June 20, 2008

Double gates in clear Port Orford cedar, with its light hue.
Milled and mortised to about a meter, times two. 

 June 20, 2008
Charles' old pal, Tom, comes to the shop one day, ten years back,
To sit in the corner with the endless prattle of a brain the opposite of dim,
And in his long elegant fingers with nails he refuses to trim,
He wields a knife and a block of walnut and with his enviable ease, he fiddles and widdles what his lovely mind sees,
And now, among the webs on the ledge of the window in the shop, this remnant of Tom's knack,
From ten years back.

 If yer thinking you'd like to meet Tom, you must think another thought.
If you offer to buy his art, you will learn he cant be bought.
Sensuous leaves with their folding curling lines carved like meandering capilaried vines,
On the porch of his closet-like cabin overlooking an emerald sea,
Down in Bolinas where he lives for practically free.
Where he'll now and again load his tools into his wheelbarrow and walk himself to work,
Chatting and prattling along the way with mary or paul or harry or kirk.

Ten thousand a year is sufficient for his needs,
His time is his own in a devotion to his creeds.
No banks, no debt, no credit, nor taxes due.
The notion of cars, phones, and email, he bids a diffident adieu.
Tom is a recluse, in this hermitage off the grid.
Where he's known for what he is and not what he did.
But he's my pal and an inspiration at that,
Unbeknownst to him, in all things dis n' dat.

   June 23, 2008
Charles' stand-up mirror #1,  designed and created back in the 80's as an early result of Tom's carving shown above.  It's this effect we'll look to in the #204 gates.  Creating distinct planes with the use of carved reliefs.

June 23, 2008
Nothing much has changed when joining an edge.  The Stanley #7 Joiners plane that belonged to my step-father's father's father. But not something dwelled upon, as there are dozens of such tools in the shop and still performing their job as they once did back in the late 19th century.

June 23, 2008
The two branches, or limbs.  We'll further the illusion in the coming days with the carved confluence of where the branches interconnect with the gate's stiles and rail. 

 June 23
Whackin it feels good.

  June 23
Creating the relief begins by scoring the line with a sharp carving knife.  Followed by opening up the scored line using the same knife.  And then the chisel, working away the stock in a gradual feathering. 

  June 23
This woodcarving business is best left to the almighty Zen,
The tapping chipping chiseling agin and agni and agin.
Hone and sharpen and sharpen and hone,
The tedious laborious zenness of a mental zone.

  June 23
With that in mind, I'm reminded a a recent gift from my friend Eric Johnson, who retires as a carpenter and takes up a career with the lost art of letter press printing.  An excerpt culled from a Cormac McCarthy novel, printed one letter at a time as a broadsheet.  One of those adages that hangs around, like footprints on the brain.

 June 25
To some this woodworking is a craft to behold,
A methodical science if truth be told.
The reverence of forethought and a studied exactitude,
With yet more thought to imprison the attitude.

Do away with the plans and those drawings you must set aside,
To trust the presumptions of an instinct decried.
The success of this effort is to all a nebulous thing,
They might groan and bemoan or your praises they may sing.

. . . . .

 June 28


Wrist watches and clocks and time cards gone away,
Accountants and bookkeepers and managers with minds of clay,
Missing the boat with their ephemerous calling,
Their columns of figures rising and falling.

Tell them, you must, of this meaningless platitude,
The quality of life is a blessing of gratitude.
He sings, he dances, he whistles in the wind,
To the language and rhythm misconstrued as a sin.

The work builds and grows at a pace unbeknownst to time,
Deafened by the distractions of a poignant rhyme.
Dr; Sues, Lewis Carroll, and Ogden Nash,
Dictating his work and his life like an impervious rash.

. . . .

So below we begin to see the growth of our secondary planes.  Having spent inordinate hours sketching trees as an art and architecture student, the lessons of perspective and vanishing scales return to dictate the separation from the primary and secondary levels.  This will be furthered when the gates are actually assembled and glued to a final position, followed only then by the remedial carving that will distinguish the limbs on their distinctive planes.  We would hope to see, from a distance, a sense of depth we see when actually viewing a tree; how the limbs and branches in the background are foreshadowed to those larger limbs in the foreground by the existence of size and shadow.  In a two-dimensional work, we'll create the illusion of shadows by carving reliefs at strategic points of confluence.

We are in the infancy.  We are incalculably lost to the ravages of logic and common sense.  Really, there is no plan.  No template.  There is only an aesthetic's apprenticeship for planes and dimensions and perspectives to be coupled with fundamentals of a 15-year apprenticeship completed 30+ years ago, to be coupled with a fondness for the gone-missing light-heartedness of E.B White and Ogden Nash and Lewis Carroll and Rudyard Kipling and Dr Sues.

 June 29, 2008

The mind as a muscle to stretch and flex,
Like a weightlifting muscleman pumping his pecs,
Cockamamied puzzles no one reads,
Rhyming little ditties as worthess as weeds.
Decades and decades and decades, in this idle pursuit,
Instinct to intuition to these pastimes bearing fruit.


. . . .

We fit the lower right gate with the first of the secondary limbs as a glimpse of what's to come.  But first we must mortise and assemble what we have in place.  Fixing these parameters with a defined and unchanging position before turning to what promises to be an encompassing phase of scrollwork. 

I've turned to Ipe for this.  A dark, dense, resistant species from Brazil almost impossible to find as a certified offering.  The vast vast majority of this currently popular wood is being harvested and exported without regard to the environment or the indigenous populations it impacts.  There is simply not enough manpower or resources to enforce the laws of an area so vast as the Amazon Basin, which has changed so dramatically since I was there in the mid-70's.  At that time, there was only a single partial dirt road being cut through the jungle known as the Trans-Amazon Highway.  Today a miasma of logging roads like spider webs, with a loss of the rainforest at a rate that boggles the mind.  Much of it driven by an American demand for products such as Ipe, impervious to how it was harvested or how those methods are impacting the largest rain forest in the world. 

So we went to some extremes to find a rare source of certified Ipe, costing about three times the going rate. 

 July 3, 2008

Mortising, gluing, clamping, assembling, and sanding,
So that we might arrive at the following landing.
A pair of strange and confounding gates,
Like a couple of wandering and wayward mates.
But hold on, as we're only half complete,
We can change it yet, cause it's wood and not concrete.

 July 3, 2008

With the various primary limbs set in place, we can now create the layers of an illusory depth.  Carving reliefs is a fairly simple process, beginning with the thin hard blade of a carving knife honed  every few minutes on a diamond stone.  Scoring the lines.

 July 3, 2008

This is followed by chiseling away the stock with the thin shavings of once again, a blade that is kept honed to a razor's edge. 

 July 3, 2008

 July 5, 2008
Mr Prowell prefers the sunlight to the florescents in the shop,
The California sunshne for twelve months non stop.
The colorless complexions of decades spent indoors,
The insescance for the florescents of, say, the Scottish Moors.
The decades of toiling deficiency from a lack of vitamin D,
In Oslo, Munich, New England and St Louiy.
This love of the natural light unencumbered by raftered claustrophobia,
This preference for simple sunlight with California over Manitobia.

He prefers working shirtless like a primate born in the woods,
Who hasnt brushed his hair since the election of Bush and his hoods.
He once bathed, but there are no witnesses under the sun,
To verify such an event since the battle of Bull Run.
That it was even a proper bath and not left naked in a raining shower,
Which would have, could have, may have, gone back to Carter's reigning power.
Or was it the reign of that insouciant Eisenhower?

 July 23, 2008
Mr. Prowell has grown bored with this white elephant,
Which to all things considered is wholly irrelevant.
This tree that's not a tree,
And the smaller tree that's rather hard to see.
The joinery is painful and the scrollwork what a headache,
The whole thing just an illusion and a slight-handed fake.
And what to do with the open spaces here and there,
Requiring a solution to this project for which I no longer care.
But now and again the lull of a mid-stream malaise,
Gives pause to an idea of better means and ways.

 August 7, 2008
Returning after an absence of weeks that were not spent, as you might imagine, laying by the pool.  I have been busy with the endless convolutions of these damnable tentacles and their ridiculous joineries and deciding along the way that this does not represent a project that ranks among my favorties.  Something better suited to a Dr Suess storybook. 

 August 7, 2008
Getting our first sense of perspective and how the various layerings succeed in providing the illusion of depth when viewed from a distance in the same way an impressionist painting changes its effect when viewed at close range and at a distance.  In this sense, we've succeeded. 

But the overall impression is stymied and convoluted and clearly intended for a patron who dances to a distinct tune.