My Arrowmont Box

In September, I spent a week at the Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. Our instructor for the workshop, "Personal Reliquaries and Story Boxes" was sculptor and furniture maker Peter Dellert. The hours were long and the pace was challenging, especially for me, who came with far less developed skills than the other students, not to mention the teacher.

Our challenge was to make a cabinet, a simple hinged box that might stow items of personal significance. Several of us worked with live edge material. In my case, looking at the material on hand, I decided to invert the edges, pulling their asymmetry to the inside.


This is the box in place. I is about 20 inches high and 11 wide, closed

 

My note to Peter Dellert, our instructor:

Thanks again, Peter, for a memorable week. For me, it was a demanding, engaging, and illuminating one. It was not without personal frustration, even shame at times, but such emotions are probably required for deep learning. 

The technical content was just immensely valuable. New to me were the milling processes and working with hinges. The use of finishes, metal patinae, and gilding and so many more, were an unexpected plus. Working at last with Arrowmont’s powerful, professional tools made me reconsider the definition of “shop”, a term I had wrongly applied to my modest workspace back home in my garage. Perhaps most useful of all the skills I learned was your design-build process( draw, mark, test, execute, etc.). It is sequential and efficient, while not totally constraining a free play of ideas.

But being a craftsman/ artist seems to call for certain other behaviors or qualities that go beyond sheer know-how. These relate to what one values, to their capacity for work and control of their emotions. I think these must be the deep skills artists have to master and practice forever. This week has revealed that I would do well to master them myself. They happened to fall, as I thought about them onto my feedback form neatly into five P’s. For what it’s worth, here they are, each with an example from many I could cite from this week:

Planning  

(example: making full-size drawings before picking up the tools.)

Process

(join, then plane; use successive grades of abrasive when sanding, etc.)

Precision

(look for 32nds, not just 16ths, FEEL for thousandths)

Presence

(stay in the moment, especially when leaning over a power tool)

Patience

( don’t panic, and if you must, take a step back, etc.)

Books: it occures to me that Robert Persig’s novel, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance perfectly embodies a lot of this value set. More recently, Matthew Crawford’s essay, Shopcraft as Soulcraft covered some of the same ground. Great stuff, right up your alley. Anywayyyy.... all the best to you and thanks again for sharing, not just your skills, but your work and life stories with us.