Constructing Art: A Renewed Focus

Taunton Press recently released a limited edition reprint of the first edition of Fine Woodworking magazine first published in 1975. The magazine was originally devoted to advanced woodworkers and woodworking as fine art. I thought it might be interesting to purchase this edition because my own craft and organ building workshop practice had grown out of an era that began during this time when the use of wood as a sculptural material was far more used in practice than it probably is now.

The first edition reprint reminded me of that time when large cast iron ruled. A workshop was considered no more than a table saw, band saw, jointer, and planer with possibly a router, drill, and sander thrown in. Hand tools such as a good set of chisels along with a plane or two completed the inventory.

Someone more research oriented than I am should write a better history, but after some time, the home improvement scene hit, and tool makers began concentrating their design and product efforts on this. A much wider array of innovative cordless, benchtop, and job-site tools can now populate a workshop space, and I have chosen to replace a lot of cast iron in the current manifestation of my workshop layout with this type of tool design.

I admit that until now, I have spent more effort here in Minnesota on technique, technology, and methods, and as a result, far less on actual design and construction much to the absence of a portfolio. I recently began to feel in fact a broken continuity to the work I did before as a pipe organ builder, and so have taken a back-to-basics approach, and have begun to study basic fundamentals and concepts of visual art.

Art does not have to be ironic, or a statement of disenfranchisement, or even playful or whimsical as is often thought. A functional object can make its own statement without being any of that, and still incorporate fundamental concepts of visual design to enhance its intended function. That will be my initial direction I think, to understand and appreciate the fundamentals of visual design and how those drive the creation of a work as a unique personal expression or experience, and by doing that, build objects that one can bond with beyond the simple consumer experience that currently defines most forms of ownership today.

The Adaptive Workshop

I wrote in my last post about the direction my workshop is heading in towards one that features new innovations in technology and equipment rather than one given over to historic methods. I just finished reading an article in the International Society of Organbuilders quarterly journal about the restoration of a Renaissance pipe organ in France. Of course the original instrument was constructed without the use of any powered equipment, but it appears that hand tool methods were used in much of the rebuild process also.

I have always wanted to someday learn and employ hand tools the way woodworkers did in the past, but then it looks like my workshop heads in the other direction. I am reminded of something the German organ builder Gerhard Brunzema once said to me when I asked him why he didn't build instruments more directly in the historic style. He said that since he lived and worked in our time, it would make sense for him to build organs for our time, and not build in the past.

I am reminded once again of this, and therefore am more content at the direction that my workshop and the work that I produce within that shop is taking. Perhaps someone will look at my work a hundred years from now, judge it as something built during its time, and hopefully find validity in that.

More than just modern tools though, I also employ a number of them on tool stands rather than workbenches. Tool stands are usually associated with, and really designed for use on, the job-site rather than in an off-site workshop. My shop is actually space constrained relative to the number of tools I use to accomplish the growing number of methods I now use in my work. I therefore use portable tool stands to set up an occasional job-site within my workshop based on some particular process. The tool stands allow quick set up so that my workshop is able to adapt quickly to some operation, and then adapt back again to another configuration depending on the particular course of a project.