“Well Mr. Savage, I am sorry to tell you the results of your tests are not good. If you play your cards right you may have two years, three at best. Play them badly and we are looking at months not years.”
So, I begin this book with the hope and intention to reach the conclusion before you do.
I wasn’t always going to be a furniture maker; that journey is for later. For now, I want to share with you a pair of cabinets that have just been finished. They will help tell a little about who I am. They are made in American cherry, highly figured and among my more successful pieces. However, both the selection of the species and the wonderful figuring are complete mistakes for which I can claim no credit. I wanted these pieces to be made in English cherry. It has a greenish-golden heather honey colour that has an elegance very suitable for bedroom furniture. I am pretty sure I said “English” to Daren, who ordered the wood, and I was sullen and grumpy for a while when the American cherry arrived.
“I can’t get English in these thicknesses,” he said. “This is all I can find, and we are lucky to have that.”
So, we carried on – no point doing anything else – and didn’t things turn out well! I could easily say how hard we looked for this highly figured stuff and how important it was to the concept, but that would be hogwash.
For most of my life I have made furniture for other people. Like the cobbler with poorly shod children, we have furniture in our home that has gone to exhibition but did not sell. What we don’t have is a handmade dining table and chairs or a pair of bedside cabinets. Storage in our bedroom is a moronic piece of furniture design from Habitat that closes two large drawers together and catches them in the centre. Push, just there, and maybe the catch will hold. Push anywhere else, and this aircraft carrier of a drawer springs out toward you, whacking you in the shins. But now we have these made-to-measure cherry lovelies.
They were largely made by Daren Millman, who is the senior cabinetmaker at Rowden. Rowden is our workshop in Devon, where we have been for nearly 20 years. Rowden is also a teaching school where we cover hand-tool techniques, machine techniques, drawing, design and business skills. Rowden is a farm owned by Ted Lott, who has retired and let out the farm buildings to us. During those 20 years, we have built up a workshop with an international reputation for making fine modern furniture to order. Before Rowden, I was in a workshop in Bideford for about eight years where I did much the same, but not quite as well. The end of that, and the beginning of this, is also a story for later. (Juicy one, that is.)
Not made fast, these cabinets. When asked how long these took, Daren would give his standard answer for any serious piece: “Oh, about 400 hours.” Whether it is a dining table set, or a cabinet with secret drawers, 400 hours seems to do it. Estimating times for making jobs is at the very guts of making a living in this biz, and Daren is spookily accurate.
We do price estimates in two ways. I have an arm-waving, general feeling gathered after 40-odd years of making mistakes. “Oh, it’s about three months,” as I visualise the piece being made from timber arrival to polishing. And I do the estimating in days or parts of days. Cutting those rails will be about half a day. I know this, for I have cut similar rails and seen others doing similar rails, and that’s how long it took!
But Daren is much more meticulous. He will settle down with paper and pen to plot the progress of components and processes through the workshop. Like me, he will begin at the beginning with timber ordering, visiting timberyards, making a cutting list. Right through to polishing, packing and delivery. Each will have a time allocation. That time allocation, again, will be based on nearly 30 years’ experience. He will be better than me, but I will have got there faster. So, if I need a quick price, I will use the arm-waving method and I may even ask Daren to wave his arms about. A serious job enquiry needs pen and paper, a nice comfy stool and a tidy bench. And about half of an expensive day.
But this wasn’t being made for a customer so none of that mattered; we won’t be getting paid for the time spent. I was once accused of being very concerned about money by one of those gutless anonymous internet trolls. This stunned me because all of our work has been for pay, but that was always secondary to making something that was special. If we could survive doing it, I would always want to make it as best we can – but to do that you need to know your numbers.
Way back in the early 1980s, I read books by James Krenov that inspired me to take up working with wood, making furniture. He inspired a generation to hug trees and to love wood, and to make as beautifully as one could, but from the position of a skilled amateur. Jim never sought, I believe, to make a living from this. That was my madness.
What Jim did do, however, was touch upon the reason that is at the core of this book. Why do we go that extra mile? Why do we break ourselves on that last 10 percent? This is the 10 percent that most people would not even recognise, or care about, even if it bit them on the leg. This is the bit that really hurts to get right, both physically and mentally.
But get it right and deliver the piece and she says, “Wow, David, I knew it would be good, but not this good.” Get this right, over deliver and soon you don’t need too many more new clients, for she will want this experience again and again. We have been making for the same clients now for most of my working life. They get it, they like it and they have the means to pay for it. Your job is to do it well enough to get the “Wow, David,” have the satisfaction of doing it right, get the figures right and feed your children. Not easy I grant you, but for some of you it will become a life well lived.
This is the quality thing at the centre of our lives. This is the issue that brings people to Rowden from all over the world, each with what Perry Marshall would call “a bleeding neck” (something is wrong, or they wouldn’t be here). Each knowing they can do more with their lives. They come with damage that they feel can be fixed with a combination of physical work and intelligent solutions. Both are essential.
Physical labour is unfashionably sweaty. We generally now sit at terminals in cool offices. We are bound by contracts of employment that would make some 18th-century slave owners seem benign. The only exercise we get is the twitching of our fingers and the occasional trip to the coffee machine. Our bodies, these wonderful pieces of equipment, are allowed to become indolent and obese. We feed up with corn-starched fast food and wait for retirement. Exercise, if we take it, has no meaning; we don’t exercise to do anything. We run or jog, but we go nowhere. We work out in the gym and get the buzz, the satisfaction of the body’s response to exercise, but we don’t do anything.
We don’t use the energy constructively to engage our minds and our hands to make stuff.
White collar work has become what we do, almost all of us in the Western world. It pays the bills and keeps us fed, we get a holiday and our children are kind of OK. And that is fine for most of us. But there are some of you who know that something is missing.
Something creative, some way to spend your day working physically while exercising your body and your mind. Thinking and revising what you are making, as consequence of the quality of your thoughts. This is Intelligent making, this is The Intelligent Hand.
This, then, is written for you. This is to help, encourage and support a decision to leave the world where thought and work are separated. Where they no longer exist together. This is for the brave souls who need to plough a contrarian furrow, where intelligence and making exist together and you are in control of your life. Don’t be scared, but don’t expect it to be dull or easy. A life well lived never is dull or easy.
— David Savage
“The Intelligent Hand” is available for pre-publication ordering in our store. Customers who order it before the press date will receive a PDF of the book at checkout.
Richard Jones has lived his life with a simple sense of practicality – he has learned what works, what doesn’t and what must be done to get food on the table, while also allowing for trial and error to explore work and hobbies that have ultimately led to fulfillment.
Endlessly interested in the whys beneath the whats, Richard devoted more than a decade of his life to “Cut and Dried: A Woodworker’s Guide to Timber Technology.” And that alone should paint a pretty complete picture, although, given the technical nature of the work, maybe an unfair one. He’s meticulous, yes, but not stuffy. He played rugby for years, dots conversations with the word “bloody,” and enjoys biking through the English countryside – particularly if the destination is a pub with the promise of a warm (by American standards) beer.
Born in Shropshire, on the Welsh border in the West Midlands of England, Richard grew up in a farming family – one that has farmed for generations. He lived with his parents and older brother, and attended a boarding school from age 7 to 17.
“In some ways, I preferred to be at school,” Richard says. “All my friends were at school.”
Richard recalls childhood summers spent working on the farm – driving tractors, baling hay, building fences, looking after cattle and sheep. But he also remembers the joy he found in all the farm’s hiding places, and riding his bike for miles around the English countryside with narrow, windy lanes, hills, trees and green, green, green. As he got older he enjoyed tinkering with cars and engines, breaking things and then fixing them. “I guess I had an aptitude to work with things,” he said.
While not a lover of school, Richard did well in English and his woodworking courses. Once his daily lessons were complete, he’d usually make his way back to the woodwork room and build things (table and chairs) and carve things (hedgehogs and giraffes). He did quite well in sports, and played several – rugby, hockey, cricket, swimming and athletics.
Unlike his brother, who still runs the family farm, Richard didn’t love farming. As a teenager, Richard dropped out of school and came back home to work on the family farm, but six to eight months in, he had a falling out with his father. So, he left.
He worked one or two daft (his word) jobs – hotel porter and the like – to make ends meet. He dreamed of being a joiner and furniture maker, but he was unable to get an apprenticeship. In 1973, he did, however, get a job with a small shop (no longer in business) that specialized in joinery, furniture making and restorations. His mentor was a grumpy old Scot, who occasionally let him borrow tools and taught him a lot (you can read about his sharpening lesson here). Richard stayed on for two years, but it wasn’t an official apprenticeship with formal qualifications at the end. In 1975, Richard applied to North East London Polytechnic, a vocational-type school to study business.
“I thought I ought to get a job in an office where they pay some money,” Richard says. “Work that made my hands calloused didn’t get me very much. But people who worked in offices, that paid a lot more – I thought.”
This time around, Richard loved school. “I had a great time in college,” he says, laughing. “I did all the stuff you’re not supposed to do.”
After graduating in 1977, Richard applied for many office jobs, but couldn’t find work. “I thought, well, I could do something with my bag of tools,” he says. “I could get a job doing some joinery and earn some money rather than have no money. And I’ve basically stuck to that, ever since, one way or another.”
Becoming a Joiner and Maker, in the British Tradition
Richard’s first job was with a joinery firm that made bank and security windows, which he did until 1979. That same year he married his first wife, Jill, whom he met in college. They married in Edinburgh, Scotland. “I managed to get various jobs there for a little while,” Richard says. “All sorts of jobs, working in shops and joiner work.” Then, Richard and Jill, with rucksacks and tents, traveled extensively, to places such as France, Spain and Morocco.
For the next two years Richard and Jill lived in England, near London, and Richard continued to work various jobs, including a short stint that took him back to his roots – driving tractors on a local farm (they had just returned from months of travel, and Richard needed the work). Richard eventually made his way back to joinery work, this time working for Chubb Security Installations.
“I was doing all this work, furniture and joinery malarkey, and I didn’t have any qualifications,” Richard says. “I thought I better get some.”
So in 1981, he applied to Shrewsbury College of Arts and Technology, which offered a well-respected furniture course to about 15 students. He was one of the 15 accepted, and the course earned him a City & Guilds 555 Level 3 in Furniture Advanced Studies with distinction.
Steeped in the Arts & Crafts and Cotswold traditions, the college and his instructors were linked to famous British makers and designers through their association with Loughborough College, and connections to such luminaries as Ernest Gimson, Gordon Russell, Ernest and Sydney Barnsley, Norman Jewson and Peter Waals. Robert Wearing, who Richard describes as “a funny mousy little man, always with his damn jigs” came by once a week – every Friday – to teach. “He was very earnest, very focused,” Richard says. “He had a jig for everything.”
Shrewsbury, the great British makers of the 19th and 20th century, his tutors and Robert Wearing all influenced Richard’s education, and, perhaps to some extent, his style. But Richard is quick to note that while he respects the Arts & Crafts style, he doesn’t particularly like it, including the exposed joinery.
“The movement itself produced some great furniture and the philosophy was kind of interesting, but it didn’t work,” Richard says. He says he likes things that are well made with reasonably uncluttered lines. He admires craftsmanship, quality and practicality. “I’ve always been driven by the need to get the job out of the door fairly quickly.”
And that is something key to know – and in many ways, respect – about Richard. While many folks build furniture on the side, a hobby in addition to their work, it is Richard’s work. He’s typically had to work with clients who need something specific, and can pay a certain price. He may consider fancy inlay, he says, but if that fancy inlay is not part of the client’s budget, he has to cut it out.
“Very rarely in my life have I had the luxury to go over the top with my design,” Richard says. “That’s always been important to me – to always make stuff at a price the client is willing to pay. I’ve never really had the opportunity to just play.”
There’s honesty and fairness in that, and a practicality that, in a circular way, has allowed Richard to turn what many can only conceive of as an avocation, into a vocation. At first glance this way of living may seem restrictive. But by cutting out the fluff, Richard has turned a great weekend love for many into his everyday life’s work, and lately, he’s his own boss. What may seem stifling, to some, has actually earned Richard a lot of freedom.
This viewpoint, in part, also explains Richard’s love of technology. “A lot of people reject technology because they believe it takes away skills,” he says. “I don’t see it that way. Technology allows you to make something complex very quickly.” Advanced equipment, CNC, AutoCAD and similar programs all inspire Richard. For, in addition to completing often-boring work (think shelf pins), there’s brilliancy, he says, in the building of the machine and manipulating it to take on complex tasks. “It’s very exciting,” he says.
Richard helped build these choir stalls for St. Giles’ Cathedral, Edinburgh, while employed at Whytock and Reid, in 1984. This photo was taken years later, in 2005.
After graduating from Shrewsbury, Richard and Jill moved back to Edinburgh, his wife’s hometown. Jobless, Richard walked into Whytock and Reid, Edinburgh’s oldest and, perhaps, most prestigious cabinetmaking and upholstery shop, and asked, “Do you have a job?” They replied: “Aye, when can you start?” Established in 1807 and awarded the Royal warrant by Queen Victoria in 1838, Whytock and Reid furnished many fine castles and homes throughout Scotland and beyond until its closure in 2004.
This photo of Richard was taken in 1985 while he was employed at Edinburgh College of Art.
About a year later, in 1984, Richard applied for the furniture technician position at Edinburgh College of Art. For nine years he worked with furniture design majors and staff, fabricating furniture for and with them, offering technical and aesthetic advice. He was also charged with the day-to-day general running and maintenance of the large furniture workshop, buying and storing timber, maintaining all the hand and power tools, and more.
“That’s where my real interest in becoming more of a furniture designer/maker began,” Richard says. “I was in an environment with not just woodworkers (furniture designers) but other creative people: jewelers, glassblowers, interior designers, fine artists (painters), architects, photographers, weavers, stained glass artists and sculptors,” he says. “I really got interested in all this visual stuff that was going on. Prior to that, I would just make things. Here, I started to better appreciate design, form, shape and function.”
Rugby, Love & Moving to America
Richard resting after a rugby training session, in Houston, Texas, likely autumn 1996.
At this time Richard was playing recreational rugby, his passion. “It’s sometimes described as a bit like American football but some say it’s perhaps harder,” he says. “We haven’t got any helmets and pads on for a start; we don’t change just about the whole team at the end of plays, so we don’t get all those breaks to get our breath back.”
Richard receiving a pass from a teammate during a Seven-a-Side rugby tournament in College Station, Texas, likely 1996.
One of his fellow rugby players had a cousin who played rugby in Texas, and he invited the club to spend a few weeks playing in the States. So they saved money for two years and took two teams to Texas where they played for a wild three weeks (in addition to playing rugby well, the teams drank well, too). His first night in Texas, Richard, by then divorced, met Gail, a Houstonian. They clicked immediately, and she followed him and the teams all over Texas. After Richard went back to Edinburgh, they kept in touch, and both took several trans-Atlantic trips to see each other. They married in Edinburgh, and Gail moved to Scotland.
Richard continued working at the college, but after nine years the job became too comfortable, with no chance of promotion. Gail missed the States, so in 1993, they moved to Houston.
One of Richard’s primary roles while serving as workshop manager at The Children’s Museum of Houston was the supervision and construction of the “Magic School Bus: Inside the Earth” traveling exhibition. The work was complex, and featured various rooms with many interactive elements.
Richard got a temporary job working with a firm that built exhibition stands, and while there, a colleague recommended Richard for another temporary job, this one at The Children’s Museum of Houston. He was soon offered the workshop manager position; he was responsible for running all aspects of the Exhibits Fabrication Shop. While there he also managed the build for the museum’s “Magic School Bus” touring exhibition.
In 1995, Richard decided it was time to open his own shop – Richard Jones Furniture. He rented a shared 7,000-square-foot workshop, which included office space. Two one-man businesses co-existed, pooling and sharing machinery. Richard’s clients were mostly householders and small businesses. He worked with designers and also designed himself. Occasionally, for big jobs, he’d hire sub-contractors.
It was during this time that Gail suggested Richard write an article for a magazine. “This was before I got into computers and stuff,” he says. “So I bought a computer and thought, this is a good way to learn all the damn keys on the keyboard. I didn’t know how to type or anything like that. I started to write about woodworking. Once I found where all the keys were, all this stuff just spewed out of me.”
Richard wrote for many magazines, including this cover feature for the April 2003 issue of “Woodwork.”
Coming up with content was easy. It was the editing that took time. He bought a nice camera, took accompanying photos, and easily sold his work to publications such as Woodshop News, The Woodworker, Woodworker’s Journal, and Furniture & Cabinetmaking.
At this time Richard’s work was also being shown in exhibits including the Philadelphia Furniture and Furnishings Show, the Houston Furniture and Design Expo, and invitational exhibitions hosted by Brazosport Art League, Gensler Architecture, Gremillion & Co. Fine Art, Gallery3 and more.
It was hot in Texas. An outside temperature of 100° meant an inside shop temperature of 110°. So in 2003, Richard and Gail moved back to the U.K. “I couldn’t take the heat,” he says. “It was great in the winter, but the heat just drove me nuts. My wife loves the heat. I missed the British things. I liked America and I liked Texas, and the people were really nice. But I missed the warm beer at rugby and, just, all that kind of British stuff. I missed my daughter and family.” Gail agreed to move back on one condition: Richard needed to have job. “And that’s how I became an accidental teacher,” he says.
Richard had been applying for a wide variety of jobs, including that of lecturer at Rycotewood Furniture Centre. He was quickly accepted for the position. Although he had never taught before, Richard said he was reasonably organized and managed to wrap his head around the job fairly quickly. Plus, the subject was second nature to him – guided by course curriculum he taught furniture design and making to undergraduates. He also continued to write for trade journals, a kind of teaching in and of itself.
Torpedore (2013). American cherry, hard maple, dye and lacquer.
Torpedore (2013). American cherry, hard maple, dye and lacquer.
Torpedore (2013). American cherry, hard maple, dye and lacquer.
In 2005, Richard accepted a position at Leeds College of Art, where he served as leader of the BA (Hons) Furniture Making program. Throughout his teaching career, Richard kept writing and building furniture on his own time, and exhibiting his work throughout the U.K. Exhibitions took place at or with the Northern Contemporary Furniture Makers at venues such as Tennants Auctioneers in North Yorkshire, and CUBE Gallery in Manchester. Between 2006 and 2008, Richard also earned a certificate in education, teacher training from the University of Huddersfield.
Eventually, Leeds ended its furniture course citing, for instance, income from furniture student fees and the footprint requirements of a furniture student compared to, for example, a graphic artist. “The craft furniture market has shrunk massively over the last 50 or 60 years,” Richard says. “Not many people are able to sustain themselves on craft furniture.”
Omega Hall/Console Table (2014). American cherry.
Omega Hall/Console Table (2014). American cherry.
Omega Hall/Console Table (2014). American cherry.
In 2014, Richard forged a new path filled with varied work – furniture maker, joiner, woodworker, writer, teacher, consultant – a path he’s still on, today. “I kind of like that, it keeps me out of trouble,” Richard says. “My two best subjects at school were English and woodwork” – two subjects he excels at and makes a living with, today. He also became a member of the City & Guilds Institute, Leadership and Management, receiving his Masters Award in 2014.
By 2005, Richard had stopped writing for magazines, for two reasons: One, the pay was simply too little for the amount of work each required. And two, he realized timber technology, what he wanted to write about, was too big of a subject for the magazine format. So, in 2005, he started writing a book on timber technology. He finished it 10 years later.
The Making of “Cut & Dried”
Richard wrote “Cut & Dried” while also working full-time, and building furniture nights and weekends. “I can’t tell you how many hours I’ve put into it,” he says. Those years, filled with sometimes-intense four- to six-week periods of writing, included research, asking for peer reviews, editing and more. “If I was to say, I probably spent the equivalent of two-and-a-half to three years on it,” he says.
Richard also took care of much of the photography, traveling up and down the countryside in Scotland, the south coasts of England, and visiting and talking to people at timber kilns.
And this was, perhaps, the first time in Richard’s life that he eschewed practicality in terms of time. At one point he was offered a publishing contract, but it came with a deadline. So he turned it down. With no buyer for the book, he had no obligation to factor in an hourly wage. It was side work that took over all of his free time; it was work in addition to. The end result, he thought, would be the result of all his years of training, work and knowledge. And he wanted it to be worthy of all those years, he wanted it to be good and right, and intellectual but accessible, no matter how long the process took.
“Hopefully the result is very good for everybody,” Richard says. “I was bloody-minded, determined. I thought, someone needs this. I really believed somebody needed a book of this type on this subject.”
Part of that belief stemmed from the fact that the book he was writing did not exist. He wanted to create the definitive guide on timber technology, not from the point of view of a wood scientist, but rather from the point of view of a woodworker. He wanted to offer the often-complex information in a less-dense format, and in a way easily understood by those not scientifically minded. It took him years to make sense of it all. And so, throughout the writing process, he constantly asked himself, “How can I make it so that any other reader can make sense of it?”
And that took time.
“Wood is a bloody difficult material, and if you just keep blundering along you’re going to keep making mistakes,” Richard says. “I felt like I needed to know more about this stuff because I work with it. And although I am reasonably good, I thought I’d really like to know the why behind what’s going. There’s just something about that that really appealed to me, the fact that we take this material that grows naturally, and we turn it into other things.”
Richard loves trees. Perhaps it’s a love that developed when he was just a boy, riding his bike through the hills of the English countryside.
“I look out the windows, and I see these lovely trees, and they are just fascinating,” he says. “Many of the trees drop their leaves in autumn. And then by magic comes spring, with new flowers and leaves, and how do they all do that? I just think it’s fascinating. The homes they create, for bugs and all that stuff, the medicine that comes from them … I cycle on my bike through the woods and I see the magpies and crows and trees are just fascinating places, habitation for lots of different things, all together.”
Richard and I spent a lot of time working together on “Cut & Dried,” and given the distance, it was all via email, hundreds of emails – editing notes, answers to questions, at one point panicky queries regarding images and a chart (something like this happens with every book and thankfully, as with all the others, this one, too, worked itself out). And, as often happens in many months’ worth of writing, whether by hand and posted or sent electronically, more casual notes are dropped in, often near the end – details about weekend plans, family happenings.
The editor/writer bond is interesting, as you’re almost always working on years’ worth of work, sometimes, even, someone’s life’s work. There’s a sacredness to the task, for all involved, and as rewarding as it can be it’s also teeming with anxiety. And so, it was with great apprehension I read Richard’s email dated June 11, the day he finally, after so many years of intense work, received his author’s copies. “I’m really pleased,” he wrote. “The book looks wonderful at my first skim through. In a funny sort of way, I feel a bit overwhelmed and just don’t know what to say. I think I need a bit of time to get my head around what’s just happened.” Kind words followed – Richard excels at graciousness and professionalism.
Richard’s days (and nights) feel much longer now. With the book done, new paths are open – there’s more freedom.
“I like to keep busy,” Richard says. “I don’t fancy retirement.” In addition to work, Richard gardens, bikes, spends time with friends and watches rugby. He visits his family, including his daughter and twin 12-year-old grandchildren. Richard’s father died young, at the age of 70. But near the end of his life, Richard says they both began to understand each other. Richard even built some furniture for his parents, and they paid him fairly.
Richard would like to design and build more furniture, but he has little interest in owning a furniture-making business full time. “I don’t want to invest in all the machinery and premises at this age, over 60,” he says. “The craft furniture designer/maker road is really tough to go down.”
Consultancy is something he does occasionally, and would like to expand on. The work is varied and complex – legal disputes, timber technology issues, design and construction questions, and workshop safety. And it can pay quite well. Richard is also interested in developing guest teaching opportunities and perhaps speaking engagements, especially in the field of timber technology.
And so he continues on, approaching each day with solid work ethic, great intellect and his simple sense of practicality. And perhaps now, that his book is done, he’ll be able to relax more often, by having a pint and watching some rugby, which he says is, “my big interest outside all things woody.”
We are fast closing in on the publication date of the classic book “Welsh Stick Chairs” by John Brown. This compact book has had a profound effect on woodworkers and designers all over the world. It is the story of a chair that no one had a good name for. And how that chair changed the life of John Brown.
It’s impossible to capture the essence of the book in one blog entry – it’s part history lesson, part autobiography and part practical manual. But the following passage is one of my favorites.
“Welsh Stick Chairs” is available for pre-publication order now in our store. It’s $29, which includes domestic shipping. Full details on our quality edition can be found here.
— Christopher Schwarz
One day I saw a chair in the window of an antique shop in Lampeter. It was like a vision. I had never seen anything that had made so instant an impression on me. To my eyes this chair was beautiful. I had never had any interest in furniture or chairs. Like most people they were just the things you lived with. Now here was this lovely chair. I couldn’t afford to buy it, but I could make one like it. Well, that is what I did. I made one. It took a long time. Chairs of simple form like the stick chair are surprisingly tricky to make. When you’re building them you have to work from points in the air, angles of sticks, angles of legs; there are so many variables. Anyway, I was quite proud when I finished my chair. It looked alright. Of course, I wasn’t able to put a century or two of patina on it. Now, twelve-years-old, it begins to look right. Family “treatment” and a few thousand hours of bum polishing have done the trick!
At this stage I was interested enough to look for books on the subject. There are quite a few, both American and English. I still hadn’t realised that what I had seen in that Lampeter shop was something quite rare and unique – a Welsh chair. Then it was just a Windsor chair. I went to museums. I visited High Wycombe where there is a museum devoted entirely to Windsor chairs. They have a very comprehensive selection of Wycombe factory chairs and English regional chairs. I don’t think there were any Welsh chairs. The English chairs did not have the same spontaneity the same verve as their Welsh counterparts.
I enjoyed my youth. After the valleys I thought England was wonderful. The war started and we could not live in London, and through a series of events of which I have no knowledge, we ended up with a small-holding in the wilds of Kent. (There were wilds in Kent in those days!) We had no electricity, gas or sanitation, we grew much of our own food and kept chickens and a pig. We didn’t realise it then, but we were living the ‘Good Life’. We made few demands on the world’s resources, and I was happy. So, as the Lampeter chair was one step towards my rehabilitation, the building of a tin shed in a field I bought, and a change to the simple life, completed my return. I live very happily without electricity or any other services. I have a workshop, a wood stove and good health. There’s a saying applied to yachts, which applies equally to life, “Add lightness – and simplify.”
A neighbour asked me to build him a chair like mine. I tried to – but it came out different. It was alright, but it wasn’t the same chair. My neighbour was pleased. He has the chair now, he keeps it in the bookshop he owns. It then occurred to me that the reason for the diversity of pattern in the old Welsh chairs was that the makers did other things as well. They were not chair-makers as such, they were wheelwrights, coffin-makers, carpenters, even farmers. When there was need for a chair, somebody in the village made it, or they made their own. They didn’t have patterns and jigs for continuous production. They had no consistent supply of uniform material. They used their eyes and their experience. It was like a sculptor doing his work, they ‘thought’ the chair, then they built their ‘think’. Some of these chairs are a disaster to sit on, most uncomfortable, but they all have a kind of primitive beauty.
“In Woodworking Shop,” photo taken in 1942 by Arthur Rothstein. Courtesy of: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-USF34-024771-D.
“Perhaps that is the most precious part of the gift a handicraft like woodwork can bring with it, and as our power to concentrate deepens so will the quality of our skill. Fortunately for us constant repetition will always bring a skill of its own, it being another mystery of living that there is in man something which adapts itself with wonderful readiness to any action or set of actions repeated over and over again. Whether we are learning to use tools, or play the piano, or to swim, tumbling and floundering along till we think in disgust we shall never master the thing, the process is always the same. Almost unawares we find that ability comes, our muscles have learned to co-ordinate, our fingers the trick of it, and we progress with an increasing sureness of touch till we have the mechanics of the thing within our grasp. And it is possible to end there, having achieved just the competence we wanted. But with anything creative, any kind of craft, it is also possible and greatly rewarding to go a great deal further. Sometimes as we contemplate it that awkward self of ours comes to life on another tack, tugging at us with the thought that we’re just ordinary fellows with an ordinary handyman talent and any finer flights of workmanship are quite beyond us. It is the child again, crying distrustfully: ‘I can’t. It’s too difficult,’ and we need to say to ourselves, just as would to a child: ‘Come on. Snap out of it and try.’
“It is here, I think, that what I have called ‘the eye of the vision’ will help us most. Let us cease to worry about our own skill or lack of it but keep instead our imagination fixed on the kind of work we aim at achieving, holding firmly to a mental picture of what our next finished piece is going to look like, colouring it in fancy with all the detail of a perfect finish such as we have most admired in the best specimens of craftsmanship that have come our way. The man running a race keeps his eye on the goal and not upon the feet which are taking him to it and we should be wise to do the same. We need to see the goal with the eye of vision in order to keep our interest and enthusiasm alight: more men have failed from lack of imagination than from lack of skill. For skill, regarded only as the technical ability to do a job, although never unsatisfying, can be of purely limited interest. But regarded as a means of creating beauty through a standard of workmanship aiming at perfection, it gives us entry into another world. It is a world full of human interest, linking us in fellowship with all the craftsmen past and present, in whose work we see evidence of the quality we seek, extending through them our knowledge not only of how things are done but why they are done and how people have lived and furniture changed in a changing world. It helps us to enjoy fashion and yet be above it, in that, arriving at our own judgments, we choose our styles as we will. That many people nowadays have technical ability unblessed with imagination is only too evident in the new hideousness of our towns, but the woodworker who has the true craftsman’s spirit and an imagination attuned to beauty will create at least his home surroundings according to his liking, keeping alive in his own and other men’s minds the knowledge of what can be done.”
My daughter Maddy is ready to start shipping our latest round of stickers. They come in sets of three for $5 cash, or you can buy them through her etsy store.
Maddy graduates from The Ohio State University on Sunday and in August will move to New York for some secret research job that involves developing vaccines for infectious diseases.
While she’s saving the world from the Infectious Lizard Butt Syndrome, she has also happily agreed to continue fulfilling sticker orders.
This might sound corny, but I think she kinda likes the notes, photos and stickers that readers send her. She has decorated her apartment with some of the stickers and photos. So thanks – y’all have been right nice.
Here are details on the three stickers.
A “Disobey” sticker a la Shepard Fairey designed by Jason Weaver. Jason has published this design on a T-shirt and says that he will be offering those shirts again. I really dislike looking at myself, but Jason did such a clever thing with this image that I forgive him.
A detail of the cover of “From Truths to Tools.” This image is an homage to William Blake’s “The Ancient of Days” by Andrea Love.
An image from “Ingenious Mechanicks” featuring my personal motto: Experto Crede.
A few people have noted the disparity of having a “disobey” sticker in the same group as a “experto crede” sticker. We do this because Carl Jung.
These are quality 100 percent vinyl stickers. They will survive the outdoors – heck you could put one on a street sign. Want a set? You can order them from Maddy’s etsy store here. They are $6 delivered ($10 for international orders).
Or, for customers in the United States, you can send a $5 bill and a SASE (self-addressed stamped envelope) to my daughter Maddy at:
Stick it to the Man
P.O. Box 3284
Columbus, OH 43210
As always, this is not a money-making venture for me or Lost Art Press. All profits help Maddy escape Ohio for New York without selling her (boyfriend’s) plasma.
