THE WISDOM OF OUR HANDS
Finding Pleasure with Friends Excerpt from Chapter 6
A guide to living fully and humanely by learning the wisdom of authentic manual work. Author: Doug Stowe Publisher: Linden Publishing Release Date: March 22, 2022 Price: $16.99
The people who commission work from craftsmen when they have so many choices to do otherwise are very special. There have been many times when I’ve been asked by someone to make something they’d not seen before and that I’d not made before, yet they’ve approached me with faith that I would deliver something to enrich their home and their lives… all while they could have instead gone to a furniture store and had something delivered to do the same thing in the same day. I can tell you exactly what it means to the growth of an individual craftsman to have such faith placed in him or her, and through that to find a meaningful life. The implications on a personal level are enormous. Later, I’ll discuss what meaning that kind of relationship has within communities and within human culture.
Earlier in the book, I mention that trees have their own stories to tell – where there’s a knot there had been a branch and all that. What is our story to tell? Years ago, I attended an opening at a museum in which an artist gave a brief lecture on her work. I had walked through the exhibit before the lecture, trying to make sense of her creations. After her description of process and her motives for creating them, she asked us if the words about her work help any of us to make sense of what we’ve seen. And, of course, that was the case.
If you were writing a novel, would you first develop a plot line that would help you keep on course and that, you would hope, your readers could follow? If you think of craft as being a form of narrative, can that help you to develop a plot? And does it raise questions? What is that you’re trying to say? Is it meaningful to you, and do you think it will be meaningful to others? Having a story line that’s meaningful may help in developing work that says something more than “I did it!” – even though “I did it” is often enough. In fact, knowing that the story line or plot of what you want to tell through your work will help to solidify what others recognize as your distinctive style.
In that story line, of course, authenticity matters. At the Nelson-atkins Museum of Art, I watched an artist in a video go to work with a mallet and carving gouge on wood, crafting her large sculptural objects on display nearby and out in the museum yard. Then I went closer to examine the artist’s work. Being a woodworker, I know what tools do and the marks they leave on wood. Discovering that there were no gouge marks, only the markings of a reciprocating saw, left me disappointed. This is not to suggest that the reciprocating saw was not a suitable tool for an artist’s creations, but that honesty and authenticity in how you present your work is also important. Had the artist known that a woodworker familiar with tools would be examining her work, she might have actually used the gouge shown in the video at least some part of it, or the video she might have been less deceptive about her work.
At best, each of us has our own
story to tell. It helps to understand your audience. Who are you making for, and what message do you want to deliver, and is your work honest to your intent? These are the kinds of questions you begin to ask when your hands are busy and the skills of your hands have liberated your mind for its deliberations. So, think. What is the story you want your work to tell?
In my own case, I began with a couple themes that were somewhat related to each other. One was a desire to illustrate how things were made; the other was a desire to awaken folks to the beauty and value of Arkansas’s native woods. These themes helped shape my relationship to my customers. I had noticed some were curious about how my inlays on my box were made. Even after I attempted to explain the simple process to them, most folks did not easily understand. I had always been curious about how thing were made, and because of my own curiosity, I was particularly drawn to types of joinery that could be seen and understood. So I chose to use more traditional joinery techniques, which my customers could immediately understand, visibly and proudly in my work. At the same time I chose to use the Ozark Mountains hardwoods I’d come to appreciate and love in their natural colors and with the reverence I’d learned they deserve. I preferred clear finishes that showed the more natural colors of the various woods, and I showed a preference for wide materials over stock sawn and glued into strips. So, my use of visible joinery techniques and reverence for wood became the narrative of my early work.
Sticking to this narrative, I began to build a body of work, including both my small inlaid boxes and other things that were recognizable to others because they were authentic to my own thoughts and objectives.
As your hands develop skills, think about the story you and they can tell. Develop your own story line. Or borrow mine if you like. The story of our humanity is a shared one, and we gain strength in our telling of it. My own story will not be diminished by your telling it too.