The Time To Hesitate Is Through...

Jeff Waldman, a friend of mine in San Francisco, likes to take on projects that quietly bring joy to a bunch of stranger's lives.  There are certainly better ways for a human being to spend their days, but it's a pretty short list.  It's highly underrated, the whole "childlike joy" thing.  Try it, you'll remember.

Jeff's got a new collaborative project that I'm totally tickled by, and I want to help get people involved with it. It's a great way to bring lots of artists and craftspeople together, all contributing to one very large work.

It started with a typically odd email I received from him one morning:

Remember that door we talked about? If you're ever bored one day and want a project, start making a few doors. Tiny ones. Like, Alice Through The Looking Glass, 15 inch tall, doors. They shouldn't be operational. But the more details the better. A frame, a few design flourishes. Some weathered paint. As I've been walking around the city I've noticed great spots where I'd like to take some industrial adhesive and mount a little fake door. Not for any real reason, but there are some well foot-trafficked areas where it would just look "right," or as right as something like that can.

Just a thought for your Wed morning. Hope all is well over on the right coast.

Absolutely. I'm in. I'm definitely going to participate, and I'm really hoping to help bring a few dozen of my friends to the table with me - I'm assuming my friends will be as amused and excited about it as I am.  I asked Jeff to send me a more explicit description to kick it off and help explain what's going on. Here's what he sent me:

The idea is to install small doors, unexplained portals, throughout the city. To start, in San Francisco. These doors would be scaled down to a size that is cognitively possible but whimsically improbable. Maybe 15-25 inches or so. Pet door sized. I don’t imagine them to be operable, but the more detailed in appearance the better.

Each artist would create his or her contribution to the project, where the frame, molding, window or lack of window, color, state of decay, and other intricate details speak to the artist’s unique take and contribution. The doors would be sent to me, to be installed by me and a couple others, around the bay area. Anyone based around here is more than welcome to join me as we find the best location for each piece. We’ll select spots that bode well aesthetically with the individual doors and are in areas that will see a lot of traffic but are least likely to be removed by anyone. Sounds contradictory? It is, but we’ll do our best.

The doors will be fixed with adhesive and installed in a way to look as natural as possible—as natural as a 16 inch tall weathered oak door can look on the side of parking garage. If anyone would want to stake out a spot before hand, via Google maps street view or some such method, and create a piece to be installed somewhere specific, that’s just fine. The installation process of each piece will be photographed along with reaction shots from passersby. The photographs, information, and story will probably be compiled together afterward-- though into what I'm not sure. If this goes well I'd like to expand on or replicate the project in other cities.

So, in case it isn't clear - this is open to anyone who can make a door, of any kind, of any material (understanding, of course, that it will live outside). That means anything from your basic woods and metals to textiles and resins and plastics and human bones and the flesh of a virgin dragon.

If you want to do what all the cool kids are doing, make a door.  If you want to break on through to the other side, make a door. If you want to find Wonderland, make a door. It's what Wile E. Coyote would do - and as we all know, Wile E. Coyote is a supergenius.


Update: If you just want to make a door and send it off, here's the address:

Jeff Waldman
1135 Leavenworth St
San Francisco, 94109

Make sure you identify yourself! If you want to blather on and on about what kind of door to make or where it should go, or you want to volunteer to help in San Francisco, that's fine too; email me here or Jeff at his site (his name at the top is a link).

The Artist as Hustler

The following is taken from a recent publication, a monograph of highlights from the 2008 Furniture Society Conference at SUNY Purchase in Purchase, NY. The essay is a condensed transcript from a 45 minute lecture I gave titled, The Artist As Hustler. The President of the Furniture Society, Andy Glantz, was kind enough to introduce me:

Andy Glantz: I once heard Scott Braun say, “I’ve been a hustler since I was 12 years old.” I would describe him differently. I would describe him as a moral shyster, an intellectual street urchin, and a hot-headed peacemaker.

Scott Braun: The face in this first slide might be unfamiliar to you, I imagine. His name is John Kennedy Toole. He was a depressive, a loser, an unknown loner in the 60’s. He wrote a novel that no one else had seen when he killed himself in 1969, at the age of 32. His mother found the manuscript in a footlocker and convinced someone to publish it eleven years after his death. The book was called A Confederacy of Dunces, now one of the most widely respected novels in American history. Toole was an exception - don’t let this happen to you.

So let’s talk about the hustle. It’s a way to live, maybe a state of mind, it’s not about deception or being a con man, but about understanding who you are and how to use that to your advantage. I’m not here because I’m some master hustler – what I am is a student, I’m fascinated and constantly learning about it. This is not a sales seminar - hustler does not equal salesman, they’re two vastly different things. What hustler does equal is an awareness of self, of your work and its place in the world. It’s an awareness of how people perceive you and never leaving any of that to chance. Though we may hate the word, this is about branding, what you’re doing is branding you.

I was both careful and cavalier in choosing the word “hustler” – it’s a word loaded with negative connotations. But I wanted to knock you askew a bit, see if I could make you look at doing things from another angle. Why do this? Why am I here? To inspire you? To entertain you? Okay, maybe. But I do this because this is my hustle, this is how I perpetuate the perception of myself that I know exists, because I created it. I’m working right now to keep my name in your mouths – I don’t care what you think of me, as long as you think of me! Now that’s a part of my hustle, because it’s part of who I am – you have to know who you are and work that. You’ll see that there are infinite variations, it’s on you to find your own. You don’t just believe the hype, you create the hype. And all of this, all that we do, all our hard work and all our hustling, it’s all about doing anything to convince someone else to give us enough money to do it again tomorrow.

I was watching a documentary one night about Leonardo DaVinci. DaVinci was a huge hustler, creating myths and legends around himself and his work – it even theorized that the Shroud of Turin was an elaborate DaVinci hoax, among other things. Now, at the time of the commission for the Sistine Chapel, DaVinci’s hustle had made him the most important artist in all of Rome, absolutely unchallenged. So, really, that commission was in the bag, it was assumed that it was his gig to lose. But he pushed it too far. His bickering with the Church, his posturing, had backfired on him, and they left him cold. They went and found the hot young kid from Florence.

It’s fascinating to think that it’s always been this way – from the first moment someone strolled into the cave next door and said, “That’s a great cave drawing! Would you come to my cave and do one for me?” – we’ve been hustling for our next gig. That’s how it’s always been, and how it always will be – it’s about hustling. All the talk you hear about luck is bullshit – there’s no such thing. Successful people didn’t ‘get lucky.’ No, it’s about opportunity, recognizing the sound of the knock and being prepared to open the door and deliver.

And for us to talk about the hustle, we have to be able to put aside the deceivers, the hucksters and pimps and thieves – that’s not what we are. We’ve all seen the word “heirloom” tossed around to describe furniture built to last five years, or you know who’s a great example of the art of deception? Thomas Kinkade. The Painter of Light, the world’s most collected artist! That crap works, but there’s nothing behind it, it’s all smoke and mirrors, and that’s not who we’re here to talk about.

To pinpoint who we are talking about, we have to acknowledge that there’s an unspoken given – we have to be able to assume that you are a badass. I’ll explain. As a young musician, I walked into the studio one morning after having seen the most amazing drummer I’d ever seen the night before, a guy who no one had ever heard of. I came in all excited, asking all the older players why no one had heard of this guy, and the only way I could describe this man was “badass.” I wanted to know how he could possibly be so obscure. So they sat me down and explained, “Scott – being a badass is a given. Without that, don’t even bother. You aren’t even in the conversation until you can call yourself a badass, there’s so much hustle that’s got to happen from there.” And that became something of a mantra for me – I had learned where the starting point was, and until I could call myself that, I’d better get back in the shed and get to work.

Look around, look just in this room. How many incredibly talented people are sitting in this room right now? I’ve got lights in my eyes and I can see Tom Loeser, and John Makepeace, and Jack Larimore, and Garry Knox Bennett just over here. Now think of how many times you’ve made some piece that meant the world to you, you’d bled and sweat and put your soul into it, and eventually sold it to someone who just didn’t really get it. This is for us! We do this for ourselves! So if we can make an assumption of a basic bottom level of quality and talent and general badassery, then what actually is separating one from another? How do we differentiate our work, our selves from the dozens of great and talented people sitting in the same room next to you right now?!? How do I carve a path, how do I get to live my life the way I want to live, to do it again tomorrow and make sure I’m not getting rained on? I want to find a way to be who I am and still have a roof and a sandwich!

So let’s look through history at successful artists I would argue are not only iconic, but have changed history with their art – every single one of them brilliant hustlers. We talked about DaVinci and Michelangelo, let’s jump to the 20th century or we’ll be here all day. How about Dolly Parton – I once heard Dolly say, “Whitney honey, you just keep on singing that song and making me money. It costs a lot of money to look this tacky!” She knows who and what she is, and she understands how to play on that, to take advantage of it. Well, I’m my own brand of tacky, right? Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, William Morris and Oscar Wilde, who would hide little debates between them within their writings just to raise controversy, Samuel Clemens/Mark Twain? A hustler? Hell, he invented a whole other guy! Pablo Picasso, Annie Liebowitz, Maya Angelou, Frida Kahlo and Jackson Pollock – you think Pollock didn’t know what he was doing when he got drunk and peed in Peggy Guggenheim’s fireplace in the middle of a party? Even when we try to talk about exceptions – people often say Judy McKie is an exception. She’s quiet and shy, she prefers to stay out of the limelight. I don’t think that’s Judy as exception, I think that’s Judy’s hustle!

Audience member: So who’s successful who’s not a hustler?

Scott: You see what I’m getting at?

What? The Pope? Did you say the Pope? That’s a 2,000 year old hustle! Let’s go on – Martha Graham, Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, David Bowie, John Lennon, Patti Smith, Andy Warhol, Henry Moore, Louise Bourgeoise, Richard Serra, Bob Dylan. Dylan’s a great example. He came to NYC knowing only that he wanted to be a rebel and he wanted to play music. He understood that to do that he had to reinvent not only himself, but his music, and he had to continue to adjust it over time, to be fluid and steal a little bit from everyone and as the folk scene began to stagnate, he just kept right on going. The die hards hated him for it, which only helped him continue to be a rebel and still grow. Dylan understood how to pay attention and adjust your work to suit the world. Yeah, Dylan is a genius.

And we have our own group – Le Corbusier, Gropius, Van Der Rohe, Frank Gehry, Frank Lloyd Wright, and we’ve got Sam (Maloof) and George (Nakashima) and Wendell (Castle) and Garry (Knox Bennett), brilliant hustlers every one.

As we run out of time, let’s talk about our own work quickly, and how much energy we see wasted arguing about what to call ourselves, and what you are and what I’m not and all the continuous Art, Craft, Design bullshit. I read recently that Brad Pitt bought a Verhoeven Cinderella Table in marble for $293,000. That interested me. So I followed some links to the gallery that shows Verhoeven’s work, and found a show featuring what they called “Design Art,” entirely the type of work we would see in any Furniture Society exhibition, selling for huge prices. Now if you think you’re willing to stand fast and insist that you’re a “Craftsman” or whatever and not a “Designer,” then you have to also accept that someone is eating your lunch, man.

Look, we do what we do each for our own reasons – we love the process, we want it to exist in the world, we want to make a statement, our reasons are our own. But to do that, you have to convince somebody to let you. So what you call it or what you sell about it doesn’t matter. If you feel the need to climb up on the table and scream, “I made this myself!” Who cares? That’s not what’s making people buy these things right now. But they’re buying the same stuff that we’re selling, they’re just calling it something else.

If you’re going to take anything away from here, then realize that just because you’re not selling snake oil, something worthless, that doesn’t mean you don’t have to be a snake oil salesman. You have to know how to sell you, and to do that you have to figure out who you are.

Quick thought.

As you've read before ad nauseum, I'm frequently caught up in the pointless and cyclical debates on Art vs. Craft vs. Design. I love to play all sides of that argument, because they're all bullshit, in the end. It's a circle, dummy, there are no sides.

Here's today's over-generalization:

Art = a beautiful idea, executed poorly.
Craft = a poor idea, executed beautifully.
Design = Art and Craft, publicly executed in the town square.


There. That ought to piss some people off.

Simplify.

It's strange the way this site fits or doesn't fit into my life. I think about it often. I think about quick posts, long posts, about how I don't want it to be a typical blog about a person's life, because I think that's boring and indulgent, and I don't want to just update you on every stupid thing I do or every romance or emotion or what color socks I wore today. I run around doing all the things I do (or don't do) on a daily basis, thinking that I'll find a full morning or afternoon or an evening to write a long post about something that's happening in my life with which I can make a statement of some kind.

And we all know how well that works out for me, huh?

Anyway, I'm sitting here tonight, trying to make a list of things to do, and playing the game of trying to separate them into categories of obligation. It's a valuable game, it turns out, and it will help me to sort things out into proper perspective and really see where priorities should be.

So as I'm doing that, someone who reads this site sends me a very flattering note, telling me that my bullshit actually helps him. Which, of course, makes me feel like a fraud, but it helps me to remember something very very important:

I'm supposed to be an artist.

I'm of the belief that such a thing means using your life and your views and your lessons and your questions to create things that try to touch other people. I think I'd forgotten that somewhat, in all the commotion of the last several months. It's time to revisit it, and to stop worrying about making it a grand statement - let's just bullshit together for a minute.

There's been one basic and overriding goal since we spoke last, one hugely important thing I want to accomplish as I continue to live with the idea that I'm not quite as sane as I once thought. It can be summed up in one word, and it's a word that's become a mantra to me:

Simplify.

My life has become entirely too complicated over the years, and not only am I unable to actually handle all the things I've brought into my world, I don't even enjoy them. Maybe I did once, all that jumping back and forth and swinging from tree to tree like a damned monkey, but I don't anymore, and I'm actively working towards cutting out everything that isn't exactly what I want in my life.

Simplification, it turns out, is a complicated process. I know - doesn't that suck? But I have an ace up my sleeve. In fact, I kind of knew about it when I put up that last post, it just hadn't happened for sure yet. I have an ace, and it's a way for me to get from here to there, it's a means to allow me to simplify my life in every way I want to, and while it has been and will continue to be a metric fuckton of work to get there, it's such a good secret weapon that it's almost guaranteed to work.

I got a job.

I know, I know, I've hinted at that kind of thing before, and in the darkest moments I've flirted with (hell, even slept with!) some pretty unlikely jobs. Sales, agent, managerial - I actually went looking for a position as a night janitor at a local church whose architecture I really love. But this is different. This is actually the kind of thing - no, it is the VERY thing - that I've been looking for for a long time.

It started part time, and it's been a lot of work and a lot of adjustment, but as of July 1st, I become a full time faculty member in the Sculpture Department at the Yale University School of Art.

Yeah, that Yale. Maybe you've heard of it.

I'd been beating my no-MFA-having head against multiple walls for a long time, even to the extent that the New York School of Interior Design (where I've been critiquing their BFA and MFA student's projects for years), offered me a teaching position last year, only to rescind it when they discovered that my credentials are a Bachelor's in Music and a dozen years of actual experience in the field they wanted me to teach. Many of my own peers in the Furniture and Design academic worlds have told me outright that without an MFA, I'm not qualified to teach in their departments.

This is a longer conversation, maybe we'll talk more about it another time. For now, the point is, Yale didn't give a damn about my degree - they saw that I had the skills and the experience they needed, and they asked me to come and build a shop and work with their students, and we all got along so well that they asked me to join the faculty. And now I have a job, and a paycheck, and benefits, and most importantly a solution to the two biggest obstacles I've had in front of me.

One, a way to finally find the luxury (curse?) of NOT having to make the bulk of my living with my work - something I have never had, not ever. And two, a way to do that which would enrich my life and make me a happier man. It accomplishes both, more than I could have even imagined. I love this job - I love working with the students, I love having the responsibility of being a member of this faculty, I could go on and on and I'm sure I will. All I'm saying now is that I love this job, it's EXACTLY what I needed, at a time when all was almost lost.

So all that is the good news. The bad news is that I can't just stroll away from the life I'd built, I have to dismantle it carefully, and that is a complex process. Much more complex than it should be, as I learn to rebuild my mind - this climbing back from that little exploration I took isn't easy, and it's going to continue to take time.

I'm okay with that. I'm working on it. I'm not nearly the reliable guy I used to be, and that sucks, I aim to fix that. It's not acceptable to me. I'm basically learning to be crazy and at the same time insisting that this bullshit doesn't run my life. I don't always win that little battle, but it gets better as we go. As each little complication I'd created in my life irons out, as each obligation comes to a close, I get a little bit closer to Simple.

Simple. It's a goal worth having, for a guy about to turn 44. I just want to do the work I love, and share some of the things I've learned over all those years with others who want to learn them. And when I go home at night, I don't want to be afraid that the lights will have been shut off, or that some commission I really didn't want to take in the first place is taking too long, or that an organization I'm supposed to be leading requires hours of attention, or that the tenants in my shop are upset because the knives are getting dull or the table saw is out of square.

Simple will remove those things, one by one. I'm a simple man, in the end. And I want a simple life.

And I'm watching it happen, a little at a time.

This Way Madness Lies.

Yeah, I know. It's been a long time.

There's an explanation. And I'm sitting here writing this because there are a few people that I still owe that explanation to, and this might just be a cathartic way to do that.

I probably won't leave this post up, I think this one is just for me and those people. We'll see.

So where have I been? Funny you should ask. The short answer is that some part of me decided it would be an excellent idea to take some time to find out what it feels like to actually descend into madness. And now that I think of it, the long answer isn't much different.

I lost my mind. I don't mean that the way we usually say it, "I lost my mind, I don't know what I was thinking!" I mean I. Lost. My. Mind. Let's back up a bit and I'll explain.

Like many people who've followed a path of making their imagination their lives, I've never been a stranger to the highs and lows of being a performer or an artist of some kind. I have my darkness, as many people do, and for 25 years of being an adult, I've learned to live with my demons and continue to be a functioning member of society. Sure, I'll have periodic bouts of depression, but the Beast and I have long since worked out an arrangement for how to live with each other and not make too big a deal about it. Spend a day or two in the darkness, shut the hell up and get back to work. I've never had much patience with those who indulge in it too heavily, I've never had much respect for the crutch of anti-depressants and other pharmaceutical solutions, and I've never really believed that clinical depression was truly a biological thing. Hell, maybe I still don't, I'm not sure.

But I know this: Madness is real.

In hindsight, it's pretty easy to see that this had been building for years, but this past Spring was a perfect storm of events that helped to trigger something I've never seen before. What those events were is completely irrelevant, they were simply a confluence of things that was enough to finally tip me over an edge that I had apparently been balancing on for a very long time.

I had what my Parent's generation would've called a "Complete Nervous Breakdown." I like that title, it's descriptive. I don't particularly like the word "depression," because it means nothing to me. I wasn't sad. I wasn't "down in the dumps." No one died, a girlfriend didn't leave me, I didn't realize I was a woman trapped in a man's body, I didn't have an unrequited love. I went mad. In the traditional meaning of that expression. Crazy. Looney tunes. A nutter. Insane.

And I spent the better part of two or three months quite literally laying in the dark in a fetal position, and not leaving my home except to make sure I had whiskey, coffee and cigarettes. I'm not being poetic here. I mean I spent the better part of two to three months laying in the dark in a fetal position.

And because I am a willful, and prideful, and stubborn, and stupid sonofabitch, I refused to admit what was happening to me, or that it was something I couldn't get a hold of on my own, or that it was anything more than my old demons being a little tougher this time. And so I just continued to descend into madness, my mind in freefall, publicly denying anything was wrong the whole way.

And I'm good at it. I'd spent my entire life perfecting the facade, building the walls brick by brick, creating a way to make it look like all was fine and well, I was just a struggling artist soldiering his way through a difficult world. So on those rare occasions that you could catch me on the phone, or see me out in the world, I appeared perfectly normal. And the truth is, one of the most fascinating aspects of madness is that, in many ways, at some moments, I was perfectly normal.

There were some fits and starts, attempts to put it all back on track, moments of clarity and days of throwing myself into the work that I love so much, assuming/hoping it would put me right again. I mean, I was still Scott, you know? It's not like I suddenly became incompetent, or began thinking I was John the Baptist and wandered around town in a white robe trying to throw water on people. I was still Scott.

But some little thing inside had tripped. Some connection somewhere in the wiring just wasn't connecting. If you were to ask me to describe the madness, I would tell you to try to imagine every molecule in your body telling you to do something, and then being paralyzed as you watch yourself do something else. Simple things, like, "get up," or, "you're hungry, order some takeout." I can remember entire days, sometimes several in a row, where I literally lay there for 9, 10, 12 hours, telling myself over and over again just to get up and do something simple, forget go to work or return a phone call, I'm talking about things like stand up and put some music on.

And still I didn't reach out for help, I wouldn't admit that I couldn't fight my way out of this. Two things finally reached me. The first was the realization that the one place where I should be finding joy, the one thing that should be my refuge from everything - the work - wasn't working. These chairs are the most exciting project I've had in years, you've read all about how much they meant to me, and there was nothing there, even that wasn't enough to make me move. There was no inspiration, no love. A few fits and starts, infrequent moments with a flicker of the love I have for this work, and poof - nothing. That emptiness showed me that I was lost, that I had lost the only reason I was willing to endure the struggle, the only thing I had that I could count on no matter what.

And then my Dad began treatment for prostate cancer. And I realized that I wasn't returning his calls. That he was reaching out to me, completely unaware of what was happening inside my apartment, and I was nowhere to be found. And his mortality hit me. I could lose him. He has fucking cancer. And here I am, wallowing around in some bullshit I didn't even believe existed.

And I moved. I got the hell up and I looked out at the world, and I acknowledged that I had lost my mind, and that no one was going to reach down and save me. And I went to a doctor. And he confirmed that I had indeed lost my mind, and that there were treatments for such things. And he sent me to a guy who gave me some anti-crazy pills, and he told me to keep on coming back to work with him, that he would help me find the broken crazy bits while the drug began to repair them. And to kick it all off, he asked me a single question:

"Suppose that we can fix the paralysis, that we can restore your sanity and make you a functioning human being again, because we can. So suppose that you're back to work and you're back in your life as you know it. Are you happy with your life?"

"Fuck you," I said.

And I took the pill, and we got to work.

It's been a few months now, and I've been back to work for awhile, and I'm a little more comfortable with the idea that apparently I'm a nutter, and that there are ways to work with that. I've done quite a bit of work on the chairs since I last checked in here, and hopefully I'll start writing about that again. I've been documenting it with pictures every step of the way, so the material is there to catch up with. I'm slowly reconnecting with all the people I disappeared on, and fessing up to this thing I don't really understand. I've acknowledged that I've spent a whole lot of years pretending that I wasn't crazy, and I'm learning that I can be the same guy I've always been, just without the crazy.

It's embarrassing. I'm ashamed of it. It definitely makes me feel "less than," and it's really difficult to admit to the people who know me and have trusted me or have the picture of me as a competent leader or a badass craftsman or simply as an intelligent, responsible, and capable human being. I mean, I'm a looney. A nutjob. A basket case. The doc says so, and he's got an awful lot of evidence on his side.

But I'm also Scott Braun. And if I remember correctly, he's a pretty fierce and relentless sonofabitch, and I never once saw that guy back down or give up, or even doubt himself. (Come to think of it, he's kind of an arrogant asshole.)

I'm here. And I'm learning how to be a sane person. There are changes, big life changes that will need to happen, and some of those are already underway. I'm back at work, and I'm stressed by trying to catch up, but I'm loving what I do again. And I'm seeing a little more clearly, and slowly rebuilding Humpty Dumpty into something more resilient and sensible than an egg in short pants, sitting on a brick wall.

If you're one of the people that I posted this for, thanks for reading it. I hope you understand. I can't ever say I'm sorry enough. If you'll still have me, I'm right here, hunched over my bench and making some chairs. If I let you down or I owe you something - work, friendship, money, love - give me another minute, I'm almost there. I'm catching up, and putting it back together in a smarter way means taking careful steps. If you'd rather keep your distance, it's cool. No hard feelings. I don't want to hang out with crazy people, either.

Say Hello to My Little Friend.

I'll have a new post coming any minute about stalking the ebony with a chainsaw, but I wanted to share something with you first.

One of the nice things about being so involved and visible in the art/craft/design community, is that I get to rub all up against people I have a deep respect for. Well, intellectually speaking, anyway. I only rub up against a few of them literally. And even then, only when I'm sure I have bail money.

Besides just general inspiration, which of course is a nice perk, I also get to have deep stoner-caliber conversations about what we do, and the way we feel about it. While they often happen while drinking together, they also come via email, telephone - hell, my friend Sylvie always jots down a deep thought or two on the back of her latest post card.

Anyway, earlier this year I met another really talented and inspiring designer/artist named Lindsey Adelman. We did a show together in March, and along with another friend, we basically spent the weekend bullshitting together about anything and everything. We all got on famously - she's one of us, no doubt.

Besides being an all around cool woman, Lindsey's work is pretty intense - she's got her hands in all kinds of bags. She has a line of lighting that's beautiful and elegant (I really like the sketches, too!), but then she's got some cool clothing she designs, and these really intense drawings that start out as art, but also double as patterns for wallcoverings and textiles.

Now about these drawings. When Lindsey first told me about them, I didn't know her yet, and I thought she might be a bit nutty (of course, now I know her, so I know she's a bit nutty). She makes these drawings with hair. Yeah, human hair.

I know. I thought the same thing.

But check it out.

That's just insane. And insane is really, really wonderful.

Anyway, you should go look at her sight, and click around on all the links. She's a busy girl, our Lindsey.

All that said, that isn't what I came to share with you. I sent Lindsey a link to this site a while ago, and she sent me an email about it the other day.

And it was beautiful. It was weird and graceful and so poetically complete, it stunned me - I was without words to reply. Well, temporarily, anyway - you know me better than that!

I talked Lindsey into letting me share it with you. And if you are an artist, or in any way involved in doing something you love, and the last line of this letter doesn't touch its fingertip directly on your heart - I don't know what the hell to tell you. I really don't.

So here's Lindsey's letter. I'll see you in a day or two, we'll get back to the ebony.

Scott,

You got me thinking a bit more about process.

[you seem like someone who is not afraid to go on about something, and not afraid to read someone else's psychobabble.]

Process is so subtle and so nuanced; it is interesting that not until very recently have I let my imagination run as big as it used to, and naturally wants to be.

I would limit what I saw in my head -- too logical about the familiar bitter realities of bringing something into the world. Creative 'team' members, materials search, vendors to do production, calculating wholesale, shipping, getting so bored, being upset that there's no time to be creative anymore, etc. - I realize now that only in the very recent past have I allowed my thoughts/images/ideas get big again. I think this is mainly due to that fact that after 12 years of being in the lighting design business, I finally have a handle on the prototyping and, more importantly, production process: mainly due to the team of people I now work with to manufacture.

It is so interesting that I looked to art-making for so many years as it was the ONLY way I could have an easy, calm experience getting the idea from my head into the tangible world without it getting messed up.

Now, I feel like I can dream so big, and I sometimes sketch without looking at the page so I don't completely squash the idea in my head.

It is just so much easier now, and more enjoyable, and I feel like I can take my time and enjoy the process of paying attention and looking at details of what I do; a process that for years made me want to throw up or run.

That said, like all creative people, the best piece will always be the one that's not done yet.

It's just so weird though, how as one ripens, one becomes easier on oneself; it's like, yes, "there is room for improvement" - there always will be: it is the material world!

And all you have is the process. And paying attention to every aspect of it is, for me, absolutely liberating.

There is nothing to escape.

- Lindsey

Nothing to escape, indeed. Goddamn. On top of all that the ebony is bringing back to me, being reminded of that one little thing feels so damned good.

One from column A, and one from column B...

Having established that I'm just stupid enough to try to build the things I do, and having come up with a design and actually convinced some kind and generous soul to pay my bills while I build it, it's time to find the material and figure out how.

I have a love/hate relationship with "the how." Clearly I love the challenge, or I wouldn't sign up for doing something I don't know how to do every single time the opportunity presents itself. And I think I'm actually pretty good at the math and the engineering part of it all, but I'm also aware that I hate it.

Hate.

I procrastinate, I do all kinds of tricks to avoid it, I draw full scale on the walls and the floor and on sheets of plywood to get around it, and when can't avoid it any longer and I'm sitting down to do it, I chain smoke and drink too much coffee. I often have to stand up and walk away, take a break because it's making my teeth hurt and I can feel my eyebrows beginning to smoke.

But, as I say, I must love it, because I seek it out, and as much as I don't like to focus on the "craft" aspect of my work when talking about it, I'm privately proud of my ability to figure it out and execute it.

I'm just glad that all the engineering happens first, because when I finally complete that aspect of the job, my reward is usually hundreds of hours of carving and shaping. And I really love that part.

To properly engineer a piece, you need to know what you're going use to make it. Not just what type of material, but what material specifically - what does it look like, how big is it, what part of the tree is it cut from, etc. - these things are all limiting factors to be considered, and the more of them you can remove from the equation, the luckier you are.

Of course, on the other hand - if you haven't done any engineering at all when you go looking for your material, you don't know what you actually need. So really the two things have to happen simultaneously. I often think of it like juggling - keep moving in all directions, keep the balls in the air until everything is set for you to let them drop and are prepared to catch them.

As I began to draft these chairs, one thing that became immediately clear is that I was going to need some insanely thick stock. Laminating pieces together is always an option, but it has its own issues, and I was hoping to avoid it. It would need to be clean and defect-free (we call that "clear"), because I was going to shape deeply into it, exposing whatever was going on inside, and I would need the ability to control each piece's orientation within the growth rings of the tree. How a board is cut from the tree determines what the grain looks like on its face, and how it will behave.

I should point out that when I say these things became "immediately clear," I mean after dozens of hours of drafting. We'll talk more about that in my next post.

Anyway, if I made a list of all the minimum requirements for the needed material, even leaving off the "best case scenario" stuff, and taken it to any lumber dealer or sawmill, or even a specialist in exotics, I would've been laughed at. Ebony is extremely rare, even Macassar Ebony(as opposed to Gabon Ebony, which is nearly impossible to find in anything other than scrap-sized pieces). With each requirement I was looking to place on the material, it becomes harder to find.

And not just hard to find - expensive, often absurdly so. A common average for this material is around $70 per board foot (an industry standard meaning a 1" thick section, one foot square). For comparison, I buy really premium walnut for around $14 per board foot, and that's nearly triple what standard walnut goes for. And obviously, I want premium Ebony for this project.

A dozen phone calls later, and I'm nowhere. The thickest material I can find is 2" thick, and it's all fairly narrow as well, which isn't going to work for me. I begin to regret my decision to talk my client into the beauty of Ebony.

Research, research, research. More phone calls. Looking through the ads in the back of trade magazines. Scouring the internet. Mild panic.

And then I find a key little piece of information.

Hundreds of years ago, many of the homes throughout Asia were built with supporting columns of Ebony, both Gabon and Macassar. If not for the utilitarian use of a such a stunning and sought-after material, it makes perfect sense - it's stronger than steel, it's virtually indestructible, it scoffs at nature's attempts to make it rot, and it is native to the Asian and African continents.

More phone calls, more research, more scouring, more panic.

And then in a casual conversation with my good friend Tucker Robbins, I mention my dilemma. Tucker imports all kinds of beautiful objects from all over Asia and Africa. He often travels to small villages and works with the artisans there to design products for our sensibilities and tastes, and he's very successful. He's an interesting and eccentric and charismatic guy, with a heart of gold.

And I want to have his babies when he utters the following words:

"Oh, I have a bunch of columns of Macassar Ebony that I brought back from Indonesia! They're massive - you should come by and take a look at them."

And so I go and visit Tucker. Several times. The columns are huge and they're gorgeous. They are basically whole trees, cut square. Panic is replaced by intimidation and excitement, and an almost embarrassing desire for everything in his storage room.

Back and forth from the drafting table to Tucker's place. Now I have no limitations at all, and suddenly this is a new "problem." Because I know what I'm going to do - I'm going to make these chairs the way they would've been done before we had things like lumber yards and sawmills, where you could just go and get a board already milled to your specs.

I'm going to cut these chairs directly out of a fucking Macassar Ebony tree. I'm "just stupid enough to try to build that," I remember, and dozens more hours at the drafting table later and terrified by my own audacity, I take my truck to Tucker's studio.

The columns are 12" square, and 8 feet long. Insane. Impossible. And very, very heavy. Dense and smooth, they weigh about 550lbs. each.

It takes four men and three hours to get two columns into my truck. They stick out the back and weigh down on my leaf springs dangerously, and I drive back to my shop like a 75-year-old on her way to the early bird special.

Four more men and only two hours this time (I can learn!), and the columns are laying in my shop.

I am exhausted.

I am excited.

I am terrified.

I have absolutely no idea how to do what I am about to do.

And I couldn't be happier.

Quick Q & A/Link break...

Just because most people don't read the comments, and it'd be nice if I could provide links to all these, here are answers to some questions from the last post:

Question:

Scott,

Wow dude, I've really been enjoying your last couple of posts. Probably because I relate to it with my music processes, but still. You write really well about it. I'd be curious to know if there is a circle of people within your industry or other people you know that are involved in this stuff that keep blogs like this too. Really impressed.

Brett

Answer:

Thanks, Brett. I don't know anyone within my own industry doing it, which is why I do it - I want it to exist.

But there are lots of people out there writing about their work - check these out, off the top of my head - If I can think of others, I'll post them:

www.gapingvoid.com - Hugh McLeod's awesome cartoons and manifesto-laden diatribes.

www.bencorman.com - Rudius Media editor documenting his own growth as a writer (and a person), while also posting some great writing.

www.englishcut.com - Saville Row bespoke tailor Thomas Mahon writes about his practice.

www.ihopetheyservebeerinhell.com - I've been really inspired by the way Tucker Max and Nils Parker are chronicling the making of their movie.

www.thebunnyblog.com and www.kungfumike.net - In between stories, both Erin and Mike often talk about the process of actually doing the writing.

And here's something really important about the concept of "just keep working" - when you truly understand what it means to work, to put your head down and just fucking put in the hours - you don't necessarily need people to tell you about it. You can just look at it, or listen to it, or read it, and you know. You just know what went into it, and it blows you away, and no one has to speak a word of it.

Question:

Hey Suapyg, could you possibly provide a couple of examples of great furniture art? I want to gain some perspective on your art vs. others.

Good post by the way.

Answer:

Wow. I could do that all day, and I'd still be afraid I wasn't scratching the surface.

Here are a few friends who inspire me - this is a wildly incomplete list, maybe in the future I can do a whole post about all the people whose work makes me want to pursue a career in refrigerator repair.

If you are a friend of mine, and I have left you off this list - I'm SO SORRY - I have to get back to work at some point today!
www.briannewell.jp
www.katehawes.com
www.matthias-studio.com
www.spacemfrs.com
www.skramfurniture.com
www.sylvierosenthal.com
www.vivianbeer.com
www.katiehudnall.com
www.isaacarms.com
www.thomashuckerstudio.com
www.danielmichalik.com
www.michaelpuryear.com

Jesus, I could keep going forever. Also check out some big name superstars:

www.ronarad.com
www.marc-newson.com
www.wendellcastle.com

Here are a couple bigshot galleries:
www.pritameames.com
www.cwgdesign.com

There are many others who don't have websites, largely because they don't need them.

Apparently, at some point I'm going to have to put up a real post about this. As I said, this list is wildly incomplete, and of course, it's without commentary.

Also, keep in mind that some of those people don't consider their work "art," they'd argue that it is just furniture. I'll have to elaborate on that, as well.

And most importantly, remember that this is only a tiny sampling of contemporary work - these people are all alive and still working. Any true representation of the field would have tons of history in it, as well - while my friend and fancy Yale scholar Ned Cooke would tell you that "studio furniture" has its roots in the 1940's, I would argue that it goes all the way back to the Egyptians. And I'd mean it.

And I'd be right (this is me sticking my tongue out at you, Ned!).

I don't necessarily want this blog to be specifically about studio furniture or art furniture or design art, or whatever the hell they're calling it these days, it's more about actually doing the work, and what the work is, doesn't really matter.

But in order to give people an idea of the scope and diversity in the tiny little corner of the world where I live, I'll try to put up a good summary somewhere down the line.

For the next few weeks (months?), though, I'm going to build these chairs - and if you're interested, I'd love it if you'd come with me and watch me do it.


See that? Y'all just got two posts for the price of one.

Just keep working.

We've had something of a heat wave here in New York over the last week or two - I've been coming home every day soaked in sweat, sore as hell, completely covered in black dust, and happier than I've been in a long time.

I'm well into a new project, and anxious to start writing about it. This isn't regular work. This is the reason I do what I do, and I haven't been able to do that for far too long.

Let's try to start at the beginning.

I get asked fairly often how I get clients, how a job begins, and how the designs happen. Each one is different and has its own variables, but there are enough common elements to generalize. Most people find me through one of three channels - word of mouth, seeing my work at a show, or finding an article about my work in a magazine.

As anyone who makes anything can tell you, not every piece is a home run. In fact, even for the best of us, you're lucky to get one or two out of every ten. This is why it's so crucial to keep working, and it's what's so intimidating about that elusive, "next piece," especially right after an important one - you have to get over the notion that each piece will be better than the last. Just keep working, the work will take care of itself.

Anyway, about three years ago, I hit a bonafide home run. It got a lot of press. Then I got asked to do it again a year or so later, and it got even more press. In that particular round of people paying attention to me, it was published in ForbesLife magazine.



Now, when a piece gets published, it generally results in a flurry of calls and emails, inquiries about commissions, etc. I try to find common elements and figure out a general percentage of how many of those inquiries end up as actual work, but the more it happens, the more I realize how pointless that is. It's completely different every single time. Just keep working, and the work will take care of itself.

Of course, since this was Forbes, and the fancy price tag was right there in the article, I assumed that I'd get fewer calls than usual, but a higher percentage of "quality" inquiries. The people at Forbes warned me that this was going to change my world, that I'd better gear up to handle the deluge. That the attention I'd gotten from the NYTimes article was nothing compared to what I was about to receive.

Uh huh.

For weeks, I got nothing. A "congratulations" from the couple who was kind enough to lend me back the piece for the photoshoot.

And then I got one phone call. From one of the biggest Design/Architecture firms in New York. To this day, it's the only call I've gotten from that article.

And it resulted in a $28,000 commission.

Thanks, Forbes. Deluge or no deluge, you did me right. The photoshoot was incredibly professional and pleasant (thanks to a great photo editor and a really impressive photographer), the copy wasn't filled with errors or nonsense, the article looked great and was well placed.

One call, one great job. I'll take that ratio any day.

So I talk with the design firm, and they graciously decide to put me directly in touch with the client (which is highly preferable, but also highly unusual). The client loves the bench. The client doesn't need a bench, though, the client needs a pair of chairs.

This is a very common occurrence - someone sees a piece I've done, and falls in love with it for whatever reasons, but has a need or desire for a completely different thing. It's my job to find the elements that spoke to them, and find ways to transfer that to a new idea. It involves a lot of questions and listening carefully to the answers, and a lot of gentle suggestions to make them fall in love with what I want to do. As my Dad once taught me, "I want everything to go my way, and I want everyone to be happy about it."

After all - when it comes to the big ones, the jobs that I know are going to take every ounce of blood and batter every muscle and test every skill and challenge every cell in my limited brain - I don't do this for them, I do it for me.

I just need to convince them to support me while I do it.

In exchange, I give them what I've done. That's the deal.

It often hurts, to give that up, but that's why you have to keep working. Just keep working, and the work will take care of itself.

So. The client tells me all the things that they love about the piece they've seen. It's a pleasant process for a narcissist, to sit and listen to someone tell you how they're deeply moved by your work. Then they tell you what else they love, and they show you pictures of things that have nothing whatsoever to do with what you do, and they ask you to somehow combine the two. Almost every time, this happens.

That part doesn't feel quite as pleasant.

But okay, it's a challenge and that's fun, that's what takes you into new territory, makes you find a place you haven't been, and if you're smart about it, you can steer that ship and take it somewhere exciting.

In this case, that's exactly what happened. The chair they showed me was horrible, an obviously uncomfortable abomination, a mixture of styles that contradicted each other and resulted in a coarse and angular piece that appears to be sticking its tongue out at me:



But that's alright, that's also common. There were things about it that they liked, and I listened carefully to what those things were, my brain working diligently in the background trying to tweak and caress those things into my own style, to swallow those ideas and find a place for them within my own vocabulary. And then when I open my mouth, I can find the words to make them happy about what I want to do.

They liked the sharp lines and the angularity, I made them softer. They'd seen the striped odd beauty of the wood from a palm tree, I explained that a palm can't deliver what we wanted - I've always wanted to do a piece with Macassar Ebony, I said, it's also oddly striped and marbled, and incredibly rare and opulent, an astonishingly beautiful material - it will be far superior to a piece made from what is essentially very thick grass.

They agreed that the tongue was silly. The liked the way it leans forward, I convinced them to make it lean back. They liked the curved rectangle for the back - I don't, but I gladly traded that for more curves and the chance to elevate the seat so that it appears to be floating.

And at that point, I agree to go away. We discuss a general price, and I take 10% of that to go away and design something. Depending on the piece, I'll come back with a little model, or a full-scale mockup, or a series of doodles, or a full 2D rendering, or even a set of working blueprints. If they decide to go with it, that 10% becomes part of the price, and I take a full 50% deposit to get going (obviously, there are little tweaks and such, within reason). If not, they are free to say, "no thanks," and I've been paid for the work I've done thus far, and everyone's happy.

I think - that's never actually happened. I mean, really - how can anyone resist my charms?

Moving on...

Someday maybe I'll do a separate post showing examples of all those different presentations, explaining why each was appropriate for its situation, but for now let's stay with this project.

For these chairs, I ended up doing a series of doodles and a full scale mockup of the back leg. The doodles because I was playing with line and stance, with the posture of the thing, and knew that a lot of the finer detail would come out as I actually did the pieces - they were going to have to trust in my ability to find it. For now, I just wanted them to know how they would feel, more than the perfect representation of how they would look.

I showed them these little sketches, and a sample of Macassar Ebony:




And we agreed to get started, on the condition that I would show them more detail as it came clear. They gave me a whole bunch of money, and I came back later with this slightly more defined sketch, the beginnings of the working shop drawings (drafted blueprints), and the mocked up leg:






Last adjustments were made - let's make them an inch taller, let's make the seat a little less deep, that kind of thing - and I'm off and running.

The next step? Figure out where the hell I'm going to find enough Macassar Ebony to make these things, and even more of a challenge, figure out how the hell I'm going to make these things. I'm reminded of something a friend once said, looking at a sketch in my notebook.

"Nice. And you're just stupid enough to try to make that."

Just keep working, and the work will take care of itself.

Dirty Tricks. (Part 2)

During my apprenticeship, all the finishing chores fell to me. That includes all the surface preparation, touch ups, color matching, and staining, as well as all the things that happen once you begin to put actual finish on the piece.

I hated that aspect of the work while I was still learning, but it was an incredibly significant bag of skills that I really wasn't giving the proper respect. The ability to make problems disappear, to read color and pattern and grain, to do all the tiny little things that can make a surface sing is something that I've found to be incredibly rare. There are millions of talented woodworkers - I'm always amazed by how many of them don't know a damned thing about finishing.

My old boss, John Fischer (no link - crazy ol' coot doesn't have a website!), used to call a lot of those little things, "dirty tricks." There's something on every job, some tiny little bit of tearout or some anomaly in the grain, or an imperfection or a mistake, whatever - there's always something that needs to be fixed, touched, made to disappear, and that often has to happen before the finish goes on. The skills I learned in doing that for John have proven themselves invaluable over and over again throughout my career.

And the massive crack that I showed you on my last post was going to take every single bit of skill and trickery that I had amassed, over years of dirty tricks.

After being told by the client, in no uncertain terms, that I had to find a way to make that crack disappear, I was pretty distraught. Even discounting how expensive that particular board was or how much work had gone into it thus far, you have to remember that everything on the cabinet is matched from slabs cut consecutively from the tree - you can't just swap out one board and get on with your life. We would have had to almost start the job all over again.

Not an option.

So I did a little research, and found that a lot of the guys who do big slab work will often just fill in the cracks with more wood from another board of the same species. It looks coarse to me, amateurish - the grain doesn't line up, the color is slightly different, it makes the crack stand out from the piece. When the piece is intended to be rough or rustic, or even based on the philosophy that you don't intrude on the "natural beauty" of the wood, that's fine, it doesn't look too bad, but it's not for me.

I tend to get more involved in my projects, I like to get deeply intimate with the material, and there's a relationship that develops between me and the tree. I know it sounds corny, but it's there. I've used this analogy before, but it's really the best I can describe it - working with an organic material like wood can be like I imagine taming a wild horse to be. You carefully push it a little farther than it will allow, and then back off a bit and let it push back, and keep doing that until you've created a relationship that is deeply intimate - until you know each other so well that you can ask it to do things it wouldn't normally do.

So I figured I was going to try to fill this crack with walnut, but a)I wanted to do it differently that most would, I wanted to really try to find a way to make it disappear, and b)I had to quickly grow intimate with this particular board - remember that Kate was the one working with it, not me. My relationship with this board was fairly distant, I was watching and reading it over Kate's shoulder and knew some of its little secrets and certainly some of its quirks, but I had no relationship with its growth patterns and its personality. Again, I know that sounds weird, but it's part of working with wood on this level - the events that shape a tree's life, the ways in which it grows, have a profound effect on the way you work with it. You can only cut the grain in one direction, or you'll tear it out instead of cutting it cleanly - but that direction changes and has a rhythm and a flow all its own within each board. Learning that rhythm is a part of developing a relationship with the board.

I spent some time with the board, really analyzing and inspecting it from every angle, learning to understand the patterns that made the crack happen. And I started to get a sense of how I could make my little plan work. Once I began working, it was going to be a no stopping fly by the seat of my pants reading and reacting on the fly type of experience.

So. The first thing I did was to take a pencil rubbing of the crack:



I wanted to be able to reproduce it exactly. If you recall, I mentioned that the cabinet is made from three consecutive slabs. What I had realized in analyzing the situation is that we had the board that was cut from the tree immediately next to this one, the adjoining faces were almost identical. And we hadn't used the part of the next board that corresponded to the cracked section of this one.

So once I had a pencil rubbing of the crack, and some marks to align exactly where on the board it came from, I was able to find the exact same spot on the adjacent board, and glue the rubbing down on it (backwards, because it's a mirror image!), matching the grain patterns perfectly, creating a positive image of the negative space left by the crack.

Next, with my bandsaw table tilted slightly, I carefully cut the "crack" out of that board - the table is tilted so that the piece I'm left with is a wedge, that can be pushed down into the crack, getting tighter as it goes. That piece needs to be perfect, so I then take it to the crack and fit it, very gently and carefully shaving and shaping it until it's a dead on match. It's finicky work, the little piece is very thin and fragile, and one wrong move will ruin my only chance to get this right.

Once satisfied that it's a perfect fit, now I have to find a way to hold everything in place, and keep the board from splitting further. For that, I have to cut some joinery out of the underside of the board, and it will have to go deep, so that it's effective. So I clamp the board flat and cut out a bowtie shape that will hold the crack together once everything gets glued. We call these, "butterflies" - they're cut out, traced onto the place they're going to live, routed freehand, and then chopped to their final exact shape with a chisel and a steady hand. Once everything is clamped flat, it can't be unclamped again until all the work is finished, so I have to make a beam for the top surface that has a cutout in it, to allow me to slip the new piece into the crack without taking the clamps off.




Once those are fit and ready to go, it's time to glue it all up at the same time - the whole operation is a process that takes several hours of setup and preparation - once you start, you can't stop until it's done.

First, the crucial piece gets glued in and clamped up tight - it's extremely fragile, so the crack is wedged open as the piece gets slipped in carefully:



Then, it must be trimmed a bit so that the board can lay flat when turned over for the next step. Epoxy is dribbled into the crack from the underside, the butterflies are hammered in, and the remainder of the crack is filled with little wedges to fill it all in (you can see the trimmed offcut of the repair piece laying off to the side with my tools):




With everything clamped in place and glued up, and all the excess glue cleaned off, and everything checked, checked again, and inspected for any last adjustments, then you drink. Heavily.



Everything sits like that for 24 hours. At that point, the clamps and the beams come off slowly, with much praying and listening carefully for the horrible horrible sound of another crack, and then everything has to be trimmed and planed flat and flush to the surface.

The butterflies and extra crap jammed in on the underside (this part doesn't have to be pretty, just smooth and flush):




And then the repair (click to see closer):



With all that done, the entire board has to be planed square again, and trimmed, so that Kate can re-cut the dovetails properly - that center tail will now be 3/16" bigger than the others, because of the new shape of the board. A small price to pay.

Months later, after the first coat of oil goes on, any anomalies in the grain and color of the repair are carefully painted in with alcohol stain, in between layers of finish.

The end result was as good as I believe is humanly possible - I was satisfied and the client was thrilled. Can you see it? Yeah, if someone points it out to you and you look very closely, you can. But then it becomes a great story for the client to tell, and it is forever a part of this piece made from a living thing.


I realize this was an exceptionally long and boringly detailed post, but the point of it all is to show just how much work can go into one tiny little step in the overall scheme of making a piece. This is not a unique experience in that way - this is what my work is, this is what I do all day, every day.

And it's what any artist must do - for every beautiful thing you've ever seen, there is blood and sweat and passion and fear behind it.

And I wouldn't have it any other way.

Tree wood will break your heart. (Part 1)

Way back when I was first discovering that I enjoyed making stuff, I was working for a guy making big planter boxes for corporate lobbies and roof decks. It was fast and furious, hard work and not much else. I wanted to learn to make nicer things, and one day at lunch I mentioned that to my boss and his shopmate, a guy who made his living inventing toys.

They started to talk to me about making plywood cabinets and such, and I corrected them, saying, "no, I mean furniture - tables and chairs, solid wood."

"Oh, you mean tree wood," said the toymaker, "aw, tree wood will break your heart, man."

That phrase has never really left my mind, and it has come back to haunt me pretty regularly. Before we get all caught up in my new project, I wanted to describe one of those moments, because it happened on that walnut piece my last post talked about.

With a vengeance.

And besides, a very dear friend of mine has been encouraging me forever to share stuff like this with you, that I should show you as often as I can just how much work goes into creating something. And she's right - people need a better understanding of what it takes.

So let's go back to that other dear friend you met on my last post, Kate Hawes. Kate is generally a reserved and quiet person, not prone to outbursts or sailor's language.

One afternoon, Kate is cutting the dovetails on the parts for the cabinet. The way that is done is to first cut all the kerfs (a fancy word for sawcut) with a handsaw, and then go back and remove all the material in between your sawcuts by chopping with a chisel. She's got the kerfs cut on both ends of the bottom board, and one end of the top, and is working on the last corner. The board (which is 7 feet long and 24" wide) is standing upright on end, chucked in the vise on her bench, and Kate is standing on her bench. I'm working on something else about 15 feet away, and her back is to me.

Suddenly, I hear Kate shout, "FUCK!" Full of surprise and anger - sharp and strong.

I look up, surprised myself to hear something so unlikely from Kate. She has stepped back from the piece, and the windows are behind her - I can see light coming through each of the kerfs she's already cut, each looking perfect and consistent, 1 3/4" long. But then I see the last cut she's made. And it's about 18" long, and far too wide.

I can't quite process what I'm seeing, and Kate is now facing me, standing up on her bench with a face that looks like it's just been slapped.

Here's what happened:

The board that we chose for the top of the cabinet was stunning - wide and clear and filled with motion, it came from a part of the tree that includes the "crotch" - the point where the trunk first splits into two or more branches. This is a particularly beautiful spot, the grain tends to do crazy things right there as it splits.

It's also somewhat unstable sometimes, and has a lot of tension in it. Each time you cut it, or remove material, the wood will find a new equilibrium to realign the tension. So when Kate's saw hit just the right (or wrong?) spot in the board, it popped. It split wide open, and rearranged itself until it was comfortable.

And it broke our hearts.



If you care to look closely at the grain pattern (click on the photo for a full size image), you can see that it released right where the smaller branch came off the larger trunk. Not the first time I'd seen something like this happen, but devastating nonetheless.


For the most part, this little event ended the day for each of us. That board was roughly $1500, and part of a matched set of three. The work that went into getting it to this point is ridiculous - I won't bother describing it, but let's just say it was hundreds of hours, all told.

We sat and stared at it, we got up and walked around it, we started sentences intended to be filled with ideas that simply turned into mumbles and trailed off into the air.

We agreed to sleep on it.

And I did what any self respecting artist would do. I packed up, went home, and drank myself to sleep.

In the morning, I had dozens of ideas. Kate turned to me and said, "this is your design, it's your name, it's your client. Whatever we're going to do, you should do it. I'll help you, but you need to do this. When it's a usable board again, give it back, and I'll continue."

She was right, of course.

It was time to call the client. My mind swimming with visions of filling the crack with silver, or a handful of other ways to accentuate rather than hide it, I picked up the phone. This is a unique design opportunity, I told myself, not a disaster.

What I didn't know was that as the phone rang in my client's hand, she was sitting in the doctor's waiting room awaiting the news that she was pregnant with her third child.

Have you ever had an important client scream at you while crying?

Yeah, well, I hadn't either, up until then.

The jist of the conversation was this: No. No new details, no fancy ideas, no silver or precious metals, nothing. "I want the piece we talked about, I want what you drew, and I don't want to have to readjust to some new idea that's going to change the feel of the whole piece."

All yelled through uncontrollable sobbing. Bear in mind that this couple owns well over $100,000 worth of my work, and has given me opportunities to stretch that no other clients had, at that point. They are precious to me.

Fair enough.

I spent the next several hours walking around the piece, now laying prone on horses. I turned it over, I turned it back. I studied the crack and the pattern of the grain. I gently pushed a little wedge into the end to see if it wanted to crack further. I measured and inspected to gauge how badly out of square the board had become.

I formulated the beginnings of a plan.

And then, mentally bankrupt and emotionally exhausted, I did what any self respecting artist would do. I packed up, went home, and drank myself to sleep.



Tree wood.



To be continued...

I didn't do it, Katydid.

I just got the following comment on an older post:

I really don't know the process you go through to create the furniture, but do you have a staff or do you do it alone?

"Just to break it down a little further, each leg of this bench has approximately 40 - 60 hours of work in it."

That sounds like a lot, but with a staff of 4-5 workers, wouldn't it take a much shorter time? Is it not as profitable or do you just not trust others to create your art?

Tangent: Do you feel that if you don't physically produce every part of of your art, it's not yours? I've always wondered how Michelangelo felt about having all his assistants and I was hoping you could give me some insight about it.

Interesting timing on this question. I'm just about finished with the drafting/engineering on a pair of chairs, and thought it would be cool to post about the process of actually making them as I go, so look for that to begin within the next few days. I'll post pictures of the progress, and describe what it takes to actually make these things - not a "how-to," but more a look at how much work is involved, and how deep the dedication has to be.

And, honestly - I thought it'd be nice to show a bit of the stuff I love so much, and stop whining all the damned time.

As for the actual questions -

Generally, I work either alone or with a part time assistant. I don't produce enough to have highly skilled full timers, and unless they were ridiculously good, I couldn't even if I had them. Hopefully some of the upcoming posts will explain that better.

There is some reality in the difficulty of finding people who are as skilled as I am, and yet are interested in producing someone else's work. I know how pompous that sounds, but the facts is the facts, and much of the work I do requires some really intense skill. My dear friend and an astonishing craftsperson in her own right, Kate Hawes, has done a bunch of work for me in the past, for example, but is now concentrating on her own work exclusively (which, by the way, is incredible work).

But Kate is an excellent example for an answer to the next question, do I feel that I must be the one doing the work?

No, I don't. I have to be involved, as any good artist/designer should. Let's look at the last piece Kate and I built together (click the pictures to see larger images):




This piece is my design. Kate did all the casework and the doors. She cut those beautiful dovetails with the mitered front corners, she fit the doors so that they slide like butter. She matched all the grain so that it wraps perfectly around the corner from top to sides.

Because I asked her to. I was right there, ten feet away the whole time. We worked together as we looked at the three consecutive slabs of walnut, drawing with chalk all over them to determine where the parts would come from. We worked together in choosing the details, in reading the wood, in creating the overall feel of the piece, and Kate did what Kate always does - she fucking nailed it.

When it comes to straight up crisp woodworking, hand cutting perfect dovetails and things like that - I think Kate is better than I am. And it was the perfect use of her skillset.

On the other hand, when it comes to carving and sculpting free hand, flying by the seat of your pants, my personality is better suited to that kind of thing. So there was never any question about who would carve the drawer fronts:



That part fell to me, and I did what I do. I nailed it.

It's obviously more complex a relationship than that, and both Kate and I would argue on any given day that the other is better at either of those styles, but the point remains.

I enjoyed that process immensely. Watching the thing that was in my head take shape across the shop every day was hugely rewarding, regardless of whether I was making it or not. It was what I imagined, my silly little notion coming to life. I got to play a part in every decision, no matter how small, and I got to go and work on something else as Kate realized my vision. And then, at the very end, inspired by the great work she had done, I got to come in and do the glamorous work, the fancy carving.

Hell, if I could do that on every piece, I would.

But it's not always that simple. Sometimes you just don't know exactly what a piece will turn out to be. Sometimes you have to go and chase that shape yourself. Sometimes it's much easier to do it yourself than to try to explain it to another.

And sometimes, you just can't find someone skilled enough.

Either way, in answer to the one question I ignored: 40-60 hours is 40-60 hours, whether I'm doing it or someone else is. If five people were working on it and qualified to do it right, than it would happen in 12 hours, but it would still be 60 man-hours. And the truth is, no matter how skilled, no one is going to be able to find a shape that came out of my skull faster than I am.

Maybe in a later post I'll talk about the possibilities of computer aided manufacture, but for now we'll just leave it at an old-school conversation.

I'll leave you with a tease - the two chairs I'm about to start are going to come from two 12" x 12" x 8 foot long columns of Macassar Ebony. That is unheard of - this material is unbelievably rare. It's also wicked heavy - they weigh in at about 550lbs each.

But they're absolutely beautiful, and I'm dying to cut into them and get started...

Luca Brasi swims with the fishes

Apropos of absolutely nothing, I'm going to tell you a story about a fish pond. I told this tale yesterday to a friend of mine as we sat looking at koi in a beautiful sculpture park, and I thought I'd share it with you. For all that I've seen, this little moment has been one of my life's greatest lessons.


My best friend from college has just about the most cliche picture perfect life you can have. He married his childhood sweetheart, has two beautiful children, works for the NFL in a job he loves and has won multiple emmy and grammy awards for, and he is paid very well. He lives in a beautiful house in the woods, with a picture perfect backyard complete with a vegetable garden, a fire pit, a hammock and a koi pond.

I went to visit and stay with his family one weekend, to hang with an old friend, to eat his wife's amazing cooking, to relax, and generally sit around and wonder why his life looks like Norman Rockwell painted it, while mine is a bit closer to an Edvard Munch.

At the time I was there, they were having insect problems in the garden, and had planted a sack of praying mantis eggs to counteract it. Amazing thing, the praying mantis, and this particular weekend there were hundreds of them stalking the backyard, most of them very small and newly hatched, but there were a variety of sizes, and it was mesmerizing to watch them.

So early one morning, I'm the first one up - I make a pot of coffee, pour myself a cup, and wander outside to sit and have a smoke. Breakfast of champions, caffeine and nicotine. It's so quiet out there, and so calmly noisy at the same time - it's early, and all the sounds of the forest waking up around me are there, but I'm the only human moving for miles. To a city kid, it's as peaceful and beautiful as it gets.

I make my way over to the koi pond and sit down to enjoy my coffee and watch the fish. As I settle in, a little praying mantis hops up on one of the rocks surrounding the pond, and looks up at me. Have you ever hung out with a praying mantis? I have, and it was one of the most amazing moments I'd ever experienced.

He was aware of me. We looked at each other. We spent the next five minutes gazing at the pond, and occasionally looking back at each other. I would swear he was taking a smoke break with me - just the two of us, the rest of the world only beginning to wake up, and we sat together in silence like old friends.

When he finished his smoke, and I mine, he looked at me one more time, reared back and leaped out onto the pond. My immediate thought was, "hey! don't do that! (Can praying mantii swim?) Don't leave now, we were having a nice time!"
But there he stood, on the surface of the water, calmly floating and gently rocking as the fish swam below him. It hadn't occurred to me that he could do that. "Pretty cool," I thought, and I sat back to watch some more.

Within a few seconds, a koi swam directly below him, passing him by high in the water, almost grazing him as he passed. The koi passed, turned around, and headed right back in the same direction. "Now he wants to hang out with us," I thought. And as he headed back towards the insect, he raised his head just barely up out of the water, and in one smooth, silent, graceful and beautifully choreographed motion - he swallowed my friend whole and dove back beneath the surface.

And that was it. My friend was gone. There had been no sound, no drama, no screaming and wailing, no sirens and no weeping. No one mourned, no one would notify the family, no one was even aware that something amazing and stunningly beautiful had just taken place, I was its only witness. A creature fed, a life taken, a morning come and on its way to gone, the world doing its thing.

That is all there is, my friends. There is no good and evil. Lives come and go, people wind up living a dream or they wind up as crackheads living behind a dumpster in the projects, and the world takes no notice. Some make wise choices and some bad, some improve their lot, some worsen it, and the world takes no notice. We live. We die. Sometimes we kill, sometimes we don't.

And the world takes no notice. And yet, somehow, it keeps turning.

You do what you can while you're here, because it helps you to live with yourself.

But if you think your view or your judgment of it all is any wiser or more important than the moment's thought that drove that little insect out onto the koi pond, then you are a fool.

The Eleventh Hour

Sometime back in the late 18th century, I was living in Boston, and a student at the Berklee College of Music. I was taking a class with a teacher named Gary Burton, a man widely considered the best vibraphone player ever.
Gary had done a series of tours and duet albums with a pianist/composer named Chick Corea, and I owned every one. The two of them had just released an album with a string quartet called Lyric Suite for Sextet, and it was easily among the most beautiful recordings I'd heard in my life, to that point.
Incredibly written and flawlessly performed, Chick's compositions found a way to combine the classical background of the string quartet with the jazz sensibility he and Gary had already been playing with for many years, creating something really special, something unlike anything I'd heard before.

Being a Berklee student at that time (before electric light, and all...) was like living in a monastery. My friends and I would set up in the glass-doored practice rooms at the end of our dorm hallway, and stay in there 8, 10, sometimes 14 hours a day. We would set up across from one another, so in the unlikely event that one of us would want to attend a class occasionally, the other guy would watch your stuff. We were broke, we were smoking an absurd amount of pot, and our lives were absolutely dedicated to music. Learning to play, learning to write, learning to listen. It was all we did, all day, every day.

Did we party like other college kids? Yeah, I guess we did, but it was different. For us, going to a concert was like going to church. Hanging out and smoking, bullshitting with one another, always involved whatever we were listening to and trying to absorb at the time. We were obsessed and obsessive, willing to sacrifice anything to become just a little bit better than we were yesterday. There was plenty of drinking and drugs and screwing around, but it was never on its own - it always included music in some way, we were always talking about what we were learning, what we wanted to learn, what we had already learned. In other words, to anyone outside of our closed off little sphere, we were boring as hell.

And not only didn't we know that, we simply didn't care.

So the announcement is made that Chick and Gary are going to tour with the string quartet that played on the album, and my friends and I are all over it. Symphony Hall is right down the road from the Berklee dorms - tickets are bought, plans are made, we sit and we listen to the album over and over and over again, analyzing every composition, every performance, every chance to hear them stretch it out and elaborate on it when playing it live.

Gary goes off on the road, and we end up with a substitute teacher in class. I think. I kinda stopped going when Gary left.

Anyway, the day comes, and off my friends and I go to the concert. We're baked and we're loving it, it's everything we could've asked for. Chick and Gary both are in rare form, performing in this incredible space to their hometown crowd, and the audience is eating out of their hands.

Halfway through the show, Gary steps up to the mic and says that he wants to tell us all about how this whole thing came about.

"Chick and I had been talking about recording with strings for ages," he tells us, "and at the end of the last tour, he finally talked with the record label about it. They loved the idea - they immediately committed to setting up an album and a tour. We set out and made our plans, found the quartet we wanted to work with, and booked studio time for six months hence."

"So I went out on the road with my band, and Chick went home to write the album."

"Two weeks before we were scheduled to go into the studio to record, I got home from my tour, and I called Chick to talk about the scheduled session - how were the plans? How are the string players taking to it? Is he happy with the compositions? Is everything working out as we hoped?"

"I was excited and eager to get into the studio, anxious to see what Chick had come up with, to get started learning the parts and planning my contribution," Gary says, smiling ear to ear.

"And Chick tells me, 'I went out shopping the other day. And I found the perfect...manuscript paper.'"

'Now, I can start writing.'"


I load into the Javits Center on Thursday morning. The parts to be assembled and made into my new work will arrive on Tuesday afternoon, with a great deal of work to be done once it does. As I write this, it is 4:30 in the morning, Tuesday. An amazing rendering badass is working on the images for the brochure, and a graphic design superstar is working on the layout, all of which has to be in the printer's hands in the morning.

There are calls to be made, business cards to be designed and printed, booth designs to be finalized, and there is a new chaise lounge in the collection that I will be unable to sit in until very late the night before we load it - I have no idea whether it's comfortable, other than that I think I've designed it well.

And that's how it works. I've probably been in this position a thousand times since I first heard that story about Chick and Gary, and I've thought of them, and of how beautiful that album is, every single time.

And I remember that this is how it works, and that I wouldn't change a thing. I love the pressure, I love the exhaustion, I love knowing that I will probably sleep 2 or 3 hours a night over the next several nights, but I'll probably get a decent night's sleep Friday.

And come Saturday morning, as the show opens, I'll be standing there smiling, and acting as though these pieces have existed for weeks, and pretending to be relaxed and prepared, and I'll be happy and excited and proud and charming.

Because some things never change.