A Maker's Life
Retrospective From a Bird's-Eye View
In 1974, I set up a shop and began learning woodcraft by taking commissions for furniture and other custom woodwork. I had no clear idea what I was doing, but I was sure I needed to be making things I could touch, use, and walk around.
It took six years to reach a level of proficiency in design and craft that told me style and skill were coming together into original forms. I staged my first gallery show of furniture in 1980.
To create anything, you have to expose yourself. If it feels safe and secure, you are missing something, and you’ll feel it. The likelihood of failure is ally more than enemy. The unexpected creativity it takes to repair mistakes can and will lead to breakthroughs of understanding and vision that reveal the unimaginable. It’s yourself you are making as you face the risks and carry through.
Sometimes you need to break the spell of patterns you have engaged that appear to be successful or good enough. It can seem as if life is a hunt for peace and security, but finding yourself in the grip of patterns that looked good from afar can feel like a cage once you get there. After twelve years of furniture making, I was feeling pretty good about my skills, but hollow in a way I couldn’t explain.
In 1986, saying yes to a crazy idea, my wife and I put our two businesses and our house in the hands of friends, sold our vehicles for travel expenses, and set out with our two young daughters for a year in New Zealand.
In Christchurch, I found and connected with L’Etacq School of Fine Woodworking and was able to use the shop there. The powerful inspiration of Maori artifacts that were touring the country at that time pushed me to step out of the utilitarian forms of furniture and make my first sculptures.
The ‘reset’ of a year in New Zealand from 1986-87 initiated far more change than I could have imagined. Poetry and writing soon became tools for expression and exploration. Words wove threads around and through everything, answering questions and questioning answers.
During this period, I finished my undergrad degree and earned an MFA in creative writing and literature.
There may be nothing that can make you feel more vulnerable than putting thoughts on paper—particularly when you are honest and risk exploring perceptions that reveal and challenge your accepted beliefs. If you let it, writing and poetry can show you who you are.
When we were returning from New Zealand in 1987, I had sidetracked for a week in Bali. The ubiquitous carven images of deities and devil-like creatures, beautiful and frightening at once, fascinated me. I began to see that when we use artistic expression to place interior demons into iconic forms, we can recognize and honor them, and become more aware of when they are messing with us.
Back in the U.S., I began to make that insight a personal practice when I noticed that a subtle feeling of contempt or disdain had a way of working on me. I drew faces that expressed that feeling, then tried carving a few in wood. After a couple of tries, I came up with a sneering face that felt accurate. I made it into a shrine that still hangs on the wall by my studio door.
Fifteen years later, the same impulse, blended together with realizations from writing and poetry, led me to a series of larger sculptures I called ‘tension traps.’ These pieces embody narratives from my life, and touch on universal stories that explore unexamined anxieties.
As you move through middle age, there’s a lot of living available for review. It’s your own unique material, gifts you can spend the rest of your life opening. When you find yourself parroting copied beliefs or repeating stressful patterns, it may be time to focus on uncovering your own unique wisdom and putting it into practice.
By 2003, I was back in the shop, making furniture again as the deep explorations of poetry and introspection settled in with the chisels and saws, reacquainting me with the techniques of craft, infusing woodwork with a new curiosity for the harmonies and integrity of form.
Between commissions, I was drawn into a pattern of creation that relied on proceeding without a plan, without a preconceived outcome, driven by intrigue, intuition, and curiosity.
The concept of mistake is muted when you’re off-trail anyway. You are traveling to find out where you’re going, so all you can do is proceed. Trust in yourself and in your materials will support you. You’ve become a traveler rather than a tourist—surprise and joy surface in the unexpected forms that emerge.
The same processes that led to the wooden abstracts naturally flowed over into metal work when I learned to weld. The first of what became the Ring Dance series had that same exploratory collaboration with the materials that led to a series of forms I could not have imagined in advance.
This sort of chaotic interaction with the materials and processes can be mentally challenging because the mind becomes concerned that, without a plan, how will you know if what you’re doing is right? Or if it will lead to something that holds an enduring intrigue.
