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charles prowell woodworks
Winter 2007

Narrative In-progress for Designer Gate #200

--The idle pastime of decades spent putzing in the shop have lead us to this.  This innocuous pastime of Putzing.  The joiner's inability to take the simplest route.

The work below is an ongoing project Prowell turns to for an hour or more a day with the absorption of a Zen Buddhist, losing himself in the complexities of a design that develops and unfurls as it grows and matures with each day's progress. 

It began with a photo in the San Francisco Chronicle of a high-rise

-planned for Sacramento, with the front facades intersected with two sweeping free-form arches swathed into the storied elevations.

With this embedded vision, the Free-Form Gate was started on just this premise--a series of intersecting non-tangental arches interlocking with at once a conflicting and confluence of unpredictable geometry.

--Because there is no blueprint, each progressing step lends itself to the next step, with the

occasional consideration to the whole.

Iit has little or nothing to do with the whole, or end product, and everything to do with the engaging moment of simply being absorbed with the designing joinery itself.

--So to what end?  What purpose? 

The work is just an amusement.  An idle preoccupation. 


A 2-1/4" thickness frame with the two primary arches laminated in a series of 1/4" thick strips and clamped/glued to corresponding forms that eventually lead us to what we see below.

The sledge hammer--a staple in any shop--can be akin to the tradesman's Gestalt therapy.

The primary arches joined and in place for a fitted assembly.  Now, finally, we have something to work with.


The layered reliefs added to the arches.  The addition of thin wenge splines .

Ready for some African Wenge, beginning with planks that will get worked into our various grids.
wood

A continuous vertebrae of wenge joined to both arches.  Sculpted might better describe this, as it took forever and essentially locked into place the location of the arches in relation to the spline and gate frame while providing, of course, the needed rigidity of a continuous support in one of the hardest, most durable species of wood on earth. 

Suddenly we have something conceptual that is, if nothing else, original.  Original.  A common word, but oddly, not so common among the woodworkers I've known.  Woodworkers come in two levels.  One clear means of separating the can-do's from the can't do's is listening to them talk. If they carry on and on and are somewhat thrilled by the sound of their own voice, then you can generally assume they are among the can't-do's.  They have not spent enough time isolated over a joint, the solitude of that, to learn the patience required. 

There is also this phenomenon of the woodworker so emphatic about technique, about polishing their tools and planning their project, that once they start in and actually make a cut, they are so consumed by technique and the pursuit of perfect technique that there is no place within their vision for spontaneity.  For intuition or improvisation.  Their work proceeds too slowly and too carefully to allow the unstructured appearance of whimsy.  Consequently, an unsettling proportion of woodworkers pass their time re-creating designs that have been replicated and replicated for centuries.  A Queen Anne Highboy, with its cabriole legs so utterly defined by the precedent of something re-created ten thousand times.  Because this genre of woodworker progresses at such a slow and meticulous pace, there is no breadth given to the conceptual, the uniqueness that exists somewhere deep inside that woodworker's heart.  There is nothing unique within his created work.  There is a workmanship above reproach.  Techniques and procedures performed with gallant care.  But no more enlightening or insightful than reading a novel of flawless technique penned by the brilliant student of an MFA program where they teach technique, and only technique. 


 


SECTION A


Section A

Concentrating on only a single area, Prowell begins to introduce the first field of wenge grids within the lower field.   Segmenting his attention to specific areas, simply because the scope of the whole can daunt the minutia.


Section A

Layers overleafed upon layers.


Section A


SECTION B


Section B

The upper right corner with its Wenge mirrored arches and joined cross-bows.   


Section B

A thin spline of Bubinga. 



Section B

The cross-bows joining into the larger arched truss.  This small and to most, insignificant, detail relegated time itself to the most peripheral entity.  Time is something others keep track of.


Section D


Section D

After ten days of non-stop rain, the days return to clear skies in the low 70's and Prowell decides to set up outside the shop to begin laying out the pattern for Section D.  Lead by the intangible imagery of ripples on a pond, the arches of Section B take an increasingly wider radius.

 


Section D

Turning to Section D, Prowell browses illustrations from the work of Scottish architect and designer Charles Renee Macintosh to find this odd distorted representation of his signature squares.  And we're left to wondering how to accomplish this in wood, this wave-like distortion.  Three principal wenge arches fabricated and dry-fitted on this 80-degree Febuaray saturday morning and to consider the two options:
1) the below illusion, in all its mind-bending permutations of joinery, and 2) a long length of 1/8" acryllic rod winding it's way through these section D arches and throughout the entire gate assembly in a manner seen at the De Young  Museum in San Francisco with it's signature 'crack' meandering throughout the foyer and walk, where each stone tile is laid out like a puzzle to extend this 'crack' in a linear, unbroken route.

Below, the De Young Museum 'crack.'


 
 


Three arches dry-fitted.  Along the right stile we use a bubinga spline, or tongue, for our joinery, with tenons joining the arches on the left side to the long vertical spine. 

Each arch is cut from a different radius, graduating from the more pronounced radius at the top to an almost straight length at the bottom.


A look at the Section D and B  as a visual aligment to one another. 


 
 


Every so often it's a good idea to climb a step ladder and have a look from afar, backing it with a white backdrop to get an idea of not only the proportions, but the levels of your own insanity.

With the Section D arches in place, we'll begin to consider the Macintosh squares in distortion while considering, as well, the use of a continuous acryllic rod bored through the various interesecting planes.


Okay.  You're thinking Stop.  Wrong.  Back up.  You were going so well and went too far and caint you jes leave it well enough alone?  No.  Unfortunately, no.  A general genetic make-up prevents such an approach to anything.  Circling the wagons when yer ahead can be a good thing, if one knows when they are ahead.  But it can also have you prematurely satisfied with Ohio and leaving the discovery of Illinois and Nebraska and California to someone else.  Like the Donner Party, who must have wished they has circled their own wagons back in Ohio.
--So, a dictum in this metaphysical turn teaches us to adopt a Westward Ho existence in all matters while balancing the perview of a potential injun attack.



Have you ever tried to bend 1/4" acrylic rod against the will of its own properties?  Threading the three arches of Section D through the rod while also trying to fit them into position to their own tenonry and against a rod that bends only so far before snapping.  

The left course of the rod will carry on, through the center oval and into the the last remaining section to be addressed.  It might then provide its own oregon trail, from the bottom-right corner of the gate to the upper-left corner in a meandering trajectory drawn upon the precedent of the wandering 'crack' at the De Young Museum. 


  It should be noted the sledgehammer is only a prop in an act of comic relief. 

 


Section E

Sec. E

Turning to Section E, representing the last remnaining section to complete and after a few quick false starts, settling on the wenge arch saddled up against the primary framing truss
(arrow). 

A start.  And as always, a start fuels the next step toward a completed section. 

 


The rigidity of a geometric flush-joined grid is what's neeeded to possibly ground the sum total of free-forming with this gate.  And of course not just a grid, but the complexity of a schematic layout that invites closer scrutiny.
--Eventually it will compliment the rectilinear presence of the bronze gate latch, aligned to the tight grids just left of Prowell's right hand.

 
 


Section D finally in place.

 
 


More acrylic rod that had to be used, or thrown out.  There is now the anitcipation, at this juncture and with the continuing use of the rod, that we may realize an added effect when the gate is in place, adorning some landscape somewhere unknown, as the arc of the sunlight strikes the rod. 


 
 


The upper left corner, in an expounding of organ pipe protrusions.


building wood gate

 


Assembly

 
 


Finally, an opportunity to set it upright, in the late afternoon sun.  The resulting effect is an explosion of light--almost impossible to photograph.


Four coats of hand-wiped
Sikkens 250HD hi-protien pigment.


 

So now what? 
We wait.
Wait?
For the right light.  Sunlight. The clear unfettered sunlight in our coastal climate belt where the fog hangs thick and heavy every morning and returns every evening and waiting for that sunrise or sunset, without fog, to photograph the affect of the light and rods in a series of time-released frames and then we're done.



 

  

 

count: 6-2010