC Finish on their floors? If so, thoughts?
The hardest part of writing a book is that I forbid myself from reading for pleasure until my book is done.
My problem is what some people call “code switching” – where you imitate a local accent. Sometimes unwittingly. At my last corporate job, we had a corporate VP who spoke in a Cockney dialect. Whenever we were in a meeting with the guy, a coworker would start talking exactly like Mr. Bow Bells.
I took the coworker aside and gently broke the news to him. His response: “I know! I can’t stop myself! It’s horrible!”
Code switching is easy to do with writing. And it can be used to your advantage.
When I teach writing, I encourage code switching. If you don’t have a “voice” as a writer, borrow one. Find a writer you adore. Study how he or she structures sentences. Are the sentences long or short? What words get repeated over and over? How do they handle dialogue? How do they describe objects?
Now imitate them as best you can. Really. Rip off their writing style without shame. I did this when I was a student. I imitated Kurt Vonnegut, Noam Chomsky, Nikolai Gogol (especially Gogol) and (nerd alert) Vonda N. McIntyre. Imitating good writing is a good thing. It’s like making reproductions of good furniture. You get the feeling of good writing (or good furniture) in your veins. And as you do it, you will say “Yes, that’s what it feels like.”
When you start writing in your own voice or designing your own pieces, you will know what it feels like when the words are flowing and the furniture is stunning. In time, your imitative prose and furniture knock-offs will fade in the past as you find your own voice.
Once you find your own voice, however, that’s when the danger begins. If I read Vonnegut while writing a book, it’s going to come out as “The Anarchist’s Cat’s Cradle” or “Welcome to the Monkey House Vol. 2, Monkey Dreams Come True.” So I cut myself off from reading anything for pleasure while I’m writing for profit.
Right now, I am in a joyful place. I’m building furniture for “The Stick Chair Book,” taking notes, making photos, drawing chairs and thinking (so much thinking). But I’m not writing. So this month I’ve gone on a bender of fiction and nonfiction.
The slutty fiction: “The Murderbot Diaries” by Martha Wells, a six-book science fiction series recommended by my cousin Jessamyn West. Wells’ writing is a great thing to try to imitate (if you are looking to do a little code switching, sailor). The higher-brow fiction: “Piranesi” by Susanna Clarke, one of my favorite novelists. I’ve read her her first novel, “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell,” more times than any other piece of fiction. And the nonfiction: “Thinking With Type” by Ellen Lupton. This was a textbook for one of my youngest daughter’s classes. It’s an interesting and contemporary take on typography (again, nerd alert).
With any luck, I still have another six or eight months of being able to read for pleasure. And I have a big pile of books to dig through.
But after that, I’ll have to close the book(s). Otherwise you’ll be in for “Shart of Darkness,” “Board of the Annular Rings” or “Love in the Time of the Emerald Ash Borer.”
Feel free to suggest other book titles in the comments (you know you want to).
— Christopher Schwarz
Read other posts from the “Making Book” series here.
Unfortunately, my drawings don’t (yet) live up to the images inside my head. While I am able to make acceptable small-scale drawings, I usually hire an illustrator to help with the complex stuff. Until I become a better illustrator, I take photos, trace the parts I like, then shade them with hatching.
It’s a simple process and produces acceptable results. Here are the details if you’d like to try it yourself.
For the paper, I use 100 percent rag vellum. It’s expensive, but it smudges the least of any “tracing” paper I’ve used. You can get the stuff at good stationery stores.
I manipulate the photo I’m tracing in Photoshop, usually to lighten it so I can see little details. Sometimes I bump up the contrast, too. Then I scale the photo so it’s 110 percent of the finished size I want on the page. This scaling is important. If I don’t scale all the chair photos the same, then the line thicknesses will be inconsistent from drawing to drawing. The reason I draw the image at 110 percent is that the slight reduction of the image (to 100 percent on the page) tends to sharpen up the lines a bit.
I print out the photo on cheap copy paper and tape it to the backside of the vellum. Then I get out my LED lightbox. This is an inexpensive apparatus that makes tracing easy. You can get them at art supply stores. Mine is made by Artograph; there are much cheaper alternatives. Before I owned one of these I would tape the vellum to a window and use the daylight to illuminate things. The lightbox makes life easier. And I can work at night.
I use three sizes of mechanical pencils: .9mm for the thick, exterior lines in the foreground; .7mm for shading, interior lines and exterior lines that are distant; and .3mm for details and fine shading (like inside a spindle).
The only drawing tool I use is a translucent plastic 6″ rule. No templates for curves or ellipses. I tried working with those years ago and preferred drawing without them. The straightedge rule is great, even for chairs. You learn to draw entasis and shallow curves with a straight ruler after a while. The other hard-won lesson was this: Move your arm when you draw, not your hand. Your lines will be much smoother as a result.
All my shading is done with straight lines. It’s a bit comic-book-y, but I like comic books.
I take liberties with the tracing. I fix broken spindles, repair splits in seats and restore chunks that have been taken out of the legs. And the shading is used for two things: to show value, of course, but also to emphasize key parts of the construction, such as through-tenons and seat saddling.
So far for “The Stick Chair Book” I’ve made about 40 drawings and have many more to go. If you’d like to see the results of the tracing, you can download this sample chapter.
Please note that the text is a draft. There is still a lot of editing and peer-review to do. I mostly wanted to see how the images and text looked together. So, if you don’t mind, please blunt that sharp tongue of yours.
— Christopher Schwarz
Read other posts from the “Making Book” series here.