Making More of Design
In the great pantheon of woodworkers, from Nakashima and Krenov to contemporaries such as Brian Boggs and David Upfill-Brown, you consistently find most belong to a particular type of woodworker, which we’ve come to refer to as a ‘designer maker’. This captures the essence of what has drawn me into the field. You’re both – you design, and you make.
And yet when woodworkers come to both the study and practice of their craft, their efforts lie almost exclusively on the maker side of the split.
When you think of a Maloof chair or a Krenov cabinet – it isn’t purely the workmanship you are thinking of. It is the lines of the piece, the relationship between the parts, a unifying language in the way parts meet or the way a particular joint has been expressed. It is the relationship between the case of a Krenov cabinet and its legs. It’s his contemplative compositions of the interior of the cases. It is the disjunct between Nakashima’s live edge top with his considered, highly orthogonal
