James Gentry,
“Comments at Edgewood Orchard Gallery,” July 22,
2000.
I am James
Gentry, a woodworker and furniture maker and I’ll be giving
a brief talk on my work today. Thank you for attending the
opening here. Artists and craftspeople tend to work alone and so
unless they are teachers, have few opportunities to speak about
their work. I appreciate the opportunity today.
I will discuss
four main areas: how I got started in woodworking; how wood as a
material and woodworking tools affect my work; what influences
the way I design and make things with the specific example of the
table I have with me here; and the relevance of craft work to
you, the audience.
My story with
woodworking began really in 1969. I was drafted for the Army for
the Vietnam war, and although I ended up being sent to Korea
rather than Vietnam, that period was one of intense
reflection for me. There is nothing like serving overseas in the
military during time of war to focus your attention on a better
way to spend the rest of your life. I was never in any direct
danger, but the possibility was always there both as a transfer
to the DMZ in the north of Korea and as a replacement to Vietnam.
Anyway, it made me think that I would really like to do something
more interesting when I got back to the states. As things happen,
I was drafted with a friend from high school and we ended up
riding the bus to Ft. Leonard Wood together and doing basic
training in the same company. He was a law student at UW and
promoted the idea of going to law school in Wisconsin to me. I
had been to Wisconsin once before when I was a college student in
St. Louis, on the so called “children’s crusade”
for Eugene McCarthy’s presidential bid, and I was struck by
the woodsy beauty of the state. So, this and that, and I end up
in law school at UW in 1972. I was only an average student, but
in my second year, I won my first legal case and that is how I
became a woodworker. Let me explain. Since I came to UW from
another school in Illinois, I was classified as an out-of-state
student and had to pay the correspondingly higher tuition. Well,
I thought that since I was practically a lawyer already, I should
appeal. I took my case to the Board on the theory that military
service had broken any previous pattern of residency, and
wherever I lighted after the military was my home. Since my entry
into UW was relatively close to my discharge from the army, they
bought it and made me an in-state student retroactively, with
about a $5000 tuition refund. It was like winning the lottery. I
thought I could do anything I wanted. I finished up the remaining
3 semesters of school, because, among other reasons, my wife
Ellen was a law student too. Best thing I ever did in law school.
But I had acquired an interest in woodworking, and took a
woodworking course at the Student Union , and before long I was
hooked. I loved everything about wood and shop tools, plus people
gave me a lot of encouragement, so after about a year of
quasi-law jobs, I took my $5000 and opened a shop. I’ve
never looked back. It still takes people’s breath away when
I tell them I actually gave up being a lawyer to become a
woodworker, but the law and I were a mismatch. I’ll give you
an image to show what I mean. A good lawyer, and I’ve known
some, is like a mirror. If you deal with a lawyer, you never
penetrate the surface, because the lawyer stays behind
strategizing while he constantly shifts the mirror surface so you
reveal yourself. When you reveal weakness or contradict yourself,
he makes his move. My personality, and I think this is the
artist’s personality, is more like a sponge. I take in
everything I can, many things interest me, and I try to reconcile
them all into some kind of coherent harmony. That is the
artist’s vision. Mine looks like an egg. Lawyers don’t
think like that
So here I am
trying to express my vision in wood, which bring me to the topic
dear to my heart, wood and trees. I’ve noticed one
difference between fine artists like painters and sculptors and
craftspeople. People involved in craft identify more passionately
with their material. This is not to say that artists of another
stripe don’t prefer some material over another, I know for
example that deKooning liked the slinkiness of oil paint, but I
don’t think it was essential to his art. But you can’t
imagine a goldsmith without gold, or a potter without clay, or a
glassblower without glass, or a woodworker without wood. And
conversely, woodworkers rarely become potters and goldsmiths
rarely become glassblowers. Your material, as a craftsperson,
becomes your story and you stick to it. So wood is my story and
I’ve stuck to it longer than I’ve been a father, longer
than I’ve been a husband, longer than I’ve been a child
in my parent’s home, longer than I’ve lived in any one
place. That’s a serious commitment.
We all, I think,
relate to trees. They stand upright like us. They live about as
long as we do, 80 years or so. They are sort of big yard pets,
so, and we mourn them when they die, as Ellen and I are now
mourning our front yard maple tree. I’m sure you’ve all
seen the cross section of a tree with the various important dates
in human history marked on the rings. We use them in our houses
and fireplaces. We stand in their shade. Trees are intertwined
with humans. And they invoke a certain awe in us and humility. As
British sculptor David Nash says, “Trees are the kings of
the vegetable world,” and so command our respect. Then there
is the sense that wood is already a finished product, so you
can’t really improve it or make it more beautiful, and it
comes from all over the world, so it can be like an exotic
visitor. All of this adds a mystique to working wood that
I’ve never grown tired of.
When I first
started my shop, I was in hunter-gatherer mode. Wisconsin was
great, all these trees around! So, and my wife will attest to
this, wherever we went on vacation or driving around, I would
seek out local saw mills and buy a few boards for cheap and dry
them myself. It was a great adventure, seeing the big logs on the
carriage going through the saw, watching the graders sort the
boards, talking to the sawmill people, making the deal, often for
cash on the barrel. Then I got into collecting wood, piles of
logs cut into thousands of board feet of lumber and stored in a
shed in the backyard. That was when my back was strong. Now I
collect a lot less wood and think more about the individual
personalities or histories of certain species. Maple is silky
smooth and cuts like butter. Birdseye maple drowns you in its
dappled surface. Ash is the tree of life in Irish mythology and
is straight and strong. I like the smell of it best of all, or
maybe cherry. Oak is barns, houses, and boats. Cherry is sweet.
Mahogany and walnut were the woods of the colonial cabinetmakers
and I think of their spirit of independence. Lately I’ve
worked a fair amount of exotic woods from Brazil and Africa and
some are so hard you can’t drive a screw into them and so
heavy they won’t float. You develop distinct relationships
with each kind of wood, and as I do more turning, even individual
pieces of wood.
Less romantic but
more practical is the relationship a woodworker has with his
tools. The state that you want to achieve here is what someone
described as “flow.” It’s what sports players call
being in a zone, the feeling that without conscious direction
things will work out right. In a wood shop there are dozens of
hand/eye/brain processes going on for any one thing and typically
I have 2-4 projects going at once. I might make the joints for a
frame and glue it up, then match the wood for the panel and glue
it up, then by that time the frame is dry and I trim, inlay and
sand it, and then I go to a different project like laying up the
stringing inlay which is set into the panel before it goes in the
frame or design a particular piece and draw up the cutting list
for it. And on and on it goes, each process folding into the
other. At the end of the day you haven’t made one thing but
completed different processes for several. It’s a very
engaging state of mind because each process has definable markers
to show the progress you’ve made and is also limited enough
to provide immediate gratification.
Let me illustrate
with this pedestal table. Wood, Flat Joinery, Laminated Joinery,
Trim, Joint Bottom, Inlay, Carve, Assemble, Trim, Reinforce,
Incise and Texture Top, Sand, Sand, Sand, Assemble, Finish.
So that is the
physical processes generally that go into a piece like this. A
further and deeper issue is why make this table this way, or what
is behind this particular design. Here are some of the things I
think about. First and always is craft. Craft objects, by
definition, have to be well made, that is closely fitted, nicely
finished, durable, and well proportioned. My feeling is that you
flaunt those basic things at your peril if you are a serious
craftsman, and most craftsmen give lifetime guarantees on their
work. I certainly do. Second, I consider the historical use
of a particular type of furniture. Tables for certain uses, like
dining, have to be a certain height to be useful. Chairs likewise
have to be a certain height. Horizontal surfaces have to be flat
if things will be set on them. Pieces that occupy status places
in a home or office should reflect that status in materials or
detailing and should look dignified. After these basic
requirements are met, I try to give each piece a personality, a
life of its own. This is the best way to honor the fact that
these objects have a long-term relationship with the people who
buy them. I want the relationship to be interesting. The kind of
personality I like is animation combined with stillness,
energetic but thoughtful. Here is how I would interpret this
table in that light. The energy is in the stance of the thing,
like a hawk perched on a branch. The incised lines add a flow
with the wheel inlay being the still focal point. The top is the
peaceful horizon line—stillness—pierced by these
through shapes to let the energetic light through.
That leads me to
my final thought, which actually concerns you, the audience. The
question is why should you or anyone care about this craft stuff?
I have 3 answers. First, and this has been written about in
several books and articles lately, craft shows what is called
hand intelligence, which, like emotional intelligence or
linguistic intelligence, makes up an important part of human
intelligence. The idea is that we actually learn about the world
through our hands because they are such sophisticated
instruments. The hand/mind connection was best illustrated to me
recently at a piano recital in our home by a friend who was
competing for the Van Cliburn prize. He would discuss what he was
going to play and what technique it illustrated, and then tear
off into 5 minutes of Chopin.And then he would do it again with
another piece. There was no intermediary between hand and brain.
It just spilled out. Craft work, in the same sense, connects the
brain and hand automatically.
My second point
I’ll illustrate by the Martha Stewart phenomenon. You could
argue that the most prominent spokesperson and symbol of
handcraft in America is not Dale Chihuly, or Wendell Castle, or
Beatrice Potter, but Martha Stewart. Few know the former, all
know the latter, and she does all hand work. Truthfully, I find
much to admire in her. As I noted in a recent announcement for
our annual “Watch Martha at Christmas” potluck,
“She’s rich, she’s foxy, she likes to work around
the house, what’s there not to like?” But I can see
that nobody is going along with me here because there is
something lacking in Martha. She is also corporate Martha,
controlled Martha, fake Martha. She lacks individuality, she is
really anonymous. Compare her with Julia Child in the cooking
field for liveliness. And so that is the second reason craft, as
practiced by a real craftsperson is important. It is not
anonymous. It is made by a real person, often that you have
actually met and sometimes that you actually have a friendship
with. People like real connections with real people.
My last and most
important reason for craft work is that not only does it come
from the skilled hands of a real person, but it also comes from
the heart. I can think of very few craftspeople who are
millionaires, and I doubt that they started in craft for the
money. Very few craftspeople are in this for the money. We do it
for the love of what we do and for the joy it brings to
people’s lives. I can’t tell you how many times someone
has come up to me at a show and said we bought this or that 10
years ago and it still sits in our living room and we look at it
and enjoy it every day. From my hands, through my heart, to their
home and life. It’s what craft work is all about.
Thank you sincerely for the opportunity to talk about
these things.