Six Year Hard Labor
One of the most flattering commisions I ever received was to build chairs for the showroom at Lie-Nielsen. A while back, I was emailing with Deneb from Lie-Nielsen and he said that someone had spilled coffee in one of the chairs. Neither of us was surprised, but he asked if I could help fix it up. He said he’d bring it down or I could come up, either way, it didn’t happen for way too long. I needed for a day off so I decided to head up and grab the chairs. Plus, Aspen Golann is teaching in that area and Andy Glenn is nearby. Here’s what I found.
Yep, that’s coffee alright.
But there’s so much more to see! Being public seating is the ultimate weather test for furniture. It basically ages it at 10X. I recall hearing about Dave Sawyer’s chairs at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. It’s very cool that the museum lets you sit in the chairs and Dave’s chairs are famously comfortable, so the security guards love to park in them. The problem is that security guards have keys, lots of keys. They basically chewed up the seat like a rabid badger. The museum asked Dave if he’d like to fix it up and in true Dave fashion, he said “Nope”.
I was happy to hear that Tom didn’t want his chairs repainted or restored to their initial state, just “freshened up” as he put it. The C arm aged exactly as I’d expected, but the unpainted Comb back was a shocker…until I thought about it for a second. The chair is in near mint condition (I used butternut on both seats to give a bit of security against rabid badgers) but I didn’t plan on customers who had just played with bronze and steel planes caressing the knuckles on the Comb back!
It looks like the waiting room at a coal mine. I noticed the right hand is much darker than the left… will the descrimination ever end.
Heirloom quality…Lasts for Generations…Built to Last, in other words scratched…dented…worn away…weathered. Part of design is a sort of well planned aging. If the piece only looks good in perfect shape, it will constantly be diminished by living amongst humans, like the dent in my new stainless steel fridge. I don’t know when I did it, but it catches the light beautifully and I can’t avoid staring at it. It doesn’t enhance the fridge, it just proclaims that the surface is spoiled.
Watching furniture take on the signs of wear can be tough, after all, we spend so much time trying to get it to look just right. But fate and time takes it’s toll, with furniture and people. Patina is the euphemism for furniture, but I wouldn’t advise using it to describe people, no matter how accurate the description.
Tom keeps these pieces in his office now, I think the coffee was the last straw. I’ll try to cajole him into putting them back into hard service. Tom isn’t easily swayed, so I’m not going to hold my breath. I’m not only proud of the chairs performance, to me, the wear is a badge of honor. But I have to ask, “people, what the hell is in your pockets?!”
Or, like the aged face of an old man or woman, these are signs of character, dinstinction, and a life well-lived (or not). As a fan of Antiques Road Show, many are the times when someone gets a gentle scolding from the expert for having tried to "restore" an object. As an aside....As a dentist I used to kill myself trying to make things look beautiful and every single time people walked out of my office and chewed on my lovely art work.
I can understand the pain one feels after making something and then seeing it sullied, but I think it was either Fallonsbee or Schwarz in a blog post not long ago who talked about a beautiful cabinet made by a well known woodworker, who drove a nail into the bottom of it. The woodworker's reason for doing so was to say nothing is perfect. All that being said, if I bought one of your chairs for what it was worth, it would be sitting behind glass.