Second session interview with Charles Prowell by the editors at Thumbprint Press April 2004 |
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Editor-Guy |
I wanted to start off, if you don't mind, by discussing business. Your ability to stay in business. For 27 years. |
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| Prowell | Sure | |||
| GB | To many of us--myself included--the trials and tribunals of self-employment are all too familiar. The usual issues with benefits and long hours juxstaposed against the freedom of pursuing our dreams. This is all accentuated, of course, for anyone who is self-employed in the arts, so to speak. | |||
| Prowell | I suppose. The publisher who publishes textbooks and computer how-to's can rely on a more stable income than the publisher who is concerned more with, let's say, poetry. But if his love is with poetry, and not computers---. | |||
| GB | Exactly. The scoreboard shifts. In fact the whole concept of keeping score should be eliminated. | |||
| Prowell | Keeping score? | |||
| GB | I'm thinking of "keeping up with the Jones' ." | |||
| Prowell | Ah. You mean financial. The house. The car. All that. | |||
| GB | Right. | |||
| Prowell | Well, that's a relative state. There will always be the Jones' and their bigger cars. | |||
| GB | Have you ever, over the years, been tempted toward another means of support? | |||
| Prowell | As a younger man I used to think it would make for a worry-free existence to secure a position within the Civil Service. To know that when you begin your career at 24 how it would take an armageden to de-rail the rightful security of old age. But realistically, no--there is no default career to consider when times are slow. You learn to live on what you make. | |||
| GB | Have there been slow times? | |||
| Prowell | Of course. After college I relocated to San Francisco in the throes of the 1973 recession and lived on almost nothing while managing with whatever I could find and finally settling in to building a wacky house out in west Marin County. And again with the recession of the late 70's / early 80's where I did actually step away, sitting that one out by taking a job as caretaker to an Historical Landmark in the City--A Bernard Mayback apartment / clubhouse in the Forest Hills district. By the time the recession of the late 80's / early 90's hit, I had more or less insulated myself and the line of furnishings that proved to be invulnerable to any economic trends and with this last--or current--recession, I've been entirely unaffected. But there will be more to come and if I'm lucky I'll survive them too and hopefully, hopefully, I'll enter the shop one day in my 90's and suddenly keel over and die in a pile of sawdust and it will have been a life well-lived. A tremendous life. | |||
| GB | Interesting. You see yourself at 90. | |||
| Prowell | I see business as a contiuum of the past 27 years. Barring poor health, nothing foreseeable should interupt that continuum. I don't believe I'll awake one day with a taste for, say, selling insurance. The work changes. The products are forever in flux with new designs and newly invented niches and there has never been a time I can recall when something isn't being developed--something innovative to the scope of what currently exists on the market. I am not capable of replicating what already exists. |
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| GB | Well I suppose that explains the lure of each day being a whole new day. | |||
| Prowell | There is a Zen-ness to the work in the shop. A grounding, disciplined effect and although it's an addiction, it is also an imperative component to my relative metabolism. A good day, nevertheless, results in only about 4-1/2 billable hours in the shop. Often only 3or so. It's dreadful. really. | |||
| GB | Hmmm. It sounds, well--liesurely. | |||
| Prowell | Well, they are very productive hours. Very efficient. We might liken it to a painter; I know a number of painters who actually support themselves by the sales of their paintings and yet not one of them regularly, or even rarely, is capable of an 8-hour day in their studio, actually painting. I don't know why that is, why their billable hours, or mine, cannot be what it is for, say, a house painter, who I'm sure gets a 40-hour week as a matter of course. | |||
| GB | So where does the day go? How do those remaining hours get spent? | |||
| Prowell | Ahh! Good question. Well, let's see. There are often coffee gatherings in the morning and those can linger. There are phone calls. Always phone calls. Endless phone calls, and because often with those patrons already on board, we're not only discussing their project but over the course of their commission we drift into areas such as politics and parenting or whatever. There is Email. Gawd. I don't want to know how much time is spent there. There is of course the web site and it's omnipresent needs. The administrative paperwork. Often lunch downtown and afternoon coffee downtown and let's not overlook my post-lunch nap and then some laps in the neighborhood pool and if we're averaging--I mean looking at the billable hours as an annual average--we must consider the mid-week ski runs and body-surfing forays and golf days and general getaways when a number of works are going to, say, southern California and I'll decide to make those myself rather than shipping and along the way do some fishing and visiting and then there is . . . | |||
| GB | Okay. I get the picture. | |||
| Prowell | It's appalling. | |||
| GB | I was curious if you ever find yourself stumped. I guess what I mean is, have you ever designed something you later realized cannot be built. | |||
| Prowell | Never. I have always believed that if you possess the fundamentals, there is virtually nothing you cannot build. From those fundamentals are born advanced techniques and the more advanced the techniques, the broader the range of possibilities. | |||
| GB | How would someone starting out go about learning these fundamentals? | |||
| Prowell | I suppose through high school shop programs and from there apprenticeships or perhaps through one of the many woodworking/design schools around the country. I don't believe it would serve them to hire on with a cabinet shop as the approach there is hardly comparable. I think, under the right tutelage, that an apprenticeship is the most efficient method. | |||
| GB | Do you hire apprentices? | |||
| Prowell | No.Unless you consider Ben as an apprentice, which I suppose he is.. | |||
| GB | Ben? | |||
| Prowell | The #2 son. He's been a fixture in the shop since he was in diapers. And he's 17 now. A very talented young fella. But beyond him, no, no proper apprentiseships are offered. Maybe in my 80's. Maybe then. | |||
| GB | One thing I've notice in your shop is the minimalist thing with tools. I was expecting more tools. More Machinery | |||
| Prowell | Machinery requires more floor space, and the more floor space results in higher overhead and the higher overhead results in the need to either work longer hours or hire on apprentices, and apprentices require babysitting. Besides, I have a general irreverence for tools themselves. They're just tools. I tend to abuse them. They exist strickly to serve me. I don't use a tool and think how beautiful it is or how expensive it is or how precious it is. | |||
| GB | So you prefer to rely more on hand tools. The old school? | |||
| Prowell | Well certainly during the years with furniture. Although I was raised around shop machinery, the nature of a one-of-a-kind piece lends itself more to the focus of hand tools than machinery. Anymore, most of the stationary machinery has been weeded out and what's left are the workhorses: The powermatic Planer; the Delta Unisaw; the Bosch compound miter. The router table. And the sharpening wheel, as I have a weakness for sharp blades. | |||
| GB | You mean for the chisels? | |||
| Prowell | Right. Chisels and hand planes. |
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| GB | I noticed a lot of those. From a massive plane as long as my arm, to one little plane I notice no longer than my pinkie. | |||
| Prowell | They each have a specific use. | |||
| GB | And Chisels of all sizes. | |||
| Prowell | One thing I've learned over the years is to keep on hand only those tools that actually get used. There used to be drawers of auxilliary chisels until I finally gave them away--those without sentimental connections. | |||
| GB | Sentimental? | |||
| Prowell | I have an old wooden toolbox I still keep up in the rafters. In here are a few selected tools that belonged to my step-dad and his father and a lovely rosewood 6" level going back another generation or so. You might say these tools represent the aristocracy--they reside apart from the peasantry of what gets used every day on the shop floor. I'm sure the peasants have their own twisted attitudes about this--you know, the big mortising chisels who work their tails off every day and who never never fail me and who never complain juxstaposed to these snobs in my grandfather's box who lay about decade after decade looking pretty, waxing on about their glory days with exagerated stories the peasants are sick of and yet, adding insult to injury, the peasants must know that if they break, they go, whereas the snobs are to be preserved like items in a museum. Aside from myself, there is only Ben, my youngest, who knows the hierarchy--the bloodlines of the aristocracy. If I were to disappear, it's only natural to expect those peasants to consider an uprising, to perhaps make some effort to pass themselves off as blue-bloods and inflate their heritage and graduate from the workhorses they are to a place of stationary reverence. An exalted false retirement, of sorts. | |||
| GB | You lost me. We were discussing chisels, and then something about an uprising and then Ben. Is this your son? | |||
| Prowell | Ben The Jaguar--Sweet Swing--Wonder Boy Prowell. Multi-generation dynasties don't topple so easily. To be sure, Wonder Boy will rule with an iron hand. | |||
| GB | I have no idea what you're talking about. Are those nicknames?. | |||
| Prowell | The Jaguar because he is light and quick and agile. Sweet Swing because in 8-yr-old minors he lead the league with a .921 average! Wonder Boy because, well--he's a wonderful boy. | |||
| GB | I see. | |||
| Prowell | Are we through here yet? | |||
| GB | Almost. In leafing through some of the clippings, the diversity of your career seems, well--unusual. For instance, in the 70's you appear to have been involved with restuarant design, of all things. | |||
| Prowell | One day I'm walking down Clement St with my cousin Ed, in San Francisco, and a fellow out of the blue asks if we know a good carpenter and Ed points to me and thus began a three-year adventure with an Irish con-man named Chris Okelly. | |||
| GB | Oh Lord, I'm afraid to ask. | |||
| Prowell | Chris could sell anything to anyone. He was linked up with an Irish priest from the University of San Francisco who could get building materials at cost and the three of us went into the restuarant business. Chris secured a site, I designed the site and oversaw the work, and Father So-and-So provided the materials. In all, four restuarants, all of which were out of business within five years. A few years later Chris was chased back to County Clair. I contunued to run across Father So-and-So for several years thereafter and we would stand on the sidewalk and reminisce and I believe he is actually still teaching at USF. | |||
| GB | Okay. I also noticed a few photographs of you much younger. A teenager, maybe, with a carpenter's apron and standing before an unfinished house. A construction site. Was house-building a phase worth discussing? | |||
| Prowell | Not really. Something I grew up doing. My step-father built custom homes and because he paid me, I also built custom homes. The fundamentals of that were well in place before I left high school. I was also, as a young teen, fed a disproportionate amount of pornagraphic brouhaha from an endless succession of older, yet mindless co-workers. Interesting how their talk seemed always to default back to this subject during breaks and lunch.. | |||
| GB | But I had also seen, somewhere, how the 12 years or so you spent through the 80's with your furniture designs was drawn from that period as well. | |||
| Prowell | My step-father's father--Wyman was his name. He had a small shop in his basement in Champaign, Illinois Fully equipped. When he wasn't selling whatever it was he sold for the local Coca Cola bottling plant, he was building furniture in his shop. A comfortable place, as I recall, with an old couch and a coal-burning stove and a stack of True magazines beside the couch and him explaining to me what was what because, I suspect, I was the only one willing to listen. | |||
| GB | On the web site, there are a number of residential interiors. Also a few bookstores, I believe. And even a section devoted to the toys you created for your own sons. | |||
| Prowell | An interest in Interior Design came obviously from my mother, who was a fine artist and an illustrator and draftsman with a good eye for, well--design.. The bookstores--Artist's Proof in Larkspur; Oliver's Books in San Anselmo; and North Light Books in Santa Rosa because I am an insatiable reader and there are similarieties with bookstores and restuarants. The Toys because I simply couldn't resist. My son's bedroom was re-designed and re-decorated through more permutations than I can remember. | |||
| GB | As long as we're on a run, what's the story with the treehouse on your site? I mean do people actually hire you to design and build treehouses? | |||
| Prowell | No. Although yes, they do write in and request this with unsettling regularity, but really, I don't have the time and the treehouse on the site was just a lark. That was done a dozen or so years back and it still exists, obscured high up in an ancient old oak tree and who knows how many teenagers have sowed their oats up there over those dozen years. | |||
| GB | So, what new products or innovations are ahead? Anything currently being developed? | |||
| Prowell | A few things. The new Landscape Column Lanterns are interesting. As a solar-powered lantern, the Column will ship with a synthetic insert that sets to the ground, like a post. It will take about 20 minutes to position them anywhere within the landscape. No concrete, no eletrical contractors. Instant lighting of a design and nature unlike anything currently available in this genre. | |||
| GB | You mean a wood column, I assume. | |||
| Prowell | Not entirely. Finally, we have an opportunity to ulitize the synthetics. The Columns themselves--. 12" square by 60" height-- have a joined grid in the upper and lower sections made from teak. The column body is synthetic. The synthetic offers a more stable medium where wood might present it's usual issues with shrinking and swelling. Half a dozen prototypes so far and most recently a wacky departure of giving the column a 45-degree twist. It would appear something like a stick of licorice, with a single spiraled twist. | |||
| GB | I like the sounds of it. | |||
| Prowell | Also a new gate line. Teak gates where the field is more stained glass patterns. Elaborate patterns and various colored glass. In the vein of the Art Nouveau and Art Deco era. Stained glass windows were a wonderful way for folks like the Scottsman Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Frank Loyd Wright and others to flex their graphic muscle. The possibilities are without limit. I have always loved graphic art. In college I was, for a while, an art major and while the other students were painting live models and figures, I was painting these geometric confusions more in the vein of Graphic Design, than Fine Art. | |||
| GB | Did you graduate in Art? | |||
| Prowell | No. I started out in Architecture. Unfortunately, the first two years were situated about five miles off campus. Here we were secluded from everything, in class from 8-12, and 1-5 Monday through Friday and up half the night at our drafting tables in the dorm. As a concession, however, the school had the foresight to also locate the School of Cosmetology out there with us. So the early Architecture students--all males--had as our companions these women whose primary interests were in learning how to make themselves beautiful. Anyway, this was in '68 and '69 and so much was happening then, culurally, that after two years of this, I left Architecture and moved to the main campus and declared myself an Art major and grew my hair--something not allowed in the Architecture Department--and from Art I migrated to a Design major, under Buckminster Fuller and then. well --considering the times, and the always lurking draft, that I graduated seems a minor miracle in itself. |
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| GB | Well, fortunately, it doesn't appear you killed off too many brain cells. You survived. | |||
| Prowell | It was a disorienting era in our history. So many confusing preambles shifting and up-ended at once--the women metamorphasizing from the role models of their mothers to the reign of Gloria Steinham while the men were either being plagued by a relentless draft or actually serving in a war that was, as Irecall, obscenely selfish. | |||
| GB | Speaking of history, let's call it a day. What do you say? | |||
| Prowell | Good. Fine. Close the door on your way out | |||
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