After graduation, [Jonathan] Fisher married Dolly Battle of Dedham, Mass., and accepted a call to minister to the frontier town of Blue Hill in the District of Maine. Situated about halfway up the Maine coast, Blue Hill is the subject of many idyllic landscape paintings. The jagged and rocky shoreline, salty ocean air and lush forests have long attracted tourists looking to get away from city life.
Fisher’s letters to family members are full of warmth and piety.
As welcome a vacation spot as midcoast Maine is today, in the first half of the 19th century it was inhospitable frontier wilderness. Between the notoriously recalcitrant populace and the lack of resources, the isolated frontier was a daunting mission. Kevin Murphy described Blue Hill in the 1790s as “a clutch of rude dwellings surrounded by some rickety tidal mills.” (2) The benefits of serving in a well-established town were not lost on Fisher. Before accepting the call to rural Blue Hill, he also considered a pastorate in Ashby, Mass., “in the heart of a well settled country,” which offered closer proximity to family, better compensation, assistance from fellow ministers and more “temporal conveniences.” For a Harvard-trained minister, the allure of urban ministry was real. Despite this temptation, Fisher felt a divine call to serve in this frontier setting – the “infant part of the country” – because “it [was] difficult for them to find a sufficient number of candidates, who [were] willing even to come and preach among them, and much less to settle.” (3) As one man said, “We are so as it wore out of the wourld that we don’t hardly know wether we do rite or rong but we mean to do as well as we can.” (4)
The Province of Maine from the best authorities, Samuel Lewis, 1794, W. Barker sculp., engraved for Mathew Carey’s American edition of Guthrie’s Geography Improved. – Courtesy, David Rumsey Map Collection, David Rumsey Map Center, Stanford Libraries, https://purl.stanford.edu/sr253bc9505.
Late 19th-century Blue Hill historian, R.G.F. Candage, recalled: “In personal appearance Father Fisher was below medium height; he dressed in ancient style, with small clothes, knee buckles and shoes, and a long waisted coat, his head bald and thrown slightly forward, with his whole demeanor and appearance clerical and grave; no one could see him and doubt his profession.” This image of the publicly austere reverend concurs with other contemporary descriptions of him, but reading his journals and personal correspondence one can’t help but be impressed with his warmth and piety. Kevin Murphy’s assessment of Fisher’s demeanor concurs with my own: “Fisher’s public persona – serious, and probably overbearing and too exacting for his parishioners – overshadowed the private Fisher, who emerges from his letters and diaries and from the words of his family as sensitive, intelligent, and inspiring.” (5) Or as Mary Ellen Chase put it: “He mingled authority with love.” (6)
As temporary structures, log cabins were quick to build and allowed frontier families to prepare the land for settlement. – Missouri History Museum, St. Louis.
Jonathan Fisher’s life was far from easy. He regularly dealt with migraine headaches, stomach pains, diarrhea and serious injuries from manual labor. Despite these trials, Fisher resigned himself under the hand of Providence. Accounts such as that of August 28th, 1818, are common: “Came on for Bluehill exercised with pain in my side, back and bowels and with diarrhoea. Called at Phin. Osgood’s, Jr. Reached home 10 P.M. Took sop pills and mullein tea. Found the family well, except Josiah, wounded by an ax. Have reason to bless God that we are all yet spared in life, that we have so many comforts indulged us.” Even in the midst of debilitating physical pain, Fisher carried on with the work at hand. On March 17, 1826, his journal reads, “High N.W. scattering clouds, cold. From 9 A.M. ‘till about 5 P.M. exercised with earache, some of the time severely. Tried first camphor on wool, then hot tobacco smoke, then had several drops of West Indian Rum dropped in. This in the first trial gave a little relief; in the second removed the severity of the pain. At intervals through the day planed out stuff for a common ruler, a pair of parallel rulers and modern dividers, finished the latter, A part of the time walked the room in great pain. It is easy to bear pain when we do not feel it, but when it is acute, then to bear it with patience is something.” He was a resilient man. Not owning a horse until late in his life, he was known to regularly travel long distances on foot, even as far as Bangor, 40 miles away.
This 1802 overmantel from a Paris, Maine, house illustrates well the stages of settlement: Clearing forest, building a house frame and the establishing of a village center. “View from Paris Hill” in the Lazarus Hathaway House. – “The Clearing of Paris Hill.” Oil on pine board, 30″ x 48″, artist unknown. Overmantel from the Lazarus Hathaway house, Paris Hill, 1802. Courtesy of the Hamlin Memorial Library and Museum. Photograph by Brandan Roberts.
Fisher’s most active furniture-making years were between 1796 (when he settled in Blue Hill) and 1820 (when he paid off all his home- and farm-building debt). The years between the Revolutionary War and 1820 (when Maine achieved statehood) were formative years for the new nation. This was especially true for the “easternmost countries” of Massachusetts, which were then called the District of Maine. Maine’s struggle for independence during these years can be seen as a “microcosm of the larger quest for national identity.” (7) Politically, demographically and socially, the District of Maine had been an “outpost” of Massachusetts since the late 17th century.
Maine derived most of its cultural influence from Boston in the same way that Bostonians looked to London for the latest fashions. Despite this deep-rooted “Boston prestige” during Fisher’s life, Maine was developing an identity apart from Massachusetts. It is not surprising, then, that Maine’s art during the Federal era often reflects this emerging sense of identity, blending vernacular/folk traditions with the sophistication of academic training.
(2) Murphy, Kevin D., Jonathan Fisher of Blue Hill, Maine: Commerce, Culture, and Community on the Eastern Frontier, University of Massachusetts Press, 2010, p 3. (3) Letter to Ashby from Fisher, October 26, 1795. (4) Harding, Samuel B., The Contest over the Ratification of the Federal Constitution in the State of Massachusetts, New York: Longmans-Green, 1896, p 8, quoted in Banks, Ronald F., Maine Becomes a State: The Movement to Separate Maine from Massachusetts, 1785-1820, New Hampshire Publishing Co.; Wesleyan/Maine Historical Society, 1973, 4, p 9. (5) Murphy, Kevin D., Jonathan Fisher of Blue Hill, Maine: Commerce, Culture, and Community on the Eastern Frontier, University of Massachusetts Press, 2010, p 13. (6) Chase, Mary Ellen Jonathan Fisher, Maine Parson 1768-1847, The MacMillan Co., 1948, p 279. (7) Clarke, Charles E.; Leamon, James S. and Bowden, Karen, Maine in the Early Republic, Maine Historical Society and Maine Humanities Council, 1988, p 12.
It’s mid-July and David Finck has just finished reading his maternal grandmother’s memoir. The youngest of 13 children, she grew up in Czarist Russia and was a pianist and top student at St. Petersburg State Conservatory. She gave recitals to Czar Nicholas II and Czarina Alexandra, hung out in the Winter Palace, met Rasputin and walked hand-in-hand with Grand Duchess Anastasia.
“It’s stunning,” he says.
David’s aunt, a gerontologist, helped write the first-person memoir. It reads like historical fiction, David says. Which is interesting, because after spending a couple hours talking with David, and seeing the circles and ties to generations past, present and future, one could almost say the same about his life, too.
Many know David as author of “Making & Mastering Wood Planes,” a classic in woodworking circles first published by Sterling and now sold under the Lost Art Press imprint. But since David first wrote that book he finds himself in a different place entirely, making violins and violas beloved by musicians. He talks a lot about luck but between his words is a lot of time, talent and skill. It’s a story that begins with his grandparents and now rests with his daughters. It’s about paths chosen and paths neglected, finishing what was left behind and following passions, all interconnecting to form a beautiful tale.
A Childhood Filled with Art & Music
David’s paternal grandfather, a paint chemist by trade, was a hobbyist woodworker. His grandfather also wrote, acted and directed Yiddish theater, and was founder of the Vagabond Theater in Baltimore, Maryland, the nation’s oldest continuously running community theater. His paternal grandmother was a trained sculptor. David has a couple little dovetailed boxes his grandfather made, with chip carving on them by his grandmother. David’s maternal grandfather, a doctor, was trained in St. Petersburg and cared for immigrant families in Baltimore’s Canton neighborhood.
David Finck and his father, Henry Finck, on a hike about 50 years ago.
David grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His father, Henry Finck, had a small woodshop in their basement and his mother, Paula, had an art studio in their home. David’s dad, academically gifted, was a professor of anatomy at the University of Pittsburgh Medical School, although academia didn’t suit him.
As a child David recognized his parents were unique. His mother, a substitute art teacher, always had projects for him and his two older sisters. He laughs, remembering how they used to melt packing peanuts with candles, creating all sorts of things with long strings of burnt plastic in the basement of their old house, a dungeon-like space with low ceilings and thick cut-stone walls. They would play with clay and origami. With a friend, David would use cardstock from old computer programs to create taped-and-glued-together cars for play.
“I was into making stuff as a kid but it was just a part of life, something you didn’t even really think about,” he says.
In high school, he took a woodshop class taught by “a very nice man who didn’t know a lot about woodworking.” While his teacher spent much of the class dealing with discipline issues, David managed to build a few projects.
“They were laughably bad, really bad,” he says. “No portent of the future came out of that shop class.”
David’s first foray into music was the recorder. At the time, his parents were secular Jews. While his mom was still interested in some of the Jewish traditions, his family didn’t belong to a temple. When David’s friends began attending Hebrew School, his mom gave him a choice: He could go to Hebrew school or learn to play an instrument. Hebrew School was a three-day-a-week proposition, 4 p.m. to 6 p.m., following full days of school.
“Guess which one I did?” he says, laughing.
He took recorder lessons for about a year – then something introduced him to the world of string instruments, which would become a significant part of his life ever after. That something? The movie “Deliverance.”
“I don’t know why my folks let me see it but I had watched ‘Deliverance’ with my dad when I was about 11, which is pretty intense, but you know the scene in the beginning where the Appalachian kid is sitting on the porch playing banjo and one of the characters starts backing him up on the guitar? Well, I just thought that was the most incredible thing I had ever heard.”
Later, David learned there were issues with that scene: While the music you hear is Scruggs-style three-finger bluegrass picking, the kid on the porch is playing a totally different style. What David did know at the time was that he wanted to play that tune. “It totally inspired me,” he says.
So his folks bought him an inexpensive plastic banjo that sounded, actually, pretty good, he says. It was the early 1970s and Pittsburgh was experiencing a folk revival – in fact, his sister, Tina, was playing guitar, mandolin and accordion in one of the city’s first old-time string bands. David began taking banjo lessons at a local music shop. Six months into them he realized there were different styles of banjo playing, and that he was never going to learn dueling banjos from his teacher, from whom he’d been learning a style called frailing (also called clawhammer). David was disappointed. And he probably would have found a new teacher and kept up with banjo had his dad not taken a sabbatical that resulted in his entire family moving – to New Zealand.
Dunedin’s Star Basketball Player (For a Short While)
Watergate and the Vietnam War filled the news. David’s parents, who were pretty liberal, wanted to leave the U.S. His father found a part-time job at a university on the South Island of New Zealand, in a town called Dunedin. New Zealand, David thought, offered a kind of paradise. This feeling was dashed a bit when the family arrived only to be greeted by a rare traffic jam caused by, of all things, the opening of a Kentucky Fried Chicken. His parents, believing they had left U.S. culture behind, were chagrined. They also were unsure about New Zealand’s political future.
Years later, David came across a passage in one of his father’s many notebooks about their time in New Zealand. His dad was a prodigious collector of clippings, pasting hundreds of them into dozens and dozens of composition notebooks, along with his own comments.
“There were a series of newspaper clippings related to Watergate that he had clipped out of the New Zealand newspaper,” David says. “And he was teaching anatomy at this university and he’s writing, ‘I can’t wait to be done with this. I want to do things with my hands. I want to make things that are tangible.’” (Eventually, he would.)
Grades were organized differently in New Zealand, by forms. The form David was initially placed in proved to be a little too easy; they moved him to the high school, which proved to be a little too hard. But there was a bright spot: For a short time, David was Dunedin’s star high school basketball player.
“I think basketball had been introduced in New Zealand three or four years earlier and I was one of the few people in the nation, it seemed, that knew how to dribble,” he says. “They put me on the varsity basketball team. I was like 100 pounds, 5’2”, 11 years old or something. But I could dribble circles around all these people. No one else really had any kind of dribbling skills at that point, but I quickly got beat up pretty bad by these much older kids and they put me in JV. But for a little while there, I was reveling in my athletic prowess. It was pretty thrilling.”
David’s true athletic passion had always been baseball. It was the early 1970s, the heyday for Pittsburgh teams. And in Pittsburgh, David lived two miles from the old Forbes Field. Like most 11-year-olds he wanted to be a major league baseball player – woodworking wasn’t even a thought. “The only trouble was I wasn’t very good and didn’t know it,” he says.
After a year in New Zealand David’s dad realized his part-time position wasn’t going to become full time anytime soon. So the family moved back to Pittsburgh, where David finished high school.
A Crooked Course Through College
“I hated high school,” David says. “But coming from an intellectual, academic-minded family, I was totally geared to go to college because I didn’t have anything better to do. And I sure wish that was not the case. I wish I had figured something else out.”
At the time Pittsburgh had a scholars program, which essentially meant starting high school in eighth grade if you maintained a B average – and David was a straight B student. He completed his high school courses by 11th grade and, not wanting to spend a year in high school taking AP courses, he graduated. Without a real plan he enrolled at the University of Pittsburgh.
“My parents were really laissez-faire when it came to guidance,” he says. “Either that or I didn’t seek them out and they didn’t impose their will on me. I don’t remember having heart-to-heart talks about this sort of thing at all. I just sort of plotted my own course in a really poor way.”
David, 17, was miserable in his big introductory college classes. But then he met Tom, a guy in his late 20s who had just earned his undergraduate degree in marine biology in Santa Barbara, California. David already had a vague interest in marine biology. Jacques Cousteau was big at the time. And David had spent several summers in Cape Cod, mucking around in estuaries and mud flats, and snorkeling while his dad worked in a lab at the Oceanic Institute. Tom told David he should go to UC Santa Barbara and study marine biology. And so, David did.
He ended up in a house with friends of Tom’s, all in their late 20s. A quarter-mile from campus, the house was two blocks from the beach and half the guys were surfers. It was paradise, David says, really beautiful. But yet again he found himself in huge general science classes. The beach was distracting and he worried he wouldn’t be successful in the environment.
He got in touch with a cousin who lived in Big Pine Key, Florida, about 20 miles from Key West. David’s cousin was taking marine technology classes at a small community college. Instead of sitting in auditorium-style classrooms, students at this college were out on boats doing sampling.
“Man, that sounded like a great idea to me,” David says. “So I took a leave, got myself all the way down to Big Pine Key, Florida, in time for the winter semester.” The problem? He hadn’t read the course catalog – no one was out on boats doing sampling in the winter. Despite this disappointment David continued his studies and spent a nice six months with his aunt, uncle and cousins in Florida.
Still unsure about his path in life, he decided to pursue a liberal arts education, and he transferred to UC Berkeley. Unfortunately, his guidance counselor told him a liberal arts degree didn’t exist. Together they came up with environmental science, and despite all the jogging around, David graduated with an environmental science degree four years after starting college.
David’s First Guitar
Before David and his family moved to New Zealand, his father had started – and stopped – building a classical guitar. The guitar was intended to be a stepping stone. After completing it his father wanted to build a viola da gamba. And if he accomplished that, he’d build his dream project: a violin. The move to New Zealand had interrupted the next step in the guitar, cutting a channel in the edges for inlaying the binding. After returning to Pittsburgh, David’s father, a cautious man with myriad things on his plate, found ways to put that step off for close to 20 years.
“It was during high school when I really started bugging him to finish that guitar because I thought it was good,” David says. “He was very meticulous.”
At the time David was a fan of James Taylor and Cat Stevens. He began playing pop folk on guitar, eventually moving to classical guitar and taking lessons. Another reason David wanted his dad to finish the guitar? He wanted it.
“It would have been way better than the hand-me-down guitar I was playing,” he says.
With a dream to join the back-to-land movement, David’s dad hunted for years for a farm. The family finally found a place in West Virginia, about 110 miles south of Pittsburgh. The plan was to spend six or seven years fixing it up, then move there once David’s dad retired. But a year later, his father had had enough of academia. He quit his job and David’s parents began a new life in West Virginia.
Throughout college David and his sisters would visit and help out on the farm. David and his dad turned one of the outbuildings into a shop and in it sat the unfinished guitar, along with all the forms that had been used to build it, a how-to book and extra wood. Having grown tired of trying to convince his dad – who had plenty of other work to do on the farm –to finish it, David decided to build his own.
“It was nothing I was passionate about,” he says. “Just when we had a little bit of down time it was something to do. But I really think at the heart of it I was still trying to manipulate him to finish his own instrument. I had a lot of confidence that it would be a nice, playable instrument and I thought this might inspire him to get started.”
David says his dad was a good craftsman – the kind who could take construction lumber and build a really nice trestle table with well-fitted joinery. He built a floor loom once, with six harnesses, because one of his interests was weaving. Without a background in fine woodworking, his dad simply figured out how to do stuff, building all sorts of things including small kit sailboats in the family living room. He also suffered from a bad back and spent a lot of time on his back reading – he was incredibly well-read. And busy. David mostly built the guitar on his own.
Turns out, he loved it.
“It was just inspiring for me,” David says. “Really, it was the first time I found something I was as passionate about as baseball. It just really felt like a real love, not just like, ‘Oh, this is kind of interesting.’ It was something like a bonfire, pushing me ahead.”
Comparatively, environmental science offered him little to no passion. He remembers a “horrible” work-study job at UC Berkeley, working with a young hotshot professor.
“He had a gazillion little surf creatures preserved in formaldehyde and I had to peer between the legs of each little one of them and tell him if it was a male or female and I would do that for 10 hours a week and it drove me nuts.”
Fortunately, while at UC Berkeley, a fortuitous meeting with a young woman changed the course of his life.
In Meet the Author: David Finck (Part 2) (coming December 9) you’ll learn about David’s switch from environmental science to woodworking, the birth of ‘Making & Mastering Wood Planes’ (while caring for two young children), his family band and pivot into violin making.
The hardest part of writing a book is that I forbid myself from reading for pleasure until my book is done.
My problem is what some people call “code switching” – where you imitate a local accent. Sometimes unwittingly. At my last corporate job, we had a corporate VP who spoke in a Cockney dialect. Whenever we were in a meeting with the guy, a coworker would start talking exactly like Mr. Bow Bells.
I took the coworker aside and gently broke the news to him. His response: “I know! I can’t stop myself! It’s horrible!”
Code switching is easy to do with writing. And it can be used to your advantage.
When I teach writing, I encourage code switching. If you don’t have a “voice” as a writer, borrow one. Find a writer you adore. Study how he or she structures sentences. Are the sentences long or short? What words get repeated over and over? How do they handle dialogue? How do they describe objects?
Now imitate them as best you can. Really. Rip off their writing style without shame. I did this when I was a student. I imitated Kurt Vonnegut, Noam Chomsky, Nikolai Gogol (especially Gogol) and (nerd alert) Vonda N. McIntyre. Imitating good writing is a good thing. It’s like making reproductions of good furniture. You get the feeling of good writing (or good furniture) in your veins. And as you do it, you will say “Yes, that’s what it feels like.”
When you start writing in your own voice or designing your own pieces, you will know what it feels like when the words are flowing and the furniture is stunning. In time, your imitative prose and furniture knock-offs will fade in the past as you find your own voice.
Once you find your own voice, however, that’s when the danger begins. If I read Vonnegut while writing a book, it’s going to come out as “The Anarchist’s Cat’s Cradle” or “Welcome to the Monkey House Vol. 2, Monkey Dreams Come True.” So I cut myself off from reading anything for pleasure while I’m writing for profit.
Right now, I am in a joyful place. I’m building furniture for “The Stick Chair Book,” taking notes, making photos, drawing chairs and thinking (so much thinking). But I’m not writing. So this month I’ve gone on a bender of fiction and nonfiction.
The slutty fiction: “The Murderbot Diaries” by Martha Wells, a six-book science fiction series recommended by my cousin Jessamyn West. Wells’ writing is a great thing to try to imitate (if you are looking to do a little code switching, sailor). The higher-brow fiction: “Piranesi” by Susanna Clarke, one of my favorite novelists. I’ve read her her first novel, “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell,” more times than any other piece of fiction. And the nonfiction: “Thinking With Type” by Ellen Lupton. This was a textbook for one of my youngest daughter’s classes. It’s an interesting and contemporary take on typography (again, nerd alert).
With any luck, I still have another six or eight months of being able to read for pleasure. And I have a big pile of books to dig through.
But after that, I’ll have to close the book(s). Otherwise you’ll be in for “Shart of Darkness,” “Board of the Annular Rings” or “Love in the Time of the Emerald Ash Borer.”
Feel free to suggest other book titles in the comments (you know you want to).
— Christopher Schwarz
Read other posts from the “Making Book” series here.
The north wall of the bench room at The Krenov School. The school’s mascot is an elephant, after an early habit of meeting after school to drink Carlsberg Elephant malt liquor. The walls of the school are covered in elephant mementos and decades of memories, jokes and relics. Photo by David Welter.
When I talk with other woodworkers about my own trajectory, nearly everyone asks about what it was like to be a student at the College of the Redwoods Fine Woodworking program (now aptly renamed The Krenov School), so I now have a spiel about my time there. It was an incredible space and monastic in focus on the craft, and I was surrounded by capable instructors, enthusiastic peers and beautiful Northern California.
When I was writing “James Krenov: Leave Fingerprints,” I posed the same questions I have so often fielded to other alumni, in particular to those students who studied while Krenov was still in residence: from the school’s 1981 inception to his 2002 retirement. There were common experiences from everyone: camaraderie, self-improvement and personal development, and an excitement at prospects of continuing a creative practice. While the book concerns itself with Krenov, nearly 100 of its 300 or so pages are about his time establishing and working at the school. Integral to that research were those interviews with alumni; they not only illuminated their experiences with the school, but also opened a window into its founding and to Krenov’s intentions as a teacher.
I won’t venture to summarize a hundred pages of writing in a few paragraphs; I’ll also avoid my tendency toward voluminous blog posts. Instead, I’ll share a short excerpt from the afterword. In it, I included my own experience – something that I avoided to that point. But the afterword was a good place to help the reader – now versed in Krenov’s life and work – understand how James Krenov, his school and the process of writing the book has shaped my own life as a craftsperson.
From page 245 of “James Krenov: Leave Fingerprints”:
Like so many students who attend the College of the Redwoods Fine Woodworking Program, I was in my 20s when I upended my life to move to Fort Bragg, California. My father, Robert Gaffney, was an amateur cabinetmaker, and after my stint in academia, I was hoping to explore and train the curiosity in wood that my father had instilled in me. I was also, perhaps, looking for a different path and pursuit than the one I was on.
My classmates in 2014, during a drawing class led by Laura Mays, the school’s director since Michael Burns’ retirement in 2011. Photo by David Welter.
A year or so earlier, when I was home to visit during graduate school, my father and I had talked about my prospects of a formal woodworking education. I had been working with him in his shop for years, but with a harrowing prognosis for his pancreatic cancer, we both wondered if I might be able to work with him when I returned East. Like so many other hobbyists, I had spent years poring over the projects in the “Reader’s Gallery” of Fine Woodworking, and noted that a large number of these projects seemed to come from a small town in Northern California. When my father opened the family computer and saw that I was looking at the admission requirements for the woodworking program at College of the Redwoods, he was thrilled at the prospect. He even helped put the few amateurish woodworking projects I had to show into a portfolio for my application to the school. By the time I was there, he wasn’t around to wish me well, but I had arrived with some of his tools and a knowledge that he had been excited for my next chapter.
Krenov died several years prior to my arrival, but as so many others in the years after his retirement have attested, his presence in the curriculum and the pedagogy of his successors was undeniable. I had picked out my father’s copy of “The Fine Art of Cabinetmaking” from his books and read it the week prior to arriving. The tool list handed to new students noted it as a requirement. I didn’t read “A Cabinetmaker’s Notebook” until I was a month or two into my schooling, and by then I already found its philosophy and approach a familiar take.
My first piece at the school, the “Madrone Stender,” a flagrant abuse of the guidelines for first projects in complexity and size. Photo by David Welter.
The height/tilt adjustment mechanism inside the “Madrone Stender.” I was thrilled with how it works; I’m not sure I was always thinking about how it looked. Photo by David Welter.
I shudder to think what Krenov might have thought about my first project, a desk that is undoubtedly “engineer art” with a brass and wood mechanism that allows for an adjustable-height worksurface. Or what he’d say about my Tage Frid stool and the odd zither I built later in the year. But just as so many students emerged from the school with differing aesthetics and shared roots, the school and Krenov’s words had shown me what I could make when I held myself to the highest standards and shunned the prospects of efficiency or limitations. It took me years to find a workshop and situation that might allow me to work again with wide shop-sawn veneers (and I still don’t have a proper horizontal mortiser) but I never looked back. Woodworking, more specifically this quiet and mindful flavor, was a new path.
The school I attended was nearly that which Krenov had departed a decade earlier. In the years since Krenov’s retirement, it has seen only a few changes in its staff. When Michael Burns retired in 2011, after 30 years at the school, he was replaced by Laura Mays, who helmed the school during my time there, and still does. A few years after my time, David Welter retired after 30 years; he was replaced by Todd Sorenson, a graduate of the classes of ’01 and ’02. Jim Budlong is still a core member of the faculty and a fundamental presence since joining it in the fall of 1989. Ejler Hjorth-Westh and Greg Smith are there, having taken Krenov’s position in 2002, and they bring their own skills and perspectives to the curriculum. Under Mays’ directorship the school hasn’t missed a beat. A wave of passion, ever-refreshed with new perspectives, meets returning alumni and visitors alike at the door.
Perhaps the most amazing thing I saw in my time at the school was the strength of its community. During my cohort’s midwinter show (a show that has been held every year since the early 1980s), a hundred or so alumni came to see the work on display, some flying from distant cities for the chance to reconnect with old friends and check in on the school. Britta Krenov, then in her 90s, came to visit; she made sure to commune with the student work and encourage the makers. By the year of my attendance, there were more than 500 graduates of the program. I don’t know many schools that can bring back a fifth of its alumni for a yearly gathering.
Editor’s note: We present to you today an early chair made out of wood. It is brown and has four legs but there may be more to it. Read on if you would like to know more about early French chairs with back rests. As always, please do not read on if you are offended, intimidated, or otherwise bothered by pathetic immature toilet humor and early fart jokes.
Rudy: OK, I’ve got another one. Perhaps you might not want to see this one. Here we go:
Klaus: Hahahahahahahahahahahaha
Chris: BWAHAHAHAHA
Rudy: It’s French.
Klaus: A pallet chair.
Chris: It’s like that chair made a ladder to escape itself.
Klaus: What the hell?!
Rudy: Staked meets ladderback.
Klaus : Staked meets pallet. The legs are SO wrong compared to the rest.
Rudy: And the rest is so wrong compared to every chair in the world.
Chris: More snakes-eating-a-big-rat shape. Just look at those legs.
Klaus: But are those chunky two-by-fours actually mortised into the seat? I mean the back posts?
Chris: The back is really interesting. The slats are notched into the back uprights.
Klaus: Yeah, that’s a nice detail. I wonder why he didn’t just nail the slats on with 4″-long nails.
Rudy: I have more pictures. Or shall we do the armchair?
Chris: This is good.
Klaus: Nah, this is great
Rudy: OK, on y va:
Rudy: The initials “PV” obviously stand for Penis Vagina.
Klaus: Or Pallet Vood
Chris: Somebody went to a LOT of work for very little benefit here.
Klaus: I don’t even know where to start.
Rudy: How about the wooden nails?
Klaus: I just noticed them.
Chris: This feels like something you would see on a movie set.
Klaus: Really, how?
Chris: No evidence of real wear. All the same color.
Klaus: Good point.
Chris: Lots and lots of work on something that is supposed to look primitive.
Rudy: DESCRIPTION: A primitive handmade ladderback Alpine chair in solid ash. France, early 1900s. Dimension: H74cm (29-1/8″) x W51cm (20-1/16″) x D35cm (13-3/4″) Color: brown Materials: wood Style: vintage
Klaus: Just the squareness of it all…makes it look so bad.
Chris: Or something you would see at a store that specialized in primitive furniture from third-world countries.
Rudy: Color: brown.
Klaus : Style vintage…nice.
Rudy: Material: wood.
Klaus: Oh, it’s made of wood!
Chris: Also: Is a chair. Really. We swears it.
Rudy: And it has legs!
Klaus: Well, that can be debated.
Chris: Legs: Number, four.
Rudy: Back rest: It has one.
Chris: I know I’m a suspicious lad, but this one smells. But I don’t know why anyone would fake this.
Klaus: Looks like the seat is rounded off at the corners with an axe.
Rudy: The maker really did his best with all the facets on the seat.
Chris: And then colored everything perfectly brown.
Klaus: It does look like it has never been sat in.
Chris: Or someone took a GIANT SHART on it. Once.
Klaus: After eating snails.
Chris: And then they put polyurethane on the shart.
Rudy: Like any good French person would do.
Chris: I think it’s something to fool the tourists.
Rudy: You may be right about that.
Klaus: It sure looks like someone decided to make a primitive-looking chair and didn’t do ANY research.
Rudy: That seat is mega thick.
Klaus: And made of material: wood.
Chris: Modern planer marks on the back edge.
Klaus: Hah! Good eye! Look at that! Or are they band saw marks?
Rudy: The wood also doesn’t look worn or aged at all.
Klaus: Nope.
Chris: Could be a band saw.
Rudy: Can you tell the brand by looking at that picture?
Klaus: It’s definitely not JB’s old Startrite.
Chris: Definitely Alpine.
Rudy: An Alpine band saw with a saw blade. And it runs on power.
Klaus: Yes, with a French opening.
Chris: Definitely an electric tool. Not a reciprocating saw.
Klaus: The maker is SO busted.
Chris: Another theory: This was made for a living-history museum.
Chris: Frenchie de la du Faker Chair™.
Rudy: Yes, and then it ended up with an antiques dealer who thought it was authentic.
Chris: Or went along with the ruse.
Klaus: Could be, but if I was the museum director, I would not pay the maker for this piece of crap. It doesn’t resemble anything.
Chris: Unless it was the Alpine Crap Museum. Ever been?
Rudy: Well, it does have a nice brown color. Le museum de la turdy.
Chris: Because it is at at the Crap Museum! Everything is brown at the Crap Museum!
Rudy: Exactly. Everything! And it smells in there!
Klaus: Been temped many times, but always ended up going to Champs Turdysees instead.
Chris: Hahaha, both of you.
Chris: I hope no one bought this chair. And I worry about the smell if used as firewood.
Chris: The Hot Fart Chair
Rudy: Ze’ot fart-chaire, as the French would say.
Rudy: £909 – nope, not sold.
Chris: Well there is a god.
Klaus: Hahaha…Is there anything more to add about this fart-smelling wood-material fake?
Chris: When they say “early 1900s” maybe early one day in the 1900s?
Chris: 8 a.m. on Dec. 31, 1999.
Klaus: Hahaha. That is funny
Rudy: Hahahaha!
Chris: Early, 1900s. It’s all about the comma.
Rudy: Early in the morning, sometime in the 1900s.
Chris: Yes. No one ever talks about that aspect of furniture.
Rudy: One brown morning, in the 1900s.
Chris: Hahaha.
Klaus: Good point. There are so many great chairs made after 4 p.m.
Chris: The late chairs.
Rudy: Late 2000s.
Klaus: Hahaha. Someone should make a timeless chair
Rudy: This chair is from the era of shut the f*ck up.
Chris: Early shut the f*ck up. To be specific.
Klaus: Get the f*ck up early and make a chair.
Rudy: Not the mid-shut the f*ck up. Those were horrible.
Klaus: I think this chair was f*cked up from the start.
Chris: From the early start.
Rudy: Do you think the maker started with the legs, seat or back first?
Klaus: Hey, it’s actually handmade, too, says the info. That is a lie. I think he started with the CNC. Or not.
Chris: CNC drawknife.
Rudy: CNC drawknife™
Chris: We need to invent CNC for froes, axes and drawknives.
Klaus: That could make you rich. Peter Galbert would love it.
Rudy: CNC milk paint.
Chris: CNC hide glue.
Rudy: Early CNC hide glue.
Klaus: That is the best.
Chris: From the morning cow.
Chris: OK, I take all back. This chair is real.
Klaus: Ze Chaiur.
Rudy: The chair is real because it says so on the Internet. Everything on the Internet is true.
Klaus: The maker probably had three cloves of garlic up his a$$ while making it.
Chris: De bonne heure chair.
Klaus: I don’t know what that means
Chris : De bonne heure marron.
Klaus: All I know in French is au revoir.
Chris: Early Brown.
Rudy: Hence the brown color.
Chris: And the earliness! So, so early.
Rudy: So early it can almost not get any earlier.
Chris: So early it is almost late.
Rudy: But hey, the maker fooled us with his wooden nails – not a pocket screw in sight. Clever guy.
Klaus: Haha. Good point. A good chairmaker hides his pocket screws. Right?
Chris: They are under the wooden plugs
Rudy: Says the expert.
Chris: I have no shame about that!
Rudy: None needed!
Klaus: You should not!
Rudy: I use pocket screws in almost all of my carvings. And cover them with wooden plugs. No shame.
Chris: I’m not going for the East Wales vibe.
Klaus: That pocket-screw trick with the three-piece arm is one of my favorite chairmaking tricks!
Chris: Thanks. Better than a JB dowel.
Rudy: You mean you think it’s authentic?
Chris: Early authentic.
Rudy: Right. De bonne heure authentique.
Chris: Oui, mon petite chou chou.
Klaus: Early authentic is better than this mid-day fake chair.
Rudy: Early authentic is actually a great way to describe this chair.
Chris: Sounds like marketing speak.
Rudy: The seat has some nice cracks.
Chris: Nice cracks to hold the nice brown.
Klaus: So, a name for this one? Many to choose from.
Chris: Yeah. Who ever edits this one can choose the name.
Rudy: Something with “early” perhaps?
Chris: And “brown.”
Klaus: I bet the back posts are screwed into the seat. The whole chair is screwed, in fact.
Chris: The buyer is especially screwed
Klaus: Haha.
Rudy: Haha.
Chris: OK, I gotta help Lucy unload the groceries. So I’m gonna sign off. She has beer. BYE!
