ABOUT

I grew up in rural southeastern Michigan, a small island bit of it, where the Detroit River flows into Lake Erie. There were two bridges connecting Grosse Ile to the mainland. The County Bridge was high enough to allow ships to pass under. The Toll Bridge, 25 cents to get across, pivoted its center section up and down the river to let ships pass. The machinery to turn the bridge took its time and we occasionally raced to the other end of the island and crossed over the free county bridge, even though it was the long way around. The river, the forests, and the wetlands our home bordered were a wonderful place to be a kid. My three brothers and I built boats, nailed rungs to trees to get to our lookout platforms and tree houses, cut and split red oaks for firewood, and shaped toboggan runs in our ample winter snow to careen down the hill behind our house. We acquired double runner ice skates almost as soon as our first pair of StrideRites. Our watery world was frozen from Thanksgiving into March, allowing us to skate along the island’s canals and onto the river.

My first real adventure with wood, the opening episode in a long and still running story, was a boat I built, the Green Hornet. I was 12 or 13 yrs old. The plans were laid out in Boy’s Life and specified 18 or so 1" saplings to be bent around 2 semi-circular forms notched at regular intervals and gathered into a sheet metal cone fore and aft. My Dad knew the sheet metal fabricator on the island, Mike Kopke, and he made the cones. I used a hatchet to skin and smooth the ribs so they would fit into the cones. The curved forms were plywood laboriously cut and notched with a key hole saw. The whole skeleton was then covered with canvas, tailored for a good fit, and fixed to the frame with copper tacks, no less. The canvas stretched over the top to create a cockpit. I then soaked the cloth with roofing tar, let it set, and painted it a bright green. The Green Hornet was ready to be sent down the ways! There is a photo in the family scrap book of Mother splashing a Dixie cup of water over the bow at launch.

Well, it floated and that is the lowest bar one needs to get over. The “hull” had no tumblehome at all so you could really get it rocking from one side to the other. The cockpit floor didn’t help; it was a flat piece of plywood that rested part way up the curved sides. A number of times it felt that jumping out rather than have the entire craft flip was the prudent thing to do. I became quite expert at towing it to shore.

The summer of the Green Hornet was my last as a child freely pursuing woodsy fantasies. Once in high school, the boys were expected to earn their keep working with contractor uncles and a grandfather in the family construction business. There were many useful skills that I picked up early on: carrying, wheelbarrowing, picking up, and going to get. I graduated eventually to more challenging tasks―measuring, cutting, and nailing. Most of the houses I worked on were mid-western ranches with roofs you could walk on. Square-edge 1x6 spruce boards were still being used for side wall and roof covering. One of my thrills was racing another worker, sometimes a brother, sliding down a rafter line on my butt, driving 8d common nails through the roofing boards into the rafter below. There was a potent rhythm dispensing a nail from a fistful, tapping it to start and then driving it home with a single whack with an 18oz Estwing framing hammer. These early experiences taught me a lot about materials and tools. What things weighed, how they resisted, how strong they were, how they could be put together to make a form. I learned what was sharp and dull. How to make a square cut with a panel saw and “leave the pencil line.” Framing squares, plumb bobs, chalk lines, a wide assortment of nails measured in “pennys,” soffits, rakes, and shingles measured and weighed by the square. How much could I do myself and what did I need help with? This vocabulary and these manipulative skills became part of my deep learning.

College, graduate school, teaching in the Middle East, social activism, lots of travel, a stint in magazine journalism, marriage, and children intervened before what I was interested in as a child and teenager came into the present. My generation was the first in my family to go to college. That experience suggested a life trajectory that devalued the ways one’s ancestors earned a living. Carpentry, cabinetmaking, farming, and other ways of life practiced by previous generations were not for baccalaureates. Equipped with a degree or two, you might become a teacher, a lawyer, CPA, scholar, a middle manager, or doctor. The question I was asking myself was: After sampling many other options, should I consider my ancestral culture as a way to express my own ambition and dreams?

In my mid-thirties, I decided on a course that I am still on. In 1973 I was accepted into the Furniture Design program at Philadelphia College of Art and we moved from Taos, New Mexico back to Philadelphia, where I had worked for several years at North American Publishing. The craft revival movement in wood was especially vigorous in Philadelphia. Wharton Esherick, Wendell Castle, and Dan Jackson (on the faculty at PCA) were major influences. Philadelphia was a great place to to soak up the excitement. There was a lot to balance as a father and provider, but it was worth it. In the 2 years I was there, I was educated technically, almost as an afterthought, as the teaching emphasis was on one-off design. The sketching and full-size drawings required encouraged me to find my own sense of how a piece could look and how it must function. I left PCA if June of 1975 for north central Massachusetts to set up my own studio, practice my art, and earn a living. For 25 years I worked with clients to design and build desk cases, beds, tables, and cabinets. A good bit of it was derived Shaker style, but with enough improvisation to make it distinctive.

An old 6" x 36" Boice Crane bench lathe with an open step pulley and a washing machine motor for power was tossed in as an extra when I bought a used 12" jointer. With this humble device and Peter Child’s The Craftsman Woodturner I was able to provide turned parts for my furniture―split columns, legs, finials and knobs. I was drawn to how efficiently the lathe produced products. Sanding and finishing were a breeze. There were limitations in the forms you could generate―everything was circular, after all―but the combination of machine power and the variability of the shapes possible with hand-held cutting tools was very appealing, meditative even. I began to imagine I could make work on the lathe and sell it through galleries and the extensive network of craft shows.

As the new millennium blew its trumpet and challenged me to take a new path, I reorganized my shop. Large general purpose woodworking equipment was downsized. A compact Inca combination jointer/planer took took the place of two giant machines. A 20" Rockwell Delta Crescent bandsaw bumped a 16" Delta. And the Boice Crane gracefully retired, as a Powermatic 90 took its place. Many of my planes, chisels, and saws made their way into storage. My first craft show was on the lawns of the Codman Estate in Lincoln, Massachusetts in September 2002 and it was a hoot. I had constructed a display (the first of many) to display my wares and sold an encouraging number. The sale I remember most vividly was to the owner of a very small chihuahua who was delighted that she could fit her darling into a large salad bowl and, seeing how comfortably he rested there, bought the bowl. Most of the work at that first show was turnings from burls and salad bowls. I was just beginning to experiment with segmentation and was able to sell a few small pieces.

As a woodworker and cabinetmaker, I developed designs together with a client. As a woodturner, my work grew speculative. Design is driven by possibilities that occur to me and are worked out through sketches, measured drawings, and trial and error. My bench is stacked with ideas that led to other ideas, with assemblies that needed to be reassembled. This was part of the design process when working with a client on a custom piece, to be sure. But if you remove the client then speculative work is more deeply rooted in ones own sense of whether the work is good. It is only after a piece is complete that the “client”―read the market, a craft show jury, other artists, the buyer―comes into the picture. By that time I have separated from the process of making and the piece is depersonalized in a way. It becomes itself, an object.

I was juried into the League of New Hampshire Craftsmen as a woodturner and began to do their 10 day August fair at the Mount Sunapee Ski Resort in 2002. I was a participant until 2018. Tented outdoors, the Sunapee Fair was always an experience. The heat could be brutal and the thunderstorms apocalyptic. But over the years sales were steady and I was able to sell my latest work to faithful collectors. The conversations I had, particularly on weekdays when traffic was light, were memorable. They were about my work, art and craft, life itself. There are a half dozen stories I will never forget and often retell.

I travelled. And travelled some more. American Craft Council shows in Baltimore and Atlanta, Cherry Creek in Denver, Craft America in West Palm Beach, Westchester and Washington, ACE in Chicago, Smithsonian in Washington, Philadelphia Museum in Philadelphia. The poet Antonio Machado suggests “...there is no road; you make your own path as you walk.” But my own path has surely straightened and narrowed. Machado, later in the poem, says that “when you look back you see the path...” so I can see more focus and intention, and much less travel. My sketches and waking thoughts lead me on; there are still songs to sing.