DEPARTMENT OF TANGENTS
Artist’s Statement
At the request of a reader, here is the Artist's Statement referred to in the last post. I always start with the material. My wood comes from a variety of sources, including commercially milled hardwoods available from a regional dealer, preferably from certified...
Virginia Woolf and Me
Lately I have been rereading Erich Auerbach's Mimesis, a book my daughter gave me several years ago. Its subject, the representation of reality in western literature from Homer to the twentieth century, is treated in a manner both sweeping and detailed, and although...
A Quasi-Victorian Mantelpiece
When we moved to Napa in 1987, one of the friends we left behind in our old Oakland neighborhood was Eric the photographer. I guess we didn’t exactly leave him behind, because he’s been up to Napa to photograph new pieces for us; but he did continue to live in...
How Engineers Do Things
My father was an engineer, who spent most of his working career in the aerospace industry, and what he did was completely mysterious to me as a child. I knew it had to do with making rockets work and that things had to be figured out and tested, and that it all had to...
Gallery Talk
I was asked recently to give a gallery talk about my woodworking, and I decided to select a small number of images and organize the talk around them. Here are the eleven images I picked and roughly what I had to say about them. I usually tell people that I started...
The Live Oak Tree
On returning from vacation in July I found a phone message from Jim Bushey, a local engineer working on a project near Napa, who wanted to show me a tree. It was coming out to make way for a new vineyard, and he thought I might be able to use the wood. The base of...
George Nakashima & Paper Clips
On vacation in New York recently, I visited a gallery show entitled “George Nakashima: In Conversation,” described by its organizers as a collaborative exploration of the interaction of furniture by George Nakashima with the work of several contemporary artists. The...
Sherlock Holmes in the 21st century
We have not had broadcast TV in our house for about 15 years. We live under a hill and don’t get a TV signal, but up until 15 years ago we had cable. Then, for some reason having to do with raising a teenager, we got rid of the cable. We would watch movies...
The Tabletop
Evelyn and I were at a local hardwood lumber dealer’s, looking at some two-inch cherry for a dining table I was making. Contrary to what they told me on the phone, they did not have hundreds of board feet of it, but only a hundred fifty board feet or so – not much...
Wall Motto
For a good while there has been a Latin quote on my workshop wall. I’ve completely forgotten how it got there, but I do know what it means. It says ars longa, vita nostra brevis est, literally “art is long but our life is short.” I know that because I took Latin in...
Zlomke Furniture Then and Now
I own an ashtray and a yardstick, promotional products of the sort given away by small businesses when I was a boy in the 1950’s, which I acquired from a family source some time later. They are important to me because they came from my Grandpa George’s furniture...
Sentiment
I took some display pieces down to San Diego the other day, where their other design parent lives and works. She is going to see if she can place them in a showroom in her market area. This was the first time she had seen these particular pieces, if you don’t count...