Febuary 15, 2008
A stash of 2" Honduras Mahogany, buried in the shop rafters for decades, leads us to the beginnings of a new project in mid-febraury of 2008.  Like always, the progress is relegated to Charles' available time in the shop and with the long-time understanding of how 2-3 hours a day of such preoccupation has maintained his basic equilibrium over the decades.  A portion of each day that stands apart from the various and sundries of running a business that is forever morphing and growing with the inevitable resiliency of any company founded on the premise of constant innovations and a doctrine of workmanship above reproach.

 Feb 17, 2008
A double gate.  An image of connecting lines and arcs from one gate to another with our only guiding light at this early stage being a sense of planes and lines traveling from one gate to another.

 Feb 18, 2008
Routing from the template to create the arching truss on the left gate and illustrating how certain procedures in the shop tend to empty the brain in a way not so dissimilar to meditating.

 Feb 18, 2008
The primary trusses machined and fitted as a continuous radius. I like it. 

 Feb 17, 2008
Ben Prowell lending a hand to scribe the template for what will be a secondary continuous truss, completing the defining outline that opens the way for, well . . . phase #2.

 Feb 19, 2008
The second truss in place with Prowell mimicking the swooshing confluence, or perhaps the Oneness of a Tai Chi master.

 Feb 20, 2008

Electing to have solid, flush-joined panels, shown here as a dry fit.

 Feb 21, 2008

Within the solid panels, a pattern of wenge beading inlays.  Shown here the simple terchnique for routing the pockets.  It actually took a few minutes to work this out.  But only a few.

 Feb 22, 2008

Showing the beading patterns for the left-side gate, with the wenge beading partially ripped and edged.

 Feb 22, 2008

Setting the wenge beading in place and realizing that the panel must now be finished with a hand-wiped application.  

 Feb 23, 2008

The bottom right corner of the Left Gate, where we have wenge pickets bored for a pattern of 1/4" glossy acrylic black rods.  The rods are barely visible, and because of the unruly nature of the arched truss and an awkward ability to clamp and maintain the gate's squareness, the right vertical stile was also glued in place at the time.  This may be an act I later regret.

 Feb 23, 2008

The right-corner bottom of the Right Gate, with the same repeating vertical wenge pickets.  Here, however, we glued the pickets to their rail without requiring gluing the vertical stiles in place.  This allows us to come in later to insert the series of black acrylic rods.  It also allows the pickets to be finished before the rods are in place.  This might not seem like such a breakthrough, but after the Free-Form #200, it's not fun finishing and wrapping every single rod to prevent it from being filmed with a build-up of oily residue. 

The rod is bundled at the top.  It will be set aside until we have decided what to do with the upper sections of the gate.

ps:  It should be noted that with the exception of last week's clear days in the upper 70's. it has rained, even poured, throughout January and February.    Beleaguered until a conversation with the fellas in the Chicago shop where the FedEx truck is blocked from the loading dock by an 8-foot tall snow drift and talks with the fellas in the Portland shops with insurmountable tallies of rainfall and to the fellas in Raleigh slammed with a bitter cold-front in the low teens and it puts our deluge here in Sonoma County in some perspective.

 Feb 25, 2008
Dry fitting the gates for a looksee that may, or may not, help in laying out the upper sections.

 Feb 27, 2008

A few days spent  putting a finish on the above wenge pickets, before the acrylic rods are set in place and thereby avoiding the difficulties of applying the finish encountered in Gate #201.

Building up finishes on both of the solid panels, and because of the raised wenge beading, this must be a hand-wiped finish.

And then oodles of time eyeing the upper section.  What to do.  What to do. 

The gates seems to be all about confluence.  The confluence of arches and the blend from one gate to another.  So . . . how does that help us with the upper sections?  Eventually coming up with a plan, lodged within my head and fairly complicated but it appears to be the right direction.  The first step is routing several small wenge arches to the same radius of the larger arched trusses.  From here we'll do some layout and put together a plan of attack.

The arches on the left are for the left gate, with those on the right for the right gate. 

 Feb 27, 2008
Consiering a few options.

 Feb 27, 2008

Narrowing down the options.  Implementing and fabricating the rest of this section, not shown, is an absolute.  Surely a hands-on approach while bearing in mind how I can and have designed work that is exceedingly difficult to carry out.  I depend on the shops, who are far more focused and capable in this regard and who have reminded me so often over the course of decades how I was once in a diving competition while at Camp Paddle Trails in 1962, burrowed in the Arkansas backwater.  Diving from a high cliff into the Illinois river, my opponent did a simple swan dive, and did it perfectly.  I did a 1-1/2, which of course is a little more demanding, and yet there were flaws, as in a less-than-perfect entry into the water that lost the competition.  So stay within the bounds of what is possible, with perfection.  Push that level, constantly, but presenting anything in its completed form that is mechanically less than perfect is to have those flaws upstage the success of a design itself.

By the way, what I also remember of that dive was how deep I went.  All the way to the muddy bottom, and reaching the surface and the ladder up the rocks and my ankles . . .gawd--my ankles were covered with slimy black, blood-sucking leaches.

Oh, and the 3-day canoe trip and how, of the 75 boys in the camp, I was the only one who qualified.  This involved going to the middle of the ten-foot deep river in my Levis and Converse high-tops and t-shirt and stripping naked, without drowning.  At some point I sat in the mud on the bottom of the river, with the leaches, frantically unlacing my hightops and then the levis, wet and heavy, slowing peeling them down my legs only to be caught up on my ankles at about the time when air was in short supply.   Pitch black down there.  My legs were tanlged and restrained by the wet Levis; I was unable to kick my way to the surface, And of course the leaches, who have a preference for ankles and thinking, at twelve, thinking this flashing thought of death and how it seemed a little sudden.   A little early in life. But the Levis came off and I did reach the surface and my reward was a 3-day canoe trip.

With fourteen 12-year-old girls and their counselor.  The girl's camp was on the other side of the river and although they had the same test of stripping in the river, they were girls, who wore shorts and low-top sneakers, and hardly the same as hightop Converse and heavy denim Levis. 

But I was twelve, and had three sisters back home.  Girls were the enemy.  Girls were what I came to camp for three weeks to get away from.  Three nearly intolerable days canoeing down the Illinois River with fourteen 12-year-old girls

I can't say what was learned from that experience, other than to be careful where you succeed.

I'll likely go overboard with the upper wenge detail shown below.  I tend to do that.

August 1962

Might as well have a look at Camp Paddle Trails.  I kept the paddle for decades, perhaps as a reminder of my rowing partner who could not row.   For three days she banged her paddle against the side of the canoe with each annoying stroke.  I, of course, in my opinion, had the noiseless, mechanical poetry of an indian.  But even at 12,  in a life surrounded by sisters, I had long long ago mastered the patience and tolerance required of this species.

Saturday, March 1, 2008

Killing time.  The upper detail of the left gate is in place and joined and clamped and requiring an unbelievable amount of time. Glorious time.   So on to the right gate.  Laying it out in a painstakingly slow process that shows the blocks in place as randomly-placed spacers but giving you little idea of the final look.  Be patient.  It aint a horse race.

Thinking of arriving at Camp Paddle Trails that August 46 years ago in our beige Plymouth wagon and stepping from the car into this pine-wooded outback along Arkansas' Illinois River and walking to the back of the wagon with my mother and a carload of sisters remaining inside as I shook hands with the camp counselor and opened the back hatch where there were two 12-gauge shotguns and a single-shot 22-caliber rifle and telling him how the brochure mentioned riflery and not knowing if we were suppose to furnish our own rifles, or what.   Hall.  Robert Hall, who would by my tent counselor, and imagining what he must have thought as he shook his head and said the camp had plenty of rifles, and then turned to the back passenger window where my oldest had that look That look that could almost effortlessly transform my pals back home into blubbering idiots and how Counselor Hall was no different. Counselor Hall, who seemed like a full fledged adult but who in reality was probably no older than 17.  Jeeze, I really needed my mother to start the car and drive away and dispense with any goodbye hugs and kisses.  She needed to do this quickly,  before Hall approached the passenger window.

Sunday, March 2, 2008
Laying out the grids for the right gate.  Because they are joined to the gate's frame, the dry fit of the wenge grids must be perfect. It also means that once the gate's vertical stiles and rails, as well as the arching trusses are all glued and clamped, the upper wenge detail fits in place all as a single, nerve-racking experience.  So we must get it right and save the heart attacks.

Sunday, March 2, 2008
The painstaking Zen-ness of fitting the puzzle laid out on the benchtop, to what is in his head.  If we were to weigh and balance the two concurrent levels of thought at this juncture--the thought given over to technique, and the other brain given wholly over to conceptualizing the unseen possibilities, the scale would be parallel.  You cannot visualize in your head the possibilities without simultaneously considering the techniques required to carry out that vision.  There is a genre of designers, exemplified most prominently with architects, who have no apprenticeship or experience within the bowels of their trade.  The technique.  The workmanship.  They exist aloof from the pedestrian restraints of our culture's high-minded attitude against labor.  The exalted real estate agent straps on his tie or her heels and prances with the aloofness of being distinct and professional in the light of those who actually built the house, those who have created the product that allows the realtor a means of support. 

Tuesday, March 4, 2008
On this day the left gate is assembled and glued and clamped and nudged in a long-standing custom of losing one's wits during this process, fighting the clock of a setting glue.  Prowell illustrates this with the mocking hilarity of a bludgeoning impatience.

Wednesday, March 12, 2008
An absence of several days as Prowell escapes to the physical poetry of the ski slopes. Upon his return, both gates are assembled and sanded and suddenly at that vulnerable stage, ripe for the legions of thieves and knock-off artists lurking, waiting, hiding in the bushes and assuming Prowell has long long ago lost the legendary cruelty of a champion wrestler.  But of course once a wrestler, always a wrestler.

Thursday, March 20, 2008
Shown applying the 5th coat of a wiped-dry finish while being tortured by PBS' pledge week over the radio.  About 30 minutes a day over the course of the past week or more, rubbing and polishing to a wandering mind.

Which brings us back to Camp Paddle Trails. 

If you look close, on the top of my right wrist is a scar.  Three, to be exact, as small almost indiscernibly parallel scars mitered across the top of my right wrist that is testimony to something primeval in them thar Arkansas woods. 

It was on a sunday and I remember it as a Sunday because the girls from across the river came a visiting.  And always on Sunday, just before the noon meal, the seventy-five girls crossed the river for not only a meal and glasses of iced sulphur water, but a shared leather-craft class and an introductory ham radio class followed by open-tent visiting.

Counselor Hall, who had been asking if my oldest sister would be attending Family Visit on the following weekend and me shaking my head and then if my middle sister would be attending and more shaking and then my youngest sister before giving it up and turning his limited attention to the Open Tent visits with a sign pinned to the tent flap that read:

Tent #10
Counselor: Robert Hall
"Who in the 'hall" do you want?"

So, the 17-yr-old Hall charming a bevy of 13-yr-old girls while a number of boys got hold of Paddy Harrington, a small pudgy little fellow from Dublin who had a talent for impersonating Haley Mills. They tied him to tent stakes in an open meadow under the insufferable Arkansas heat for the girl's amusement while Lillie Mahala and I checked out two rods from the commissary and made our way down to the river and to me, Lillie was just another sister (I was beginning to miss my sisters, believe it or not) and to her, who had four brothers, I was just another brother.  We fished. 

At some point my line goes taut and starts reeling out with the strength of something big. 
--Hey, I got sompin.
--Reel it in, stupid.
--I caint.
She makes for the rod and we're struggling, the two of us on one rod, against something really big and together we give it a concerted pull when out of nowhere something prehistoric breaks the surface of the river and sails toward us to arrive at our bare feet, flopping on the bank and we stand back, amazed.

A Gar, to those of you needing an explanation, is a creature dating back to dinosaurs.   A fish that ultimately evolved into a latter day crocodile, but that managed over millions of years to survive as a fish, with a long crocodile-like snout filled with razor-sharp teeth. 

It flopped and flopped and then settled down and appeared beaten and we closed in, bent down close to see our lure had snagged him against the back dorsal.  I removed the lure and set the rod aside.

We got down on our knees. 
--What is it? Lillie whispers.
--Sompin.  It's sompin.-
--I know that, stupid.  But what?
--I aint sure.  A fish, I reckon.
--I know that.  But what kind of fish?
--A fish with teeth.
--Touch it.
--No.
--Yer the boy.
--So what. Yer the girl.
--So you noticed.
--Huh?
--That I'm a girl.
--Shut up, Lillie.  I aint stupid.
--Yer pretty stupid, Charley . . . actually.

And right about then the creature gives a last gasping flop and rises up to catch his teeth across the back of my right wrist and we leap like catapults, scrambling up the bank as it flops again, and again, and suddenly it's gone, back into the river.

My wrist is bleeding.  Three parallel scars, about 1/2" long, mitered across the skin.  We make our way back, up along the rise to the open meadow where whats-his-name is still tethered to the tent poles and on up to commissary to return the rods and then to the kitchen to ask for glasses of ice cold sulphur water and we make our way to the Adirondacks chairs situated along the bluff overlooking the valley and we sit, sipping our water, and every so often Lillie leans in to inspects my wrist, running her finger along the scars in a way that gives me goosebumps. 

 But . . . before we get to the main event, two parting images, awarded that summer of 1962 to only one of the 75 boys at Camp Paddle Trails.

  The inscription on the back, nearly illegible.

Saturday, March 22, 2008
Anyone weathering the above dalliance, deserves the below image of our final product. 

Thanks for your visit, enjoy the galleries, and look for Prowell's coming project, all about ellipses and bursts.