Jögge Sundqvist works with hand tools in the self-sufficient Scandinavian slöjd tradition, making stools, chairs, cupboards, knives, spoons and sculptures painted with oil color. “Not uncrafty” is his motto. He’s also a teacher, performer, musician and author of several books. An English translation of his book “Slöjd in Wood” is available from Lost Art Press, and an English translation of his latest book, “Karvsnitt,” is forthcoming. Jögge’s father, Wille Sundqvist (1925-2018), was a prominent figure in the green woodworking movement.
Wille Sundqvist (photo by Mattias Hjalmarsson)
“There was never a word about how I was going to be the one to take care of the tradition,” Jögge says. “Never. My father, I think he just wanted to share the joy, how to form things in a beautiful way, how easy it is to use an axe and use a knife. He was a good teacher and he was very eager to teach. But sometimes, when I was younger, once in a while I’d say, ‘Stop! I want to try myself! Don’t tell me everything!’ He was a trained furniture maker from Carl Malmsten’s Verkstadsskola, so he had his ways. But despite that, he was encouraging.”
Jögge grew up in Luleå, Sweden, where at that time his father was teaching kids in slöjd.
“In Sweden, slöjd is still something that every student has to learn,” Jögge says. “They have to learn how to use materials such as wood and textiles, and the techniques that go with it. Today I wouldn’t call it slöjd because I have another definition of it. But still, it’s a practical way to teach children how to use their hands.”
Otto Salomon (1849-1907), was an advocate of educational slöjd. “He wrote about how important it was for children to learn practical things, to read a drawing with measurements and stuff like that, especially farmer kids and working kids,” Jögge says. “They needed to have that knowledge to be able to be workers in the industrial revolution.”
Jögge has fond memories of his childhood in Luleå, following his father to the school’s workshops, helping him make things and making his own things.
“We had fun,” he says. “And he was eager to do his own things besides teaching and he helped us do our things too. And I loved that. For one thing, it gave me the confidence that everything could be made by hand.”
Around this time Malmsten, who founded two schools, arranged a workshop with teachers in Luleå where they were tasked to create children’s toys made out of wood.
Jögge, 4 years old. (photo by Wille Sundqvist)
“It was meant to be a fun workshop where they invented a lot of ideas around woodwork and children’s toys,” Jögge says. “Years ago I saw some slides when I’m 4 years old and I’m sitting on a crocodile on wheels and it has four pieces that are tied together with yarn so it can roll and sway on the ground a little. I’m sitting on it and it’s very roughly axed and carved with gouges and painted with oil colors and kind of sparkling – vivid colors – and I just loved that. And when I saw this picture, something inside me said, ‘Yeah. This must have been an early triggering point there.’ Because I am very attached to folk art and colors. I love powerful designs and rough carved surfaces. That’s why I am into slöjd much more than furniture work. I think it was somewhere there casting an eye over my shoulder – the inspiration started there for me.”
From the Back of a Dragon to a First Knife Jögge’s childhood was filled with art and slöjd. He remembers his father taking him to a film about Picasso at the age of 10. And he recognizes that the environments he lived in were special.
“My mother was very, very skilled in weaving, felting and nålbindning, which is an old knitting technique,” Jögge says.
His mother was also brilliant with color. Jögge remembers dining room tables filled with color samples and his mother eyeing them all day long, observing them in different light for days on end just to pick the perfect shade of red. It’s something Jögge has found himself doing, mixing and fixing paint for hours, trying to settle on the ideal shade.
Jögge’s childhood apartment, 1962. (photo by Wille Sundqvist)
“She and my father adapted the Carl Malmsten way of having a home, with handmade things, crafted things,” Jögge says. “The things were fancy and well done, but it wasn’t that we were rich or wealthy. But they were very well designed and carefully made. We lived in a workers’ block, very close to the iron and steel mill in Luleå, not very fancy at all. We had three rooms and a kitchen.”
Jögge and one of his two brothers shared a double-stacked bed in a room that also served as their father’s workshop.
Jögge and his brother’s bedroom, which also served as their father’s workshop. (photo by Wille Sundqvist)
Ola, Eric and Jögge in their bedroom/father’s workshop. (photo by Wille Sundqvist)
“In their mind, a home should be something very comfortable, functional and cozy and crafted,” he says. “So my father made the shelves and the beds but it was my mother who was the one who had the overall look for making it a home. My father was very oriented in objects but my mother saw how everything should fit together, from the carpets to the windows.”
Wille Sundqvist, Jögge’s father, grew up in a small village outside Bjurholm, with eight siblings. Wille’s father was a farmer who made a special kind of chair from that part of the country and brooms with a natural bent curve and horsetails on the back. On the weekends Wille and his family went to town and sold chairs and brooms for extra income.
Jögge’s grandfather, Arvid Sundqvist, 1961. (photo by Wille Sundqvist)
A copy of grandfather Arvid’s broom, with a natural bent handle, made by Wille Sundqvist.
“And that is exactly the definition of handicraft in Swedish,” Jögge says. “Because we have the word ‘slöjd’ and then we have the word ‘hemslöjd,’ which is ‘home craft.’ And ‘Hemslöjden’ is the craft movement in Sweden.”
Hemslöjd, Jögge says, is basically a side business for farmers. “When the industrial revolution started you needed money,” he says. “If you were farming you were self-sufficient and you didn’t have any money so you had to make some things in the tradition that you knew. So they made spoons, brooms and baskets and chairs and all kinds of objects in different parts of Sweden and sold it in the cities and they’d buy a steel bucket, for example, because you couldn’t make one yourself but it was obviously much better than a wooden bucket.”
Jögge sitting on his grandfather’s children’s eight-rung chair with older brother Ola and parents. (photo by Wille Sundqvist)
When Jögge was 10 the family moved to Vilhelmina, and his father began working as a craft consultant.
“He was one of three craft consultants in Sweden working for hard materials, wood and metal,” Jögge says. “Before that they had craft consultants for textile work but never before for harder material. So he was kind of a pioneer there, working for the whole county, trying to help mainly farmers who also had a hemslöjd as a side income.”
The craft movement flourished in Sweden in the 1970s and ’80s. As a craft consultant, paid by the government, Wille helped thousands of small farmers get loans from the state, create business plans, design workshops and create sophisticated drawings of everything, from candle holders to cups to butter knives.
Ten-year-old Jögge loved the move to Vilhelmina. “We came from an apartment to a house,” he says. It was 1969 and the town they moved to had about 4,000 people, so everybody knew everybody. As a teenager, Jögge started playing instruments, including the guitar, and he started a band. His life revolved around rock ‘n’ roll and friends.
Jögge’s father was patient. And when Jögge was 15 years old, he asked his father, “Can you show me how to make a knife?”
His father was quietly thrilled.
Wille taught Jögge the importance of finding a good blade, testing several blades out on reindeer antler. The knife was made in parts from reindeer antler and masur, a type of birch, so there’s a special pattern to it. His father showed him how to inlay the silver and sew the sheath.
Jögge’s first knife, 1973.
“It’s great,” Jögge says, holding it while talking. “I use it very, very much. It’s still a favorite.”
The Old Ways of Doing Things
Jögge moved to Umeå in 1978 where he had his own apartment and started to work for the railroad, at Umeå Central Station.
“I started at the tracks,” Jögge says. “When you’re taking apart a train, someone has to stand in between the cars. When the train was disjointed, the cars were pushed off to another train set. When they came in at a speed of up to 20 mph, you had put on the hook when it bumped into the trainset, to put the train together. It’s a very dangerous job. You have to be quick, and you can die if you come between the bumpers.”
Jögge also had a small workshop in a big wardrobe, 3 meters x 2 meters (about 10′ x 6′). Instead of using it for clothes, he built a workbench where he made knives and did some commission work too. In 1982, a friend convinced him to take two years and attend Vindeln, a folk school that specialized in slöjd.
“That totally changed my whole perspective, because we were a group of students who were all dedicated to work in the traditional way,” Jögge says. “We were finding the old ways of doing things by riving wood, splitting wood, following the fiber, using tradition as a woodworking tool. At the time, a lot of people trained in woodworking more like a fine arts craft. But we were dedicated to the old traditional craft, from the 1700s to the 1800s. We had a lot of discussions defining things: Who are we? Why are we doing these things? We had all-night discussions, even arguments. That was the sense of time, and formative to who I am. Beth Moen was in the class above me, and Ramon Persson was another heavy influence. And we were trained in design too – painting, freehand drawing, technical drawing and so on.
Jögge and Beth Moen, 1983.
“As I look upon it now, I found a way of exploring the tradition from a personal point of view, not my father’s point of view. Because I knew how to make a spoon. I knew how to make a knife. That was pretty common for me. But all of a sudden I had people in my age who were dedicated to what they did and I was able to form my own world which wasn’t my father’s world so I finally had my own choices to make.
“I remember I had been there for a week and I called my dad and I said, ‘Oh, I forgot to tell you, I’m at this school.’ And he said, ‘Wow!’ And he was free-minded by that time. He said, ‘When you’re 18, go out in the world and do whatever you want to do. I care about you but you should feel free to do whatever you want to do. You have to form your own life.’”
By this time Jögge’s parents had divorced, and his mother had moved to Vindeln as well. Jögge lived in her house during the week, and they invited classmates for weekends at his mother’s house, where they had “many wonderful parties and laughs.” His mother was very social and loved young people, Jögge says.
Jögge’s classmates from Slöjdlinjen in Vindeln, 1984, with his mother Maxan in a blue dress with a flower wreath.
While attending Vindeln Jögge continued to work for the railroad on the weekends, and once done with school he went back to the railroad full-time. Later he worked as a train dispatcher with an office at the station and a platform outside where he’d waved to the train drivers, indicating if it was OK to go or not. In 1985, he asked to work half-time. By then he had his workshop, was playing in a popular rock ‘n’ roll band and owned a record company, Jakaranda Records, recording local bands and putting out records for them.
Traditional Craft & Rock ‘n’Roll
Jögge’s first band was Rockvattnä, named after a village outside of Vilhelmina, which roughly translates to “rocking water.” When Jögge moved to Umeå, he formed another band called Favoritorkestern and later Kapten Nemo.
Kapten Nemo
“We were more of a serious Swedish pop band, heavily influenced by the Beatles, the Who, bands like that, but lyrics in Swedish. Very ’80s like. We were playing all the time. Stockholm too.”
Jögge, to the right, playing guitar with his band, Favoritorkestern.
The band had two leads. Jögge played guitar and sang, and they had a bass player who also sang. Both Jögge and the bass player wrote all the songs. They made a maxi single with four songs and a long-playing record. They were on the radio. For two to three years, around 1986 and 1987, they were the biggest band in Umeå.
“It was real fun,” Jögge says. “We had a good time there. In 1992 I finally released a solo record, Människa.”
He continued his traditional craft work, and the combination of rock ‘n’ roll and traditional craft fulfilled him.
Jögge teaching a chair class at Nääs, 1991.
“Doing traditional craft on one hand was lovely because the rock ‘n’ roll world is a very on-the-surface world,” he says. “It’s fun! But when I got fed up with the superficial rock ‘n’ roll world I could do craft and make things that lasted forever. But also, playing a gig that exists for a moment in time is exciting, the power and energy which comes out of it. So I had this kind of dialectic relationship with the fluidity of craft and rock ‘n’ roll. And I liked that combination, the interaction between modern life and tradition. I think I am that type of person who wants contrast and a little conflict in order to have balance in my life.”
Although Jögge no longer plays, he’s still, as he says, “totally addicted to good music.” He has more than 5,000 songs on his Spotify playlist, and he always plays music while working.
The rhythm of the music must match the rhythm of his work. When that equivalency occurs, he feels more power while throwing an axe, he says, and experiences more feeling while doing it.
“But when I carved patterns on knives, I tried to play rock ‘n’ roll but it didn’t work,” he says. “So I tried to look for more repetitive music which gave me some kind of fluency while working. And I found Steve Reich. He’s arty, modern, non-vocal, very repetitive. I found music with small patterns, like Philip Glass. And actually, it was Laurie Anderson who brought me there, talking about these people, Talking Heads was very repetitive but still a kind of ambiance. And I did much better working with that kind of music for patterns and chip carving. So a very profound insight was when I realized it must be a connection between music and body and working.”
In 1994, Jögge set up a big multimedia rock concert called Rockhuvud. He acted as producer, project manager, composer and musician. The performance featured a rock ‘n’ roll band, Komeda, and two craftspeople, Beth Moen and Tryggve Persson, live on stage. They toured throughout Sweden, 40 concerts in all.
Rockhuvud live at Hultsfred festival, 1994, with Bet Moen and Tryggve Persson as slöjders, and the band Komeda playing with Jögge. (photos by Mats Pallin)
“All the musicians and the craftspeople worked in rhythm, instructed by a choreographer, through this whole concert,” Jögge says. “So it has been a real thread in my work – the body, the rhythm, and the work. It’s hard to explain, but the performance was a way of expressing the power of slöjd, both the physical character of the work and the beauty of the shapes and colors.”
Here he quotes the beat poet Jack Kerouac: “Because I am Beat, I believe in Beatitude and that God so loved the world He gave His only begotten Son to it.”
“I think it has to do with something about flow,” he says. “One of my favorite moments in the workshop is working pretty hard and sweating all over – when form comes naturally and you don’t even think about it. It just comes there, from the tool, from the material, from your skill. It’s a rhythm, a kind of instinct that is created in that moment. And after that you just look at it and say, ‘What have I done?’ I talked with Del Stubbs about this, about the dancing of the hands. Sometimes you can just look at your hands, and they just work themselves. You don’t even think about it. They just work.
Jögge drilling a shrink box with a T-auger. (photo by Henke Olofsson)
“This is still something that’s true to me. I believe real craft comes from a deeper interaction with your mind and body, obviously with a long knowledge of tradition, materials and technical skill with the tools. When all parts connect and work together, real slöjd comes from my hands.”
Jögge says he realizes now the importance of having one leg in traditional craft and one leg in rock ‘n’ roll, and that both legs contribute to his body functioning in a way that allows the magic of Surolle. (And that’s a story still to come, in part two.)
In his book “The Difference Makers,” Marc Adams hand-selected 30 contemporary makers, instructors who have taught at his school, Marc Adams School of Woodworking, whose work (and life stories) are exemplary. He did not include himself.
If you ask Marc about his school, he’ll tell you that it should have never had his name on it. (After its first year with no name, Bob Flexner suggested Marc’s name and it unfortunately, in Marc’s eyes, stuck.) Ask Marc about the school’s accomplishments and he’ll say, “I could disappear and nobody would ever notice.” (Then listen as he talks passionately about the school’s students, instructors and staff.) Ask Marc about his craftsmanship and he’ll digress. (And tell you all about the impressive work he sees every Tuesday night, when instructors share slides of their work.)
But. Ask any one of the thousands of students who travel hundreds of miles to Marc Adams School of Woodworking each year and they’ll tell you about a difference maker in their life – Marc.
Marc never intended to open a woodworking and craft school. He never intended to be a woodworker period. But a great personal loss, a journey to the Middle East and a 19-year-old man in Dumyāṭ, Egypt, changed everything.
A good start
“I had a great childhood,” says Marc, who lived with his mom, dad and older brother. “I had great parents, great grandparents. So I kind of had an advantage that a lot of kids don’t have. But, at the same time, my parents had nothing.”
Marc, 8, with his mom.
Marc’s dad, John, was a builder, and Marc knew what kind of week his dad was having based on how much Maalox disappeared from the bottle. “This was the ’60s and early ’70s,” Marc says. “Back in those days a builder was somebody who built the house himself. They dug the footers. They framed it. They put shingles on. They built the house. Contractors contract somebody else to do everything for them. But he came in a different generation. He was real hands-on.”
Marc’s dad was also active in the school community. He drove the athlete busses to all the sporting events, built press boxes, and worked at every basketball and football game. (Marc grew up where his dad grew up, attending the same high school.)
“He was just a real big man in the community, which was a real inspiration as a kid,” Marc says. “Everybody liked him, so it was a good start for me.”
In his spare time Marc’s dad built things they needed for the house – bunkbeds, dressers and the like. “I always thought it was just because we were poor and we couldn’t afford anything, but in reality, now that I’ve grown up, I’ve realized it was just because he liked doing that kind of stuff,” Marc says.
Sports were important to Marc, and he was an active participant. By high school he narrowed it down to running, and he was good. For 43 years he held his high school’s mile record – it was finally broken last year.
Marc won a running scholarship to Indiana Central University (now called University of Indianapolis), a private United Methodist Church-affiliated university in Indianapolis. Even as young as junior high Marc knew he wanted to be three things in life: a coach, a teacher and a youth pastor. In college he earned a bachelor’s degree in education, ran and dated his wife, Susie.
Marc first met Susie as a young child – she attended his mom’s nursery school. Fast forward to 1978 – Indiana (and much of the Midwest) was paralyzed by a blizzard. Susie, also a runner, was a senior in high school and her school wouldn’t allow girls to run in the gym if boys were wrestling or playing basketball. So Susie and her friends used the college’s track to run, and that’s how she re-met Marc. The next year Susie attended the same college, also as an education major, and the two dated throughout. They married after Susie graduated, in 1982.
At around the same time Marc graduated, 750 teachers in central Indiana were laid off.
“I just couldn’t get a job,” he says. “And I didn’t want to relocate. So I turned around and started on my master’s.”
He enrolled at IUPUI (Indiana University–Purdue University Indiana) and then, with a 4.0 GPA and only a few credits shy of his master’s, Marc’s path in life changed course.
Great loss and a new career
Marc’s mom loved crafts. And every year, from the time Marc was 5 years old, the entire family would attend a holiday craft and hobby show in Indianapolis.
“My dad would go to that show basically because my mom wanted to go,” Marc says. “It was mostly boring for my dad. But every year at that show Shopsmith would be set up.”
Launched in the 1940s, Shopsmith was a combination woodworking tool many home woodworkers envied.
“You have to go back to that time period,” Marc says. “In that time period, nothing was imported. The only place you had to buy tools was basically Sears. So for my dad, whose goal in life was to take an early retirement, build a building out back, put a wood-burning stove in it and do nothing else for the rest of his life but create things out of wood, the excitement in going to the show was that Shopsmith would be set up there.” Every year Marc noted his dad’s ever-growing enthusiasm for the machine and rare public display of excitement.
While in graduate school, Marc attended the craft show again with his parents. By now his dad had already started building a 3,000-square-foot building as a place to store a vehicle, and as a place for him to do woodworking and Marc’s mom to do crafts. Marc knew he would soon have steady income, so while watching the Shopsmith demonstrations at the craft show with his dad he had an epiphany. He and his dad could buy the machine now and split the monthly payments. His dad could finally own something he long desired, and Marc could use it to build an occasional piece of furniture for his someday house. His dad was thrilled by the idea.
On Monday they drove to Shopsmith in Dayton, Ohio, signed a contract and loaded up the machine. On Tuesday they began putting it together. On Wednesday, his dad had a heart attack and died, and with it, his dream of retirement. He was only 52.
Marc could have sent the Shopsmith back. But he didn’t. It took him a few months before he was able to walk into the shop his dad built.
“But when I finally walked back in, I looked at the parts, exactly where they were, the last place they were when he touched them,” Marc says. “And I said, ‘I can’t. I can’t put it in a box and send it back. I can’t do that.’ So I decided to keep it. And that is where it all started. Literally. I had no idea which way the blade spun on the machine. I had no idea how to make something. Like any young guy I could make what I needed but not in a fine manner. But I kept the machine and the next thing I knew my entire life stopped and all I wanted to do, before I had made the first payment on that machine, was I wanted to make things.”
Payments were $200 a month. Marc figured out how the machine worked and started making things with a goal to make just enough money to pay for the machine. Initially he intended to finish his master’s but as Marc studied the craft and became more skilled, he began buying more tools and accessories, pulling him further into debt. He loved making things, which was good because now he couldn’t get out of it – he owed too much to quit.
“I was chasing myself, trying to figure out how to do woodworking, because I didn’t know – I had never been trained in it,” he says. “And now I love it so much, but I find that I’m getting myself so far in debt.” What little money he did make went to pay off the debt. “I didn’t know how to price anything,” he says.
But with time, things began to shift. More work led to more money which led to better equipment which allowed him to produce work more efficiently. This allowed him to take on more work, which allowed him to hire somebody. Their joint efforts brought in my more money, which led to better equipment, more work and more hires. It spiraled. In the back of his mind, Marc still assumed he’d finish his master’s. But instead, his company grew and grew.
“I never took a business class in my life,” Marc says. “I had never taken a woodworking class in my life. So to be in my 20s and think that woodworking and owning my own woodworking business would be something that I would do, I would have figured I would be an underwater explorer exploring caves before I would have thought of that. That wasn’t on my radar at all.”
Although Marc had a lot to learn, years of athletics and good coaching prepared him well.
“Runners are different than football players who are the kind of guys who like to hit people,” Marc says. “Runners are the kind of people who like to push themselves beyond whatever they can do and never give up. So I had this inward drive: I’m not going to give up. I’m not going to embarrass myself as this point in time by losing. And so I just continued to work through all that and the work just kept coming and it kept getting more prestigious and bigger without me having any clue on how to do any of it. I just had to figure it out.”
Some examples of Marc’s work from the 1980s.
And he did. By the late 1980s Marc was running a multi-million-dollar business with 35 employees, good people, he says, people who really knew what they were doing. His company had three divisions: a cabinet shop with a focus on residential and commercial kitchens, architectural millwork, and stairways and stair parts. But as so often happens, at some point Marc realized all he was doing was managing when he wanted to be woodworking.
A revelation by the Nile
In 1991, Marc was asked to become a technical consultant to the Western Wood Products Association, the Southern Forest Products Association, the American Hardwood Export Council and the U.S. government, lecturing internationally about business, industrial production and marketing.
While the oil wells were still on fire from the Persian Gulf War, Marc traveled to the Middle East along with experts from major businesses and industries worldwide, including automotive, banking, pharmaceutical, tech, textile and more. This consortium was established to help businesses in the Middle East establish connections worldwide. The U.S. sent Marc as a wood industry representative.
At each of the 13 stops local business leaders and community members would listen to presentations from CEOs and top players from business entities around the world, in large rooms with interpreters and tables with little flags representing dozens of countries. The half-hour presentations went alphabetically, so by the time it was the wood industry’s turn, everyone was always pretty tired. And yet each time Marc forged ahead, reading his U.S.-government-approved script. Once finished, everyone would be led to a large convention-room-type space with booths set up representing the different industries. Attendees would stop by booths to ask questions and network.
“At the end of the day, we’d be thumb wrestling with each other because nobody wanted to talk to us,” Marc says. “We’re talking about the Middle East. There aren’t many trees there. We were kind of the unthought-of group in the whole thing.”
They traveled from city to city on luxury buses, with military trucks filled with men and machine guns in front of and behind them.
“A lot of it had to do with show,” Marc says. “Al Jazeera was the only network on TV. And because this was a big group of very influential people worldwide, we were the only thing that was shown on national TV every single day. We were going to get them out of poverty – we were coming in to help. It was a big-time deal.”
One of their last stops was Dumyāṭ, a harbor city in Egypt. Because Marc and his companions had been on TV for days prior to this, hundreds of thousands of citizens in Dumyāṭ lined the streets as their buses paraded around. And in this particular city, more than half of those citizens were woodworkers.
Any and all things made in the Middle East out of wood ended up finding its way to Dumyāṭ,” Marc says. “So all of a sudden the wood group I was with, we were the main people. People were actually going to listen to us.”
Every presenter had an interpreter and the one assigned to Marc was 19 years old and lived in Dumyāṭ. Throughout the trip Marc’s interpreter spoke fondly of his hometown, and was excited for Marc to see it.
At every stop, Marc and his fellow business leaders had stayed in five-star hotels and had been treated to five-star meals. Dumyāṭ was different. Lunch was served outdoors in a local park, at benches and tables under big wire netting constructed to keep the bugs out. Everyone inside the netting was on display. Thousands and thousands of people stood outside looking in, watching, just as they had been watching on TV the previous days. Food was served in baskets and everything was homemade. Fellow U.S. business leaders warned Marc not to eat the homemade food – the water used to prepare the food might make him sick.
“Eat, eat! You need to eat!” Marc’s interpreter said. Marc tried to be polite and simply kept saying he was not hungry.
After the presentations and meal, Marc and his group found a long line of people at their wood industry booth.
“It was kind of fun,” Marc says. “For the first time we were getting attention where we had gotten no attention on the whole trip. And everybody wanted to talk to me because I was the person who represented the trade.”
Everything was slow because of the number of people who wanted to talk to Marc and the time it took to interpret questions and answers. Still, Marc took the time to listen and respond as well as he could. It was well after midnight when a man and his son approached him. No one on the buses could leave until Marc was done, and Marc was ready to go home. The man and the son asked Marc if he could come back when his tour was done, and spend time with them in their shop.
Marc had already been gone from home for several weeks and he had business to attend to back home. So he politely declined, which was interpreted. The man and his son asked again. Marc came up with another polite reason. They asked again, and that’s when Marc realized he had the perfect response.
“Tell them,” Marc said to his interpreter, “I’d really like to but I have a baby daughter at home, a brand-new baby daughter who is only four months old, and I can’t wait to get back and see her.”
The interpreter, father and son talked for a while and then the interpreter turn to Marc and said, “OK, here’s what he’d like to do. He’d like to give you his youngest daughter.”
Marc was so taken aback he laughed.
“And then my interpreter looked at me, and remember, he was 19-years-old,” Marc says. “And he told me, ‘You have really just insulted this man by laughing at him.’ And it made sense. Because you see for them, daughters aren’t as respected as sons are. ‘You don’t live in our world,’ he said. ‘For him, this would be a way that he could get something for his family, to help them in their world. Plus this would give his daughter an opportunity to get out of here and go somewhere else. And you thought that was funny.’ And that was it. That was it. I couldn’t handle it.”
That night, while sitting on a luxury bus waiting to go back to a luxury hotel in a neighboring town, Marc looked out his window. The moon was full, right on top of the Nile. And in the distance stood tall guard shacks with silhouettes of men with machine guns. And Marc thought about the last thing his interpreter said, the thing that really hurt, right before Marc got on the bus.
“He said, ‘Do you remember today when we ate lunch? You didn’t eat anything. And you remember all those people standing around watching? A lot of those people had to borrow the money to make the food in honor to serve you and you didn’t touch it. And at the same time those people, whose food you didn’t touch, aren’t eating tonight and probably won’t eat tomorrow.’”
Marc cried the entire way back to the hotel.
“You know all of sudden it hits you, what really matters in life?” Marc says. “It’s not so much how big you can run your business but how much you can do for mankind. And it was a really hard hit. I had a 19-year-old kid, in literally a four-hour span of time, change the entire way I looked at life.”
As soon as Marc got to the hotel he called Susie.
“I could keep running, and add more zeros to the dollar sign of our year-end profits, but I’m not really doing anything to change anybody’s life.”
He told her he was getting rid of the business and starting a school. And although Marc wasn’t able to stay in Egypt and help that father and son grow their business, he did hold true to his personal promise. He sold his business and built a school, one that has helped educate thousands of students.
Building a school and a new way of life
“Ultimately,” Marc says, “whether it was something that I did see or didn’t see, God had it all planned. Those years when I was in college learning about education and organization – all that was for a reason. Those years when I ran my business, the learning that I had to go through on my own, that was all to prepare me for what I needed to do to make the school run. So everything that happened along the way was predestined. And I believe that’s why we are where we are today. It’s a gift from God. I just keep hoping every day that I don’t screw it up.”
Marc Adams School of Woodworking
Today the Marc Adams School of Woodworking, on Marc and Susie’s property, offers up 40,000 square feet of space, including six workshops, four large bench rooms, three tools rooms, a dedicated turning center, outbuildings for special classes, a multimedia room and a cafeteria that serves 100. Each student has access to a custom-made Lie-Nielsen workbench. At each instructor’s bench is a digital camera system allowing the entire class to easily see demonstrations, and a specially designed sound system is available for those who struggle with hearing. The lineup for 2021, with COVID precautions in place, includes 245 courses in woodworking, metalsmithing, glass blowing, mosaic work, painting, CNC technology, instrument making, blacksmithing, paper sculpture, leather work, upholstery, calligraphy and even chocolate making.
Marc teaching a joinery class, June 2018.
When Marc returned from the Middle East, he sold his business and started building the school. His daughter, Markee, was born in 1990 and his son, John, in 1993. Marc spent a lot of time lecturing, for businesses, universities, clubs and at woodworking shows, all the while meeting people and making connections. Although this required traveling almost every week, once home and without a business to run he was able to spend time with his family and work on personal projects – woodworking has always remained a loved hobby. And even today, because the school is seasonal, Marc always finds bits of time in the winter months to make things. Every piece he makes has 800 to 2,000 hours of work in it, and for years it’s all had a Disney theme.
“The interesting thing about the Disney stuff is that it’s never drawn the same way twice,” Marc says. “So when you see a clip of it in the movie, and it comes back to it later in the movie, they are not drawn in the same way. So I would take all the images from the movie that I could and try to conceptualize how it would have been done.”
Two of Marc’s marquetry lobby cards.
For the last 15 years he’s been making marquetry images of lobby cards (posters) that were released to movie theaters from 1928 to 1935 that feature Mickey. Each one takes a year to complete. He’s also reproduced front covers of Dell Comic Books, particularly the Uncle Scrooge series published in the 1950s through the early 1970s.
Marc grew up watching Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color, but he was never really into cartoons, even as a child. In the mid-1980s he completed a commercial job and for the first time in his life he had some real extra money. So Marc and Susie decided to go to Disney World.
“The whole time I was there I was so blown away by the detail,” Marc says. “It was the detail that they put into everything that they made. And I realized that in my personal work, when I was making things, it didn’t have the detail. Every woodworker wants to find something that can be their own voice and for me, what hit me was detail.”
When Markee was born, Marc thought it would be fun to make something for her with Disney characters on it.
“I thought it would be unique,” he says, not realizing how ubiquitous Disney was with anything made and sold for kids. Turns out it was unique, in the time and talent Marc put into it and everything else Disney-themed since.
Many would say this level of detail is evident in every aspect of his school, too. Marc insists that’s only because of his employees plus the varied experiences every student and instructor brings. Teaching woodworking is not Marc’s first or second priority.
“We’re a vacation destination,” he says. “It’s our job to make sure people have a really good experience, whatever it is they come for. If, by chance, in their experience they learn a little bit about craft and making things, that’s great. But that’s not our focus. Our focus is on making sure people have a great time while they’re here. And I think that’s what a lot of these craft schools miss. They think their priority is showing somebody how to cut a dovetail. But our priority is showing somebody how to have a great time cutting a dovetail.”
Not a woodworking school
One of the many people Marc credits the school’s success to is his longtime friend and employee, Zane Powell. Marc and Zane grew up together. When they graduated high school, Zane got a job in a cabinet shop and Marc went to college. They drifted apart until one day Marc was making something for a client and noticed something else the client had, made out of wood, with the name Zane on it. Marc contacted the maker and it was as he hoped, his old friend Zane. Marc told Zane about his woodworking business and asked if Zane would work for him. Zane agreed and eventually ran the cabinet shop division.
Roger Cliffe and Marc, Baltimore, 2001
When Marc sold his business, the new owners moved it 60 miles north. That was too far of a commute for Zane so he got a job in a factory. After work and on weekends he’d show up at Marc’s house, helping him remodel the business’s buildings into space suitable for a school. Zane helped Marc for three years until Marc was able to hire him full-time. In the early years, Marc asked Zane to teach, but Zane resisted. Instead he assisted Roger Cliffe, a well-known woodworking instructor. Roger had a heart attack and died unexpectedly, three weeks before 9/11. Suddenly Zane had to take on Roger’s role and Marc says he did so admirably.
Zane Powell
“The thing about Zane, he was the funniest person in the room, but he never told a joke,” Marc says. “He has this incredible sense of humor. He was also incredibly gifted. And so not only was he a brilliant craftsman, he had a great humorous personality. And everybody who met him was touched by him.”
When Zane disclosed his liver cancer diagnosis in 2018, a GoFundMe page was created to help financially, and students at the school jumped at the opportunity to give back to someone who had given them so much. Zane died in 2019.
“Losing Zane was a really difficult thing for us,” Marc says. “He was an incredible person. An incredible craftsman. Everybody loved him. Nobody ever said anything bad about him in any way. He was just an outgoing kind of guy. And all those years we never, ever, ever had any issues. No differences and the amazing thing was, in all those years, he never asked me for a raise or more money or time off, ever.”
Marc and others still find messages from Zane around the school.
“He was a great artist. So you might be working on a machine and underneath you’ll see some kind of stupid drawing he did of something somewhere and it is always so funny.”
While there is an advantage to being able to grieve with employees, instructors and students who all knew and loved Zane, constantly being in the public eye, during good times and bad, can be trying.
“Being that the school is 30 steps from my house you learn to give up your personal life,” Marc says. “Because there is no privacy. Everything you do is public. Everything you say, everywhere you go. Trying to raise kids in that environment is a really hard thing to do. When my son was 5 years old, I wanted to go out and start playing basketball with him. And so I did and I’m working with my son and I’ve got guys standing at the front door of the shop laughing every time I miss a shot. So your kids can’t be normal kids because in the course of a summer we’ll have thousands and thousands of people on our property. And they can’t go out and make too much noise or they’ll disrupt a class. So it’s really hard. You just kind of get used to it, knowing that everybody knows what you do and you also get used to knowing that people are sometimes going to criticize you before they pat you on the back. So losing Zane – we all had it tough. We all just grieved in our own ways and dealt with it as we could.”
In 2020, Marc had 112 instructors from around the world slated to teach 245 workshops to more than 2,500 students. And then the world shut down, including the school. Shutting down even two months (April and May) meant postponing 64 workshops and refunding more than 700 students – doable, but tough for a school that relies solely on tuition. But then came the emails, hundreds of them. Almost everyone chose to roll their deposit into a future workshop or gift it to the school. And then, after working with an advisory board of physicians with expertise in the coronavirus from around the country, and working overtime to reconfigure the school, Marc reopened on June 1, 2020.
“I chose that week specifically because that was the week we were doing a memorial for Zane,” he says.
Last year about 1,200 students came along with 39 instructors.
“We had zero spread of COVID through our facilities, which is phenomenal,” Marc says. “And all of those people who were here, they needed to be here. It relieved a lot of stress they had in their life. We had more people this last summer come to one of our key people crying, literally crying, because of the emotions of what they were going through in their life. And they were able to get away from it and come to a place with less burden. We tell people that last summer we were all counselors moreso than anything else because people needed to get away from what they were going through and they were able to do that here. And we had more of an emotional responsibility to people last year more than anything.”
Marc talks a lot about the emotional ties people have with the school, and credits the active building of friendships among staff, instructors and students.
“They develop these incredible relationships, and Zane was a bit part of why all that happened,” Marc says. “He would have been an incredibly big part of helping people through these times.”
These relationships are also why Marc has no interest in offering online classes.
“It’s hard to laugh out loud when you’re at home looking at a computer screen,” he says. “Our investment is here where you actually get to smell the dust. You get to ask questions at any time. You have a panoramic view of everything. You have interaction with the instructor all day instead of just for a few hours at a time. The entire body of learning has to involve as many senses as possible and you just don’t get that through a computer screen. That world isn’t for us and it isn’t the world we’re in. People will always seek our world. We’re in a phase now because of the pandemic but that phase is going to go away.”
In the meantime, Marc is continually looking for new ways for students to build relationships through craft. And the word “craft” is important here. In fact, “time honored crafts” is a phrase Marc has slowly been adding to the very name of the school.
“My goal from the beginning was not for this to be a woodworking school,” Marc says. “I wanted this to be a craft school. But my income and my world at the time I started the school was woodworking and you have to get something established first before you move on to other things. You have to have the facilities and resources.”
Marc started offering breakout classes 20 years ago, and they are some of the first to sell out. Running six classes at a time also serves as easy advertising. Students can take a break from what they’re doing and sit in another class for a short amount of time, as if watching a trailer for a feature film. Although while Marc is committed to a continual broadening of horizons, some of these experiences, such as chocolate making and glassblowing, require a significant investment in equipment.
October 2020 glassblowing class
“But see, the thing for me, from a business standpoint, I never look at whether a class makes money or not,” he says. “I really don’t. I look at each week. How did we do this week? Well, we offered six classes and we did well.”
Staple woodworking classes have long carried light-attended classes and costly breakout classes. But Marc has been careful to introduce them slowly, establishing new markets while existing markets foot the bill.
Daily, Marc regrets not being able to personally take more classes. He’s tried, but is easily pulled in different directions. (It’s why he loves the bottle magic class, a class where you learn how to stick things in bottles. It’s secretive, behind closed doors, so he hid in that room for a week taking the class with little interruption.) As the school becomes more of a team-led effort, Marc hopes to take more classes in the future.
“You reach a point where you don’t work for money.” – Walt Disney
These days Marc enjoys spending time with his grown children and being a grandfather. His daughter, Markee, married Pat Murrin, who she met at her dad’s school. Pat started out as a student while in college, eventually earning his Master Woodworker Certificate at the school. He now owns Murrin Woodworking Studio, five miles down the road from Marc and Susie. Markee is an elementary school teacher. Together they have a daughter who recently turned 2, and they’re expecting another. Marc’s son, John, works with diesel engines in the trucking industry. Early 2020 John was in northern Italy for work. Marc and Susie dropped everything school-related for several days trying to get him out before the country shut down to the coronavirus. He was on a plane three days before international travel was banned.
Marc, Susie, Markee and John
Markee and Pat Murrin
Marc still runs, almost every day, typically about 3 miles. “It’s my big getaway and I really, really enjoy doing that,” he says. Susie will often ride her bike while Marc runs.
“You kind of hate to call this a hobby but we also really like to mow,” he says. They own several houses around the school where students can stay, and mowing helps gets them away from the school during the busy spring and summer months. Susie also enjoys tending her many wildflower gardens.
It should also be noted that Marc’s home and school sits on 17 acres.
“There’s always something that needs to be done there,” he says. “And so instead of looking at that as work, I look at that as sort of my other hobby. I really enjoy getting out and taking care of my pond or cutting branches off of trees or whatever needs to be done.”
They don’t sit around and watch TV Marc adds, laughing.
“You know the saying ‘if you like what you do you’ll never work a day in your life’?” Marc asks. “I totally disagree with that. That’s an incorrect statement. The statement should be, ‘If you enjoy what you’re doing you’ll want to work every day in your life.’ And so for me, that’s kind of where we are.”
It was November 13, 1942, and his mother was living with another woman and her small child in Los Angeles, California, while his father was working as a psychiatric social worker in the army, stationed in Texas. After the war his parents divorced, and his mom remarried.
Drew’s stepfather was a classical violinist and his mother was a serious pianist. Drew also spent many afternoons with his father, an art historian, visiting artist studios, galleries and museums.
Drew with his good friend Mike, the neighbor’s dog. Photo taken around 1948.
He and his half-brother, who was 8 years younger, spent their childhood in West L.A., which Drew says was then a nice place to grow up in. A self-described quiet and shy child, Drew struggled with rote memorization at school and never yearned for a paper route in order to buy things like most of his friends. He preferred making things, and his parents always made sure he had access to art supplies.
“Nobody had much money in our family at the time so I was always encouraged to do art things and try making stuff,” he says.
Instead of having him study for his bar mitzvah, Drew’s parents signed him up for weekly art lessons with Adalaide Fogg and Mary Gordon, liberal progressives who painted, made jewelry and prints, and supplemented their income by opening up their studio to provide lessons for children.
After high school, Drew enrolled at San Fernando Valley State College (now California State University, Northridge) to study anthropology. He had always been interested in the topic and while the school wasn’t his first choice the anthropology department there had recently hired Dorothy Lee, “a really brilliant woman who was fed up with teaching at Harvard to be the department head,” Drew says. Lee was interesting, connected easily with young people and eschewed standardized, formal education. Drew thrived and in two years took enough courses minus one to satisfy an anthropology degree.
Drew disliked the San Fernando Valley and was falling in love with San Francisco. (This was San Francisco in the 1960s after all.) So he transferred to San Francisco State, which he loved – except for the anthropology department. In one class Drew stated an ethical objection to a field method used by anthropologists. The instructor, who was the department head, suggested that it would be a good idea for Drew to consider work in a different field. Drew managed to pass the course and earned his bachelor’s degree in anthropology in 1964.
While at San Francisco State, Drew had fallen in love with the university’s dark room and ceramic studios. And in 1966, he earned a master’s degree in painting and sculpture. Although there was a woodshop on campus, there were no instructions on how to use the tools, Drew said. And while Charles Haywood was writing in the U.K. at the time, Drew had never heard of him and publications like Fine Woodworkingdidn’t exist.
“Interestingly, while I was in the art department at the graduate level at San Francisco State University, I had no idea that they had an industrial arts department,” he says. “I literally didn’t know it existed.” Turns out John Kassay, who later went on to write “The Book of Shaker Furniture” in 1980 and “The Book of American Windsor Furniture: Styles and Technologies” in 1998, was teaching on campus at the same time Drew was a student. “It wasn’t until 30 years later while on the phone with him one day that I found out he was teaching right where I was,” Drew says. “For me it was all learning on one’s own and sometimes woodworking was part of it and sometimes it was not.”
In graduate school Drew became friends with a guy who grew up in a “real all-American middle-class kind of family,” he says, which was quite different from the way Drew grew up. The dad in this family had a little woodworking shop, complete with a table saw, and together, father and son were building a boat. Drew would visit this family often, and says he learned a lot about woodworking while helping build the boat.
1960s San Francisco
After graduation Drew, who at this point owned a small table saw, started a small business making stretched canvasses for professional and more well-off artists. He also started to make some sculptures and, as funds would allow, would occasionally buy a new tool from Sears.
Drew loved living in San Francisco in the 1960s, and that decade proved formative.
“It’s part of my story,” he says.
He was involved in civil rights and anti-Vietnam war demonstrations, and drawn to people who were producing the Whole Earth Catalog.
“Back then we would walk everywhere,” he says. “We would walk across San Francisco. I lived in a neighborhood, it was pretty much a slum, and we would walk to China Town and say, ‘We have $3 for dinner. What can you make us?’ And they would make us dinner. It would show up. And there were all kinds of stuff happening in various arts and it was all accessible. It wasn’t a pricey play to live like it’s become.”
“At our wedding, April, 1971,” Drew says. “Sonoma County, Calif. Photo by Jalaladin, a friend in the Bay area Sufi community.”
Around this time Drew met his wife, Louise. He had heard about a woman named Ann Halprin who ran a modern dance studio. He and Louise met at one of the studio’s summer workshops on experimental dance theater. “A couple years later we were living together and then a couple years after that we were getting married,” he says.
“Adventure playground built with partner Jay Beckwith,” Drew says. “We used new exhaust pipe seconds and recycled parts of the existing playground.” This playground was located at a Bay area daycare center. If you look closely in the background you can see Drew and Louise’s 1952 Chevy Travelall, which they drove across country several times. Photo is from 1969/1970.
Around this time Drew and his friend, Jay Beckwith, began building adventure playgrounds for kids, essentially sculptures for kids to climb on. “We were using our art-school mentality to cut up existing structures with funny angles and put it all back together in a totally different configuration,” he says.
One night, while watching a friend of a friend’s slideshow from a trip to Nepal, Drew says he felt an attachment to the landscape and Nepalese people, and how closely they were living to an outdoors life. At the time, a lot of young people were traveling to India and Nepal, and Drew and Louise decided they wanted to do the same. Drew, a fan of Bernard Rudofsky’s “Architecture Without Architects,” wanted to take photographs of people and write a book about the vernacular architecture they found along the way. Louise also became interested in the book, with a focus on finding out more about the people they met and how they lived their lives.
“I was a little kid who marveled at the building of the Hollywood Freeway and I even thought I’d be an industrial designer someday but somewhere in my teenage years I became more interested with what you could make with your hands without a bunch of machines and big bucks and spending a lot of money,” he says.
The two saved a little money, “way too little,” Drew says, and began driving east. Along the way they spent a summer at the Lama Foundation in New Mexico, then continued on, visiting Louise’s parents in Chicago and dropping off their old Chevy truck in New Jersey on a farm owned by an artist friend of Drew’s father. And then they flew to England, intent on reaching Nepal.
A Year in Europe + an Apprenticeship in Coopering
Drew’s passport photo for his 1971-1972 trip overseas. “I packed a suit and tie, ‘just in case,’ but never used it,” Drew says. “There isn’t a single photo of me during that adventuresome year.” Film was valuable, and Drew and Louise saved it for photos for their book, “Handmade: Vanishing Cultures Of Europe And The Near East” (Harmony Books).
Initially Drew and Louise wanted to do their entire trip on public transportation and by hitchhiking, thinking that would put them closer to the people they wanted to meet.
“But we found out we were lousy hitchhikers,” Drew says, laughing.
So they traveled by bus and train. Their first big stop was Greece – winter was coming, so they decided to stay put. Drew took a train back to Munich, bought a used police motorcycle and brought it back to Greece. The motorcycle, it turns out, was a lemon and although Drew says they spent half their winter in Greece trying to fix it they enjoyed their time in places they were stuck.
Once the weather began to warm they took a ferry to Turkey but soon they realized their motorcycle wasn’t going to make it. Back to Munich they went (tax regulations made it impossible to sell or even give away the motorcycle in Turkey) where they found some American soldiers willing to buy it. They saw a “for sale” sign on a Volkswagen Beetle, “a really good one,” Drew says, and they bought it. By now they had given up on Nepal and instead had their eye on Scandinavia. “We thought we could explore some rural parts of Western Europe, starting with the Swiss Alps,” Drew says. And that’s where they met Kufermeister Ruedi Kohler.
This is a 1980 photo of Ruedi Kohler, the master cooper Drew apprenticed with in 1972. To watch a documentary about Ruedi, check out “Swiss Cooperage: Two Days in the Workshop of Ruedi Kohler” (Country Workshops/Image and Word) here.
Ruedi was one of the last traditionally trained Swiss coopers and he made wooden, open buckets for use in Alpine dairies. “They were really quite beautiful and very specialized to the area where he lived,” Drew says. Drew and Louise bought a bucket and put it in the back seat of their Volkswagen. Every day, as they headed up to Norway and Sweden, Drew looked at that bucket and wondered how Ruedi made it. “I knew enough about making stuff to realize I couldn’t do it,” Drew says. “And I had no idea how he did it with his tools.”
Drew and Louise drove around for several weeks, considering a permanent move to Norway. Ultimately they decided against it but before moving back they had an idea: Maybe Drew could apprentice with Ruedi. “Ruedi seemed to be really kind and definitely very skillful and he lived in this beautiful log chalet in a kind of obscure corner of the Alps,” Drew says. “And I thought maybe he would take on a student.”
Ruedi agreed and Drew began a 10-week apprenticeship in single-bottom coopering, working six days a week. Because of the language barrier, Ruedi would simply show Drew how to do something, Drew would try, then Ruedi would show him again, over and over, until Drew improved. Drew wrote down questions on a little pad of paper and every once in a while a local schoolteacher who knew rudimentary English would come by and translate Drew’s questions and Ruedi’s responses.
“I still have never found anyone as skillful as Ruedi,” Drew says. “And he turned out to be even nicer than we had thought – his wife and family also.”
Planting Roots in North Carolina
Once Drew’s apprenticeship ended, he and Louise were ready to move back to the U.S. Although they loved the San Francisco Bay area they wanted to experience a different kind of environment, something less urban – but they weren’t sure where. So they picked up their old Chevy at the farm in New Jersey and began driving it back across the country.
While in Greece a publisher from Harmony Books, a division of the Crown Publishing Group, who Drew and Louise meet at the Lama Foundation, sent them a letter stating interest in publishing their book. So once back in San Francisco Drew began writing, processing film, making prints and even working on the book’s layout. Louise worked on it, too.
It was the beginning of the Foxfire books era and having spent a year traveling in rural Europe, both Drew and Louise knew they wanted to live in a less material world. They considered Vermont, but didn’t want to be involved with its winters. Other places they deemed nice were too expensive.
While at the Lama Foundation they had met a guy who owned 100 acres in North Carolina who had the intention of starting a craft community. Drew and Louise happened to run into this guy again and he said they were welcome to stay in a small house on the property while they looked for a place to live. So, they did.
“We got everything done with the book,” Drew says. “Winter was over and we took that old Chevy truck back across the U.S. to exactly where I’m sitting right now.”
Drew and Louise lived in this double-board cabin from 1974 to 1980.
The guy’s plans fell through, and Drew and Louise, who had fallen in love with the seclusion and beauty of the southern Appalachian mountains, bought his 100 acres. And although they eventually built a new house, they’ve never moved off the property.
Initially they had no idea how they were going to earn a living but they were confident they’d figure it out. “We always figured things out,” Drew says.
While they never wanted to farm for a living they were interested in small-scale farming and making a bit of income off of it. Drew was interested in farming using draft animals, and they wanted to grow their own food. “We just wanted to experience it,” he says. “We wondered what the possibilities were, what we could do.”
Drew shaping a bucket stave.
In 1977, Wille Sundqvist visited which, in part, prompted Drew and Louise to start a craft school focused on traditional woodworking. “But I don’t want to talk about Country Workshops,” Drew says. “Too much has already been written about Country Workshops.”
That’s fair. Still folks equate the name “Drew Langsner” with two things: “Country Woodcraft,” the book he first released in 1978 completely reviving hand-tool woodworking in the modern world, and Country Workshops. In 1978 Drew and Louise opened their home and farm to students to learn about traditional woodworking. Instructors at Country Workshops included Wille Sundqvist, Jögge Sundqvist, Jennie Alexander and John Brown. Peter Follansbee, who spent time learning and teaching there, had this to say on his blog when he learned Drew and Louise were closing it down, 40 years after they opened: “Many green woodworkers in America and beyond can trace their roots to Drew & Louise, even if they don’t know it …”.
Country Workshops took place in the building on the left. Drew and Louise still live in the house on the right.
Although it may seem like it, Drew says it’s not always easy for him to connect with other people. “I’m not that gregarious or maybe kind,” he says. “But I’ve always been attracted to that kind of thing. One of the best things that ever happened during the 40 years of Country Workshops had to do with meeting the people who came as students and as teachers.”
During the last 20 years of Country Workshops Drew organized and hosted 17 international craft tours where people not only looked at craft work but met craft people – in their homes. “It seems to be something that Americans want to do but a lot of other people don’t understand that attraction at all,” Drew says. “They don’t particularly care if this potter has three kids who all play musical instruments or they’re just cuter than hell. They just want to get in that guy’s studio, buy some stuff and go. People like myself and a lot of the people that I took on those craft tours, we wanted to spend the day with the potter and meet his wife and see what his house was like and check out their neighborhood and have a meal with them. And we often succeeded in doing something like. It was my love of anthropology pasted into craft.”
Country Workshops shut down for good in 2017.
“During a lot of years Country Workshops, particularly, was a struggle but because of the people we were dealing with it was a pleasure,” Drew says. “A really good ride. And we survived. We did five years longer than I had ever thought and we were able to put together enough savings so that we’re able to live out here and not worry much. Instead we worry about the country and the world.”
A Love of Learning – And Sculpture
Today a typical day for Drew starts with a shower then reading, first some news and then 20 to 30 minutes of something more serious. “I’ve become much more interested in what I sometimes think of as getting the education I should have been paying attention to in high school and college,” he says. “I’ve been doing some, not heavy-duty, but definitely serious reading the last 10 years – philosophy and various things to do with the arts and history and thinking and stuff like that. I’m liking that a whole lot.”
Next comes exercise, something he’s been doing for years but given some recent health setbacks he’s now more focused.
“I make my own breakfast,” he says. “Then I take a walk, which is something that Louise has been encouraging forever but is more important now that the cardiologist has prescribed it.” He typically walks around their property for an hour, including down to the mailbox and back, which is two miles.
“Then I usually fool around for a while and we have lunch,” he says. “And then I try to do some outdoor work on something and usually there’s chores or things that need to be fixed and then before supper I try to get in a couple hours in the shop working on my sculpture projects. I have a hard time working on that stuff until I’ve cleared my mind of what needs to be done around this place which is too big.”
When the weather’s good Drew spends time working with the young forest that’s developing on the edge of their fields – lots of pruning, thinning and weeding. And then there’s always firewood work and work on the driveway and other light farm work.
“I just don’t worry about what I can’t do anymore,” he says. “Louise, she hasn’t made peace yet with the fact that she can’t keep up with getting rid of the bittersweet and the poison ivy. I do what I can, I get help when I can and I don’t let that bother me.”
In the evening he does more reading.
Prior to the pandemic Drew would try to sail one day a week on a nearby lake. He and Louise also enjoyed spending time with their neighbors, and visiting their daughter, son-in-law and grandson in California. Now those visits are FaceTime.
Bhuto Dancer II – Drew recently finished the painting and next will work on the base.
Drew has been spending a lot of time with his “Bhuto Dancer II” (which he talks about in “Country Woodcraft: Then & Now”), a sculpture made from a fallen remnant of a scrub apple tree.
“Right now I’m involved with the real painting on it,” he says. “It’s no longer just flat white and it’s been a really tough one to paint to get things right. I didn’t have an exact vision at all how it’s going to be once painted. I’m getting there, I’m almost there. And then I have some other old pieces of wood that were hollowed out that I’m saving. There are some that are real easy to work on but the one I want to do next is another one that is very unique. It’s a hollow log with dried fungus all over the surface which I’ve stabilized with lots of glue and epoxy. I have a form and what I’m trying to do is work with it to the point where the observer doesn’t think it’s a piece of a tree anymore. It’s an experience that you have visually and tactilely that has actually nothing to do with how it started as a tree except that it can only be thought of as that as it is a tree that grew that way. And that’s that.”
Drew has made many small sculptures, including bowls, and several big outdoor ones.
“My hope for the future is that I get some kind of exposure and success with these things,” he says. “And so far I’ve had absolutely none. And I’m unwilling to try to market myself as an artist. I’m hoping to be discovered.”
‘I Like Life When it’s Good’
When talking about a life philosophy, Drew says he simply tries to be honest and fair.
“Just the golden rule,” he says. “I don’t like to see people get cheated and I don’t want to have anything to do with that kind of thing. And I want to participate as much as I can and try to feel. I like life when it’s good. It’s a struggle. This year, of course, was an extra tough one with two big medical things plus America and Covid. But I’ve done pretty well.”
Drew dealt with both prostate cancer and quadruple bypass surgery this year. His bloodwork has been very promising where the cancer is concerned. Heart health, he says, never ends. Drew’s father died from a heart attack at age 56. And while Drew has lived a pretty heart-healthy lifestyle the last 30 years, he knows he carries those genes.
“A phone conference with my doctor ended with him saying I want you go and get a stress test this afternoon,” Drew says. “I foolishly put it off for a week but I did it. And at the end of the test the evaluating doctor said, ‘I have some bad news for you. You flunked the stress test. The doctor and I want you to go to the hospital right now.’ By the next morning I was getting woken up from four bypasses. So that’s something.”
Living 50 miles from the nearest hospital, Drew says he was very fortunate the doctors ordered him to go to the hospital when they did.
For years Drew says he was involved in organizations trying to change politics in their area, environmental pursuits and peace pursuits.
“I still support those things as much as I can but now I just want to live,” he says.
In the meantime Drew is approaching life with the same anthropologic curiosity he’s had since he was a college student.
Right now he’s reading a 500-page biography of Francisco Goya, the painter. He’s excited to finish “Bhuto Dancer II.” He loves listening to music late at night – mostly jazz, but also some blues and rock-and-roll – often with headphones.
“It’s so easy for me and Louise,” he says. “There’s so many things that we’re interested in that are so fascinating to learn about. Just seeing how plants grow, what goes on. Did you see the popular movie ‘My Teacher the Octopus?’ Our world is just full of that fabulous kind of stuff. I don’t want to get dragged down by the things that are dragging us down.”
You can order “Country Woodcraft: Then & Now” (Lost Art Press) here. “Green Woodworking” and “The Chairmaker’s Workshop” are available from Drew personally, here. Simply include a note with the title(s) you wish to buy, and your mailing address. Payment is accepted via PayPal.
I was chatting with Kara Gebhart Uhl about some new “Meet the Author” profiles, and realized that while we have a blog category for Nancy Hiller’s “Little Acorns,” we don’t have an easy way to find the profiles Kara and others have written. So, I’ve added a new category to our drop-down menu: Profiles. There, you’ll find 75 good reads about woodworkers (and that number will no doubt grow as I find ones I’ve missed).
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.
