We’ve restocked on our Cincinnati-made chore coats. As of this moment, we have plenty of every size except Large. We’re working with our stitcher, Sew Valley, to restock the Large size and build up inventory on all of our sizes.
This is the best time of year for the chore coat. I just emptied the pockets of sawdust from mine and went to dinner with Lucy at Ripple down the street from us.
Other news: Both the expanded edition of “The Anarchist’s Design Book” and “The Solution at Hand” are projected to ship the week of Jan. 21. Apologies for all the out-of-stock books. Last year was our biggest year ever by every measure. We’re having to increase our press runs in many cases and keep a closer watch on inventory.
Exekias’ signature (ΕΧΣΕΚΙΑΣ ΕΠΟΙΕΣΕ) as potter, rotated 90° anti-clockwise, detail from a scene representing Herakles and Geryon. Side A from an Attic black-figure amphora, ca. 550–540 BC.
I have often wondered what period of time must elapse before a good craftsman becomes an outstanding one. Was he born that way, needing only the requisite skill to develop his genius? Or did he evolve stage by stage like other men, but having the courage to take his work a stage further, perhaps many more stages than other men will venture.
Yet that may only imply the virtue of persistence, not that he is outstandingly gifted. What is the secret? We can add together the small perfections which make up the quality of a first-class man but, even so, something eludes us, something in the very essence of his work which defies analysis.
There is an old Breton proverb which says: “Qui aime son métier, son métier l’aime.” It may be this puts a finger right on the spot. That there has to be love between a man and his work, something which each gives to the other, which acts and interacts upon his skill before craftsmanship becomes the superlative thing that is created beauty.
Probably many more men than we can possibly estimate, working at the handicraft they enjoy, are producing work of this kind today, to be seen by few people, but to some of those few communicating that little thrill of pleasure which only superlative work can give. When we think of the amount of wastage there has always been right down through the ages by reason of material change and decay, the destructiveness of wars, accidents, sheer stupidity and thoughtlessness, the marvel is the amount of creative beauty which must have been produced by unknown men in every age for so much to have survived into our own, infinitesimal in comparison with what has been lost.
Furniture, of its nature, cannot date back many centuries, as much, perhaps more, through neglect due to changing fashion than from the perishability of wood. But ancient records and wall paintings have yielded up a great deal of information about the furnishing of kings’ palaces and the like, and many ancient craftsmen’s masterpiece has been described in meticulous detail, which still seems to retain the sense of wonder of those who had seen the work and the proud sense of possession of the monarch who had owned it. Very occasionally, by one of the freakish chances of history, the name of the craftsman will have survived while that of his noble patron is forgotten. A strange reversal in values.
In some cases, conscious that this work of his was good, the craftsman has inscribed his name on some obscure corner, to be discovered years afterwards by men who came to admire. It is not often the craftsman inscribes a friend’s name as well as his own, yet this is what happened when, between two to three thousand years ago, a Grecian artist wrote his signature in tiny, crabbed Greek script: “Exekias made it,” on the lovely vase he had made and painted, and then in a burst of pride and affection: “Handsome Onetorides.” And so the name of his handsome friend has been passed down through the ages in somewhat unsual confirmation of Keats’ “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.”
Had the maker instinct of immortality when he inscribed his friend’s name on the lovely thing he had just completed? Exekias himself was known as the finest Athenian vase painter of his day, and the vase is the famous one painted with a panel in which with consummate skill he shows the two Homeric warriors, Ajax and Achilles, seated at an improvised table playing a dice game. The two figures, painted and incised in black upon a red ground, are bearded and every line of their bodies as they bend forward shows a kind of eager intensity, but there is nothing to suggest that the handsome Onetorides was a model for either. No, the inscription seems to have come out of the fullness of the artist’s creative joy, knowing this work of his hands to be good and wishing to associate with it the name of the friend he admired. Rarely has a dedication been made with such simplicty and rarely has any dedication lasted so long.
Probably when we come to the word “dedication” we come to the crux of the whole matter. The man who is going to do outstanding work in any craft has himself to be a dedicated man. He must be sensitive to beauty wherever he sees it and in whatever form and have the instinct to turn to beautiful accomplishment the handicraft he has made his own. He has to have skill so sure and informed that it will carry him faithfully through his undertakings, enabling him to tackle new kinds of work with the confidence of experience.
But all this the really good craftsman can have. If he wants to go further still, it can only be for the love of it, something which will bring an element into his work which no school can teach, a heightened degree of skill, a suavity, a finish, which can only happen when, as the Bretons say, the work loves him back.
Editor’s note: When we published David Savage’s “The Intelligent Hand” we were under a cancer-imposed deadline to finish the book, and so some aspects of the production got shorter shrift than I like. One part was this section on the Cable Street Mural, which David had begun painting in the 1970s. We tried like hell to get some good photos of the mural for the book, but could locate only one small photo before press time.
This fall I taught a couple classes in the East End of London, and one of the students mentioned that the mural was a quick train ride away. So we went during a meal break and I took these photos. Below is David’s text about the mural. Please note that this story is a little out of context outside its book. It is not about politics. It is about failure. Please don’t drag our blog into the political muck in the comments. We’re better than that.
— Christopher Schwarz
When I tell this story to students they always say the catastrophes and failures have been the best bits. Each time I tell the story I get the courage to look a little closer at what went wrong. It helps to see each failure not as a falling down, but as a stage of personal development. It’s how you get back up that matters. Creatives are good at failure; we do it all the time, and we know there is no good work without it. But it helps in the telling if the blood and gore gets drippy.
The Battle of Cable Street happened in 1936 when Oswald Moseley attempted to lead a band of the British Union of Fascists through the largely Jewish East End of London. They were prevented by a large crowd from going along a main route, so they were diverted down a smaller parallel road, Cable Street. The group was so deeply provocative that this road, too, was blocked and the march was prevented from proceeding. Hurrah!
This area near the London docks has always been where immigrants would first settle. It had been the home of Huguenots and, in turn, Jewish people fleeing pogroms in Europe. As immigrants settled, gained stability and a little prosperity, they would all move to other areas of London. (In the 1970s and 1980s, the new Bangladeshi immigrant population was threatened with fire bombs and daily racial intimidation from a small but vocal far-right political group in the same way that the British Union of Fascists had done to Jewish East Enders in 1936.)
Remembering the Battle of Cable Street seemed an important thing to do. Especially as the side wall of the Stepney town hall on Cable Street had a public garden in front of it and seemed to have PAINT ME written all over it.
I began the selling process all over again. I made drawings and large watercolour designs, showing as much as I could what the wall would look like. The proposal had considerable local support, but most people, quite reasonably, couldn’t see the sense of spending any money on art, especially this art. Going against a majority opinion for what seemed to be right was becoming a silly habit of mine.
The local authority was the Tower Hamlets Council, and as owners of the building, they were responsible for its repair (rendering the wall paintable). Getting this done took years. In my proposal, I asked for two assistants to speed up the job. This never happened. I was on my own. The scaffolding was nearly 80′ high. My plan was to work from the top of the wall down, which may have been foolish. At some stages I would put a projector on top of a nearby tower scaffold and project drawings onto the wall. Working on the top of it meant my work was obscured from view by the scaffold board I trod upon. To see the area I had worked on from the ground meant removing the boards and climbing down, spying the errors, putting the boards back and making the change. And on and on. I was running up and down those ladders all day long. It was exhausting and dangerous work; twice I fell a short distance.
But the wall was going well; I had spent two winters and a summer on it, and most of the top part was near finished. The image was beginning to emerge. I didn’t realise it, but this was the dangerous time. This is when the wall was comprehensively vandalised.
That and the exhaustion got me. My body told me that if I went on that wall I would probably fall again, and this time I might die. It was a move I am not proud of, but I pulled out. I quit. I knew the mural would be finished, as the political will (and the money) was now there to do it.
A team of three, including my old mate Des Rochefort, along with Ray Walker and Paul Butler, were commissioned to finish the job. Well done fellas. Hurrah! This mural, unlike the “Royal Oak Mural,” has been protected from vandalism and become a well-loved part of the area.The repair and restoration has been periodically and lovingly done by Paul. Well done, Paul.
Nearly everyone who has visited the workshop has commented on how I should change these Gibson chairs to make them more contemporary – or to alter them using my own design language.
Chamfer the underside of the seat. Add bevels and hardlines. Reduce the visual weight of the crest. Saddle the seat. Make one with three legs. And on and on.
I haven’t taken their advice. Here’s why.
When I seek to understand a form, I first want to get as close to building an original as possible. I attempt to replicate the surface finishes, the shapes and the joinery. And I try (as much as possible) to use tools and processes that were appropriate to the time the original was made.
I do this not to make a slavish reproduction. Slavish reproductions actually don’t interest me much. Instead, I want to learn what’s important about how the piece goes together. Making an original teaches me far more than just studying some photos and riffing all modern on them.
With the Gibson chair, there are some curious parts that aren’t obvious from photos. The two back sticks that aren’t angled are a different shape than their neighbors. They are deliberately oval and inserted into a deliberately ovaled and tapered mortise through the arm. Why? The taper is obvious. It locks the arm in place from below. The angled stick next to it locks the arm from above.
But why oval? After making three of these chairs, I think I’m closer to the answer, like something on the tip of your tongue. I suspect (but could be wrong as this is a blog entry and not a researched book after all) that a tapered oval is:
Easy to make with a round rasp. Tip the rasp forward and take a few strokes. Tip it back and make a few strokes. That gives you an oval mortise. Then you adjust the rasp’s angle and take out the high spot inside the mortise.
Making a round and tapered mortise instead would take a little more work and might weaken the arm because you have to remove more material from below the arm.
But I am going to make some more Gibsons and think some more with my hands (feel free to build one yourself and chat me up).
This chair is about 90 percent of where I want to be. I have the geometry of all the sticks working like the originals. To get to this point, I used lumber I had on hand – mostly scraps from other chairs. Now I am going to use riven material for the legs and sticks so I can get closer to the appearance of the legs and back sticks (and if I wanted to go full reproduction I might use a broom or tool handle as one of the legs – a somewhat common repair on originals).
This chair is going to Narayan Nayar to thank him for photographing the construction process. He picked out the nice color (it’s General Finishes’ “Basil” Milk Paint).
The next chair might get a more Irish green. Or it might end up natural, like some of the museum versions I’ve seen.
This is a quick reminder that the storefront is closed today – our next open day will be June 13.
We’ll be using today to catch up on publishing projects and commission work (I have to build a crate to ship a chair). We might also scoot down to Crafts & Vines because Vic is smoking some wings.
We look forward to seeing you in June and hope to have a special day planned.
