Giving a Second Life to Trees

By Wolf Von Eckardt

The popularity of handcrafted wood furniture is booming

The first impulse is to touch. People like to feel the sensuous smoothness of hand-worked wood and trace the grain with their fingers. Handmade wood furniture, says George Nakashima, 77, the foremost master of the craft, "seems the second life of a tree."

Nakashima and a growing number of followers enhance this second life by working with, nature rather than imposing willful shapes, let alone metal, paint or varnish on their material. They carve the natural color, grain, burls and organic forms of selected wood into useful and, with luck, beautiful objects--such as stools, tables, cabinets, desks, lamps and beds.

Interest in handmade furniture has developed into what Paul J. Smith, director of the American Craft Museum in New York City, calls "a cultural phenomenon." There are at least 5,000 first-class wood-furniture makers in workshops scattered from Alta Loma, Calif., to New Gloucester, Me. Young professionals, who once furnished their first home with store-bought Danish modern, now buy one-of-a-kind pieces in art galleries or directly from the artisans. They may pay as little as $60 for a stool and more than $5,000 for a large table from a master like Nakashima. For many purchasers, handmade furniture, augmented by hand-woven fabrics and carpeting, provides a welcome alternative to the sort of homes that look more suited to either the wearing of powdered wigs or the hosting of group therapy sessions.

The furniturewrights are often people who have left other, more remunerative occupations after discovering a special satisfaction in creative carpentry. Sam Maloof, 66, of Alta Loma, one of the best of them, was a graphic artist before he took up chisel and plane. Glen Gordon, 39, of Chicago, dropped out of the University of California at Berkeley and wrote poetry. Phyllis Bankier, 35, of Milwaukee was a schoolteacher. "Most independent craftsmen put in far more hours than people employed by someone else," says Kenneth Strickland, 32, who teaches woodworking and furniture design at the State University of New York at Purchase and is president of the newly organized Society of American Woodworkers. The society has some 200 active members and a mailing list of about 4,000. Says Nakashima, a former architect: "The large number of young people, many of them college graduates, who want to do truly fine work is astonishing. Perhaps this is a backlash to industrialism and commercialism."

Born in Spokane, Wash., Nakashima looks as plain and sturdy as the untreated boards of rare wood in his lumber sheds in New Hope, Pa. Trained in International Style architecture, Nakashima went to Japan in 1934 "to find and touch the creative roots of tradition," as he puts it in his recently published The Soul of a Tree: A Woodworker's Reflections (Kodansha International; $52). But after seven contemplative years in the Far East, he felt "an instinctive resistance to withdrawing from life." He returned to the U.S. and eventually set up shop in the rolling woods of eastern Pennsylvania.

The work that has emerged from his small monastic enclave is the opposite of modern metal or glossy wood furniture. Nakashima involves himself totally, from the selection and first rough cutting of the logs to the final caress of the sandpaper. "There are a thousand intricacies and a thousand decisions," he says. "An old tree is unpredictable. It is a stirring moment when out of an inert mass drawn from nature, we set out to produce an object never before seen, an object that is useful, but with a lyric quality."

Nakashima's forms follow nature. His famous coffee tables are made of planks sliced from the trunk or root systems of such trees as the redwood or Eng lish walnut. Their natural configuration remains unchanged. So do natural breaks in the wood, which Nakashima holds to gether with small pieces of wood shaped like butterflies.

Says Danish-born Craftsman Tage Frid, 67, of Foster, R.I.: "Furniture building should be very clear, very straightforward. A chair should say, 'Come and sit here,' and it should fit you in any position you want to sit." Thomas Moser, 47, a onetime college professor who runs a furniture workshop in a former Grange hall in New Gloucester, shuns ornament -- the joints in his furniture are the only decorative elements. Moser works mostly in red-hued cherry. He says, "It's stable and tools well. You can sand it to a beautiful polish." Moser never uses stains.

But there are novelty seekers whose work resembles sculpture more than furniture. Leading them is Vladimir Kagan, 55, many of whose sofas, desks, chairs and bedroom furnishings are custom-made with Plexiglas, marble, bronze, leather, lacquer or textiles. Kagan's work lacks the devout simplicity of pure crafts manship and often looks as though it had been swiped from the set of Fellini's La Dolce Vita.

Still another approach falls into the whimsical or even bizarre category, such as Judy Kensley McKie's glass-topped tables supported by attenuated, Giacometti-like mahogany dogs. McKie, 38, of Cambridgeport, Mass., sold one of her $3,600 doggy tables to Joan Mondale for the vice-presidential mansion in Washington, B.C. Alan Siegel, 43, of Lake Hill, N.Y., recently exhibited a bent poplar chair that looks, he suggests, like "a smiling bandit." Other well-known "fun" pieces include a table by Wendell Castle, 50, of Scottsville, N.Y., with a carved wood hat and briefcase.

By contrast, the work of former Painter Peter Danko, 33, of Alexandria, Va., is an advance along the simple path cut by Nakashima. Danko's furniture represents an intriguing blend of the sculptural and the functional, with a healthy respect for the natural qualities of the wood. More over, pieces like the Danko Chair are light in weight and appearance and thus well suited to small apartments. With delight ful ingenuity, Danko is experimenting with folding chairs of molded plywood. One of the plies is a bendable, plastic material, so the chair folds without metal hinges.

For craftworkers, who rarely get rich, one of the most important satisfactions of the arts and crafts boom is that some in stitutions, like Boston's Museum of Fine Arts and California's Oakland Museum, are buying contemporary handmade furniture for their collections. We are again recognizing that craftsmanship can be art and that art ought to show craftsmanship. Perhaps industrial designers had better watch out. People are beginning to demand more than stream lined plastic. -- Wolf Von Eckardt

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