“I appreciate what George is trying to do with his column. His heart’s in the right place. But it’s like pushing water uphill with woodworkers.”
— Anonymous
George Walker’s “Design Matters” column in Popular Woodworking Magazine is one of the publication’s most polarizing. It’s not “love it or hate it” (read “Arts & Mysteries” for that). Instead, it’s more like you “get it or don’t get it.”
For many woodworkers learning to design furniture is as important a skill as learning to accurately sex a fruit fly. They see no need, especially with all the plans out there, beckoning to be built, luring you in with their come-hither cutting lists and scale drawings.
Other woodworkers want to learn the “assembly language” of good design – the architecture of a balanced composition. Like the pivotal scene in “The Matrix,” they want to see the ones and zeros – the straight lines and curves – that are used to create the grand illusion of furniture.
As I’m writing this blog entry, George and Jim Tolpin are finishing up work on a new book for Lost Art Press tentatively titled “By Hand & Eye,” which seeks to decode the pre-Industrial concepts of design and translate them into something we can use and will use in the shop.
Today I got a small glimpse of the work that Jim and George are doing when George made a short presentation on drawing curves at the Lie-Nielsen Hand Tool Event at Popular Woodworking Magazine.
He showed us a simple thing. He drew a circle. Then he adjusted his compasses and drew one-quarter of a circle inside that circle along the diameter. He readjusted and drew one-sixth of a circle along the same chord.
Though the final result looked a bit like a laughing PacMan, the individual curves were powerful stuff. If you had even a passing familiarity with furniture you would recognize them. Then George held up drawings of pediments and photographs of well-designed furniture and began pointing out these curves in the work. He showed how cabriole legs could be broken down into just a series of curves and straight lines.
It was, all in all, an extremely cool lesson.
I can’t wait to read the book when the draft is delivered to my desk in June (right George and Jim?).
— Christopher Schwarz