The Artisan’s Place in Today’s World

Defining an Artisan

My use of the term artisan requires an explanation. The common understanding of the word is a highly competent craftsperson—that is, someone who is skilled at making things, usually by hand. (The term by hand has a lot of baggage and can be at times disingenuous, as I will discuss later.) This understanding of artisan precludes the attribute of artist. But I want to take a step back to the root word of artisan—which is art. My definition of artisan is someone who is not only highly skilled at making, but also at designing.

Today’s artisans do not limit themselves to simply replicating things. Many have a strong desire to be truly creative. The 1970s model that I knew, in which there was a distinct separation between designer and maker, is no longer universally accepted. Today an increasing number of people yearn for a livelihood that serves as an outlet for their creativity and self-expression. For these artisans, it’s no longer sufficient to just design or to just make. It is not one or the other; it is one and the same. It is hands on, and a very personal approach. It is in essence the life of an artist that makes things. Twentieth-century furnituremakers Sam Maloof and James Krenov both worked in this vein.

Being an artisan of any kind is a commitment fueled by passion. It is a lifestyle. But it is a lifestyle that is often in opposition to the tide. The lure of a good living beckons from the corporate world, while going it on your own is fraught with uncertainty. The question becomes, does a solitary maker of things have a viable path forward that contributes in a positive way yet offers fulfillment and a livable income?

The Maker Movement

The growing maker movement indicates there is interest from both people who want to make things and people who want to buy those things. It is an incredibly diverse group. Some makers are producing stuff of the highest order—imaginative works in which the aesthetics and quality go hand in hand. While at the same time others are fabricating tasteless, poorly made objects. Let’s hope some of these latter makers are going through a process of learning and improving. My discussion here concerns the former, or at least those who strive to emulate the former.

The current maker movement has much in common with the Arts and Crafts movement from the early twentieth century. Back then, artisans were motivated by the steady march of industrialization and the advancement of impersonal products. In our present day, makers are reacting to the virtual world. They yearn for something real—something they can put their hands on and feel, something that is tactile—as opposed to the computer-generated world that exists behind a curtain of zeros and ones.

Many of my woodworking students make a comfortable livelihood in technology. They often tell me that making serves as a therapy of sorts. While they enjoy their careers (the tech world is full of opportunities to be creative), woodworking provides a balance. They find pleasure in using their hands to create something in the real world.

While technology and industry can produce stuff of superior quality, they frequently produce things that are inferior and disposable. The trend is to let quality take a back seat to profits. This is prevalent in many industrially made products—not just furniture. Corporations buy up companies that had once possessed pride in their products and then shift the focus to profits. Routers, for instance, that once were solidly built and reliable now have cheap plastic parts that fall off (a long-standing peeve of mine!).

A reliable, honest product is not always at the forefront of business these days. But many in the maker movement seek a balance between profits and integrity. To them, profits are essential, but pride in a job well done has value as well.

Even when technology lives up to its promise and produces things of quality, there is something missing in these things—the small random errors and variations that are akin to the human hand at work. Those small imperfections are a connection between the user and another human being, whether the maker created the object last week or a thousand years ago. I dread the day when technology attempts to mimic the human hand at work by programming irregularities—or, worse, when artificial intelligence endeavors to produce original art by reducing human emotions to an equation. I hope that the need to have things in our lives that connect us to other human beings never dies.

In my work the human hand can be seen in the softening of an edge or corner, or the silk-like pillowing of an end-grained surface. Or it’s the little pull back of the inside corners (done with a rasp) of a finger joint (see image 1-1). Sometimes it’s the final hand shaping of a hand pull or my strap detail.

Handmade (or Not)

There has been a focus over the past several years on the use of hand tools alone—that is, on working in a shop where the only things that plug into the wall are the lights. I admire this push to revive old, almost forgotten skills. I hope that that knowledge never fades away. But my purpose in this book is to lay out a path for the contemporary artisan furnituremaker—one who makes a sustainable living in our current, ever-changing environment. And though there are a rarefied few who can make it by using only hand tools, for most of you that is not a viable path.

Given the reality of today, I would think most would agree the label handmade should be reserved for those who use entirely hand tools from raw lumber forward. But that is most often not the case. Work that involves jointers, planers, bandsaws, and table saws are often proclaimed to be handmade as well. The terms handmade and Old World craftsmanship get a lot of usage when selling furniture. This is especially so with online craft markets. While I have no intention of degrading handmade (quite the opposite; I respect those who truly do things by hand), I do feel it is a term that has been used too freely and to some extent overly romanticized.

In addition, the term handmade has been abused through clever advertising, rendering it of little practical use. Handmade conjures up an image of a furnituremaker at their bench with their hand plane and a pile of shavings. I am sure most of you have seen such ads with softly lit, oversaturated photos of an old guy with a beard—who sometimes appears to be ill at ease with a tool in his hand. The point is, the term handmade has been abused.

This abuse is not a new thing. Back in the 1980s, I worked for Harry Lunstead Designs (HLD). Harry was a well-known designer of office furniture in Seattle. I labored in the custom department, making, for the most part, high-end conference tables. While Harry was alive, the furniture was built with integrity and great sensitivity to aesthetics. I was disciplined that doing it right was the highest priority. HLD is where I first learned to use grain with forethought and sensitivity. Thank you, Harry!

While Harry’s furniture had integrity, I would not classify it as handmade. Sure, our department made some details by hand, but we employed a lot of industrial machinery as well. At its peak, HLD employed more than two hundred people on the floor. We imported the latest, greatest, biggest manufacturing equipment from Europe. Most of the workers were engaged in high production but could not be called furnituremakers; they were in fact simply machine operators.

HLD salespeople had a different take. They would regularly give potential clients the tour of the shop, and I would often listen in as I worked. I think there must have been a reward for the salesperson who could use the term Old World craftsmanship the most times while keeping a straight face. They could have made an honest argument for HLD’s high standards, but in my mind Old World craftsmanship invoked something else entirely.

They may have been responding to the general belief that work of the distant past was of a much higher quality than that of today. While I do not deny there may be some truth to this, it is not entirely so. To be sure, much of the surviving work from long ago is well made. But if you think about it, furniture that was produced using inferior material and methods likely did not make it to the present day. “Survival of the fittest” eliminated much of the shoddy furniture, and we get a somewhat distorted view of what came before us. Imagine a hundred years in the future—how much IKEA furniture will survive?

The salespeople may also have been acknowledging that when most people think of handmade, they imagine finely honed skills and unrivaled attention to detail. But I would argue that the handmade does not have absolute rights to these things. That is not to say that machine work is always done with a high degree of skill and attention. Shoddy work can be done by hand as well as by machine.

Workmanship of the Imagination

David Pye, in his 1968 book The Nature and Art of Workmanship, has a fascinating discussion on handmade. He uses the terms workmanship of certainty and workmanship of risk. People associate the workmanship of risk with the handmade, the hand being more at risk to make a bad move and spoil the work. The workmanship of certainty is associated with power tools and machine work, which are generally perceived to have replaced the need for skill. Pye rightfully argues that that these assumptions are not necessarily true. He points out that a dentist with a motorized drill is highly skilled and is engaged in work that is very much at risk.

I would add that much of the machine work people do requires advanced skills and is also at risk of mistakes and errors. Granted, machine errors do not bear the mark of the human hand, as would the slip of a handheld tool. But they are human errors, nonetheless. Machines require skills to operate—some more so than others and often much different types of skills than required by hand tools. We have big industrial machines, like edge banders; once set up, it’s merely a matter of feeding material into them and monitoring them for malfunctions. While intimate knowledge of their setup is required, the results are for the most part very predictable. The hand is not actively involved in the actual work. There is little or no creativity involved in using them. There is no chance for a slip of the hand to spoil the work. It is for the most part a workmanship of certainty.

Another tool with predictable results is the computer numerical control (CNC) machine. Once properly set up and programmed, it represents the workmanship of certainty. If all the chances of human error (from poor registration to improper hold down to bad tool path) have been accounted for, the CNC is capable of endlessly producing perfect parts. It can represent the workmanship of certainty taken to the nth degree, endlessly repeating cuts with extraordinary precision.

While the CNC has zero chance of imparting the mark of the human hand, it presents enormous potential for creativity. In the hands of a highly creative person, it represents the ultimate workmanship of the imagination. It allows an artisan to dream big and remove previous impediments to construction. Its potential is immense. If you can dream it, it can cut it out!

The CNC does, however, require exacting technical expertise that, at least for me, can be a bit uninspiring and feel somewhat removed from creativity. For me, mastering technology such as computer-aided design (CAD) and computer-aided manufacturing (CAM)—tools needed to operate a CNC—is a hill to climb. The payoff, though, is truly immense and worth any impediments along the way.

Humanizing the Machine

Much of our negative feelings about machines come from the industrial world, where the division of labor is a primary contributor to the so-called dehumanization of the machine. When engaged in high-production furnituremaking, an operator can spend a few minutes setting things up and then hours feeding parts. Standing at one end of a machine and repetitively making the same movements is mind numbing. Often an operator is limited to running one machine only and has very little, if any, personal input on the resulting product. Given their limited involvement in the process, the operator would not be able to build the piece of furniture from the beginning to the end. They are unlikely to feel truly engaged, and their labor is dehumanizing.

When I first started woodworking in the 1970s, I read a letter to the editor in a British magazine. The writer lamented that the only skill required in modern-day woodworking was to avoid a gory accident. They may have been highly skilled with hand tools and saw the up-and-coming younger generation as taking shortcuts that bypassed what had previously been essential knowledge and skill.

I am not entirely without sympathy to this perspective. I lament the fact that younger woodworkers often have no reference to how it was before the CNC machine. But I imagine that if that lamenting writer were confronted by someone from a hundred years prior, they would be on the receiving end of the rant. The world moves on whether you like it or not. I sincerely hope that hand-tool skills never die out, that that knowledge continues to be passed down. But to be viable you need to compete in the environment you are given. That environment is by no means all bad—there is plenty to be excited about and celebrate.

C. R. Ashbee, a central figure in the English Arts and Crafts movement, said it well in 1901: “We do not reject the machine, we welcome it. But we desire to see it mastered in industry, and not as it is at present, to remain the master.” Machines are not inherently bad. They are what you make of them. They can in fact be the source of much creativity. The issue becomes how an artisan furnituremaker uses them to carve out a path that has meaning, one that is both practical and fulfilling, one that addresses the world as they find it today. The answer will not be the same for everyone and will no doubt evolve with time.

If you are merely feeding parts into machines, they become degrading. However, if you use them as tools in a creative endeavor, you become the master, and they become a means of self-expression. Smaller shop machines—such as the jointer, table saw, handheld router, and shaper—exist as opportunities for creative engagement. Many of these machines require significant skill to operate and offer a tactile connection to the human hand.

I worked with Roy Weimer, a master of the jointer, many years ago. I was in awe of his skill with the machine. He could flatten boards that most of us would deem impossible. If given a pile of table legs to flatten and square, the resulting stack was dead flat—both on the top and the side. This may not sound like a big deal, but the next time you have flattened a stack of parts, place a straight edge on it and see for yourself.

For me, the jointer has a tactile quality. When I run a board across a well-tuned one, I can feel it in my hands. There is something satisfying in flattening a wide board and the vacuum that pulls back when lifting it from the outfeed table. The jointer entails both strategy and skill. Give me a pile of boards to flatten and I am happy for hours.

The table saw and the shaper can also actively engage your mind. Jig and fixture making are highly creative ventures, and both these machines are rife with opportunity to exercise the imagination. Many other power tools and machines in the woodshop engage the mind and require great skill in their operation. While they may not leave the mark of hand tools along the way, they are by no means dehumanizing.

Thinking Back, Looking Forward

In 1907, Gustav Stickley wrote the following in “The Use and Abuse of Machinery, and Its Relation to the Arts and Crafts”:

It should be the privilege of every worker to take advantage of all the improved methods of working that relieve him from the tedium and fatigue of purely mechanical toil, for by this means he gains leisure for the thought necessary to working out his designs, and for the finer touches that the hand alone can give. So long as he remains master of his machinery it will serve him well, and his power of artistic expression will be freed rather than stifled by turning over to it work it is meant to do.

If only Stickley and Ashbee could have a conversation concerning today’s mastery of machines and artistic expression. Would our greater use of machinery be too much for them? Would they see the CNC as a means of artistic expression? How much machine work would they be comfortable with? And if only a select few of us could have the same conversation with artisan furnituremakers a hundred years in the future. How would that discussion differ?

I believe there would be a mix of both common ground and disagreement. We would find consensus on several principles. Quality of work and aesthetics are of equal importance. It is the artisan’s vision that drives the work. The maker has creative control over the process. The division of labor should be kept to a minimum. The work must leave the mark of the human hand in some way.

The disagreement would be variations in the acceptance of each of these principles. To be sure, I would find this disagreement from many present-day furnituremakers as well. I do hope that we would agree on the basic principles, though, and the debate would be only one of degrees of balance.

My guess is that our forebears would be less likely to assign all the joinery to a machine than I would. Our distant successors may well assign even more of the work to the machine. It is not a stretch of the imagination to visualize a CNC router (or whatever succeeds them) being programmed to replicate the hand pillowing of an end-grain surface or the varied subtle shapes I like to bestow on my ribbon pull. The delicate differences imparted by hand work would just be a matter of coding multiple varied tool paths (assuming tool paths are still a thing).

Our successors may swap one human attribute for another. They may be more inclined to rely upon the mark left by the human imagination, rather than the mark left by the human hand, to reach out and connect to their distant successors. They may be most influenced by the emotions that speak to us via shapes and proportions and balance or a mixture thereof. Once machines can duplicate every nuanced move the human hand can make, artisans might focus on the realm of the imagination. I hope that some vestige of interaction with the hand is still a part of that distant work.

In an ever-more-technical society that frequently rewards hype over integrity, the aspiring artisan furnituremaker has a difficult path to follow. Here’s hoping that this book will be of help. If you are like me, the creative part of woodworking drove you to this career in the first place. Creativity is still, after fifty years, what excites me the most!

There are less obvious ways to group as well. Notice in my Fremont Dresser the cloudlifted arched rail. This arrangement organizes seven drawers into two basic groups and in doing so follows Varnum’s rule of two horizontal divisions of the primary mass.

Other groupings can be seen in the work of Charles Greene, who with his brother Henry formed the design firm Greene and Greene. I will study their work in greater detail in later chapters. For now, I will use two examples to further study the primary mass and its divisions.

This first example is the built-in bookcase from Greene and Greene’s Thorsen House (image 3-13). Here Charles uses divisions within divisions. The initial viewing gives us a rectangular primary mass. The primary mass is then prominently divided into two horizontal sections, with the drawers being one section and the doors being the other. The doors (upper section) are dominant.

There is a lot more going on here though. Don’t read through this section if you are rushed for time. There is a lot to take in and I will be heading down a rabbit hole of sorts that takes a few twists and bends. So, take it slow and stay with me.

The vertical divisions of the primary mass comply with Varnum’s rule for more than three divisions in that they are all the same width. Now look a little closer at the difference between the upper and lower sections. There are six upper divisions but only four lower divisions. Except in the very center, the lines of the upper and lower division do not line up. This not only breaks up monotony of a large surface but also serves to separate the two sections visually. The dominance is clearly in the upper section (image 3-14).

Now look at something that is a little more nuanced. Consider the center point where the upper and lower sections line up. It is marked by a common division line that divides the primary mass into two equal vertical sections. This halving is not screaming for your attention. It is merely suggested, probably not something that you were consciously aware of. But it is nonetheless there, and one way or another your eye perceives, at least in a subtle way, the two equal vertical divisions of the overall primary mass (image 3-15).

As you progress down the hierarchical order, take each subsection and treat it as if it were an individual primary mass. In other words, with every step down, consider each new section on its own merit. Keeping in mind the two major vertical divisions of the primary mass, isolate one of those sections and have a look. First observe the lower section, which consists of two equal drawers and follows the rules for two divisions of the primary mass (image 3-16).

Now move to the upper section. There is a lot to break down here so let’s start with the basic stuff and then move our way down. Here you see three major vertical divisions (doors)—all equal. Now, you may remember Varnum states that for three vertical divisions