CHAIR-ISH IS A WORD I'D USE TO DESCRIBE YOOOOU...

"Chain-sawed Windsor chair." Several words you never thought you would hear together in a sentence. "Hal," I asked, "Why a chainsaw? Why a Windsor chair?" Chain-sawed anything--it sounded like something out of Appalachia. But then he drove down to the city with a box of bowls he was leaving me to try to sell, and he plunked this little chair right down right there on the curb. Great, I thought. More apartment clutter. I kissed him goodbye and hefted the box and the chair up to the apartment past the doorman's gimlet stare.

I put the bowls out on the bookshelf. The apartment was not the right place for them. They were interesting, but they competed with each other and all my other *stuff* (white Haeger pottery, books of poetry, Scott's CDs...just too much *stuff*). A place was found for the chair and I resigned myself to...I don't know, living with it. But then something funny happened. I started to like it. It's sort of insane--carved with a chainsaw out of one piece of red oak, all splayed legs and drunken angles. It's a little whimsical, a little strange--somewhere between Isaac Bashevis Singer and a queasy nightmare. Just a tough little survivor, much stronger than those fragile slats seem like they could be. Hal said people do make chain saw furniture, but "it's usually really clumsy--like those bears you see carved out of logs," he went on, "and something about the delicacy of a classic Windsor chair made me want to do it just to see if I could." He had to dump a lot of shellac on it to keep it from splitting as the wood dried, but it seems to work, somehow.

Donskoj Gallery put this one in the window to advertise the show he had last summer--they hung it from wires, which is funny--they too seemed to get the flying-away quality it has (sit in it, you might be transported to Prague, circa 1356). "People tell me they've never seen anything like it, " Hal says. "*I've* never seen anything like it," he adds. He priced it at nearly $6000. I asked owner Georgi Donskoj, who obviously liked the piece, what he thought of the price. "I thought it was a little high, but he has a right to ask what he wants for it," Donskoj said. "Maybe it's not something he wants to let go of right now."

Funny how much comes back to letting go.

LOCK 'EM UP!!!!!!!

Hal called. "That one you call the hubcap is HEMLOCK, not yew." But then I would have to get rid of that "Yew dooo something to me..." title, and offhand, what's to say about hemlock that doesn't involve killing Socrates or some suicide society, circa 1989?

So, OK, another excuse to post a picture of the hubcap, with its silken grain (it's big--did I mention that? About 20 inches across, and ethereally more delicate than you'd guess it would be, with a heritage like that...).

Not Bowled Over? RETURN IT!

This is the little butternut bowl my friend bought for her friend (?), who did not say anything (it's also second on the left in that picture on the upper right where it says TURN TURN TURN). Tell me the truth: does it look like a salad bowl that cost two bucks at IKEA? Was she a total freak to give it as a wedding present? People are funny. Maybe the friend loved it and just ran out of time to thank her. Maybe the friend has already ditched it. GIVE IT BACK if ya don't like it, wherever you are. He doesn't produce things very fast (long story--he has three bowls he's made recently, but they're all "green" and need time--months, even, to cure...).

Ghosts in the Machine

Hal had been working as a treecutter for a few years when he and I took a short vacation together in 1996. We went to Assateague, an island off the Maryland Shore, where an old friend, Sis, was working for the month on the beach. Sis was actually Hal's teacher, a long time ago, and although I hadn't seen her in years, she and Hal had remained friends. So she invited us down to spend a few days with her there at the State Camp Site...car camping, lots of trailers...not what I'd grown up with, but after a night or two in an army pup tent, with wild ponies snurffling about my wary head...basically forget trying to sleep when a horse is about to crush your little skull like a walnut] we gave up and slept in the hot little camper with her. At least there were no mosquitoes in the camper. No air, but no bugs. OK, I'm making it sound miserable. But here's what wasn't miserable:

• clamming on the Bay side...wandering out in water with a basket floating attached by a rope to your waist, using your toes in the mud to suss out wily clams, RAKIN' 'em out, quick...
  
• riding bikes and watching the brilliant flash of red winged blackbirds in the tall rushes
  
• going to the Nature museum there and seeing what lives in tidepools
• Sis's marinara with clam sauce made with the aformentioned clams
• waking up at dawn and walking along the pink-sand beach
• being on the beach at dusk, watching the colors fade to lavender and the palest blues
• riding across the bridge onto the mainland and seeing what was for sale at the local farmstand: fragrant fat peaches, ripe melons, beans, jars of local jams and jellies in jewel-colors, the first red-ripe tomatoes, "Silver Queen corn." She crab soup at the local diners. "Waterman's" in Ocean City, " where they covered the table with brown paper and a heap o' crabs was placed in front of you to attack ((((I, alas, am not the type, but the crab cakes were yummy))).
  
• going to the beach after dusk with flashlights, which we shone along the length of the beach to illuminate HUNDREDS of scuttling little ghost crabs, their eyes a-wobble atop slender stalks.
• And finally, to tie this even tangentially to blogdom, I learned something about wood: Hal and I were walking along the beach, a very long walk, and we kept seeing the edges of old shipwrecks, which must have been uncovered by recent storms (I've been back since and never seen them again). Hal showed me the cross pieces in the wood and said the shipmakers chose the crotches of the wood, because it was so strong, and he showed me how, in these days before metal nails, the pegs used to hold wood pieces together were just jammed in. A friend who was moving just gave me an old (circa 1700) oak chair and it has the same look--wooden pegs inserted into the wooden plank. There was something profoundly beautiful about seeing these weathered, wave-smacked ribs, and how amazing that these immaculately pegged beams were still holding together, even now.
  

Woodn't it be Loverly...

I used to refer to this one as "tiny world," but I see I already called another one "exploding world." But things made of wood really are their own little worlds, aren't they? They have the history of all that happened in the years they were alive, they still have a remarkable warmth ever after, and this one is....well, to me, anyway, it's its own little world. First, it's REALLY little, maybe 4 inches high, incredibly thin and delicate. The shape is exquisite, the grain is soft, polished, and lusciously swirly. But as a vessel it's got some, er, issues.

As do we all.

Anyway, Scott bought it as a gift for someone recently. It was his favorite piece and it was the piece they used to advertise his show--we stuck the card in with it. Giving artwork as a gift is fiendishly hard, though. My co-worker bought one of the little butternut bowls last summer for a friend's wedding and the friend never even thanked her. Maybe the friend thought my co-worker bought her a salad bowl or something...you kind of wish they'd give it back and say "not my style, but thanks anyway"--she'll probably give it to the thrift shop. My co-worker would have loved it for herself (and it was nice of her to buy it from the show last summer--meant a lot to me). Still, Scott was right about getting this. It's not useful, it's not big and showy, but it is perfect in its own way: as enigmatically beautiful and strange as life itself.

Yew Doooo Something toooo me....

My husband, Scott, says this one looks like a hubcap, or a flying saucer. It's huge--about 30 inches across. It didn't sell at the first show (Hal wanted $400 for it) but it will one of these days. It's yew (I'm going to let him come in here at some point and 'splain these woods better than I can--I just like saying "yew").

It reminds me of a large decorative bronze platter (?) that my father got when he was stationed in Korea in the early 60's. We always had it up on the wall somewhere. Another leftover from my dad's military service, besides fraying pup tents, was the stockpiled C rations in a grey green metal box in the basement (I remember sneaking in to eat the cold war era chocolate--even the jelly!). Hal had (and still has) a photographic memory for our childhood...I wonder if, along with the basement smell of mouldering 1928 National Geographics, he was influenced by that huge plate.

There's another piece--not for sale, though I want it--he made it for an ex-employee's wedding and she's off somewhere but he is still holding it for her--it's a covered dish in a shimmering yellow-red wood (maple?), heavily shellacked. It looks like a little ziggurat, and the bottom part has three little feet (Hal was big on little feet for last spring's work). I kept thinking "where have I seen this?" In my father's house is a covered black laquerware bowl from Okinawa--it has a ziggurat-y shape, three little squarish feet, and a deep red interior. It's interesting to see how Hal re-interpretted it--same shape, same lacquered shine, same size--4 decades later in a warmer wood. My friend Sumo thinks the shellac is too much, but I like how it makes the tiniest zig-zaggy pores in the wood shimmer.

Like the flying saucer-y piece, it's considerably more playful than its Cold War-era Asian inspiration.

Haunted Kingston

There's a website I stumbled onto while following Shaun O'Boyle's favorite links--it's part of the Hudson Valley Ruins site, specifically, Tom Rinaldi's photos of Kingston. I remember the old Town Hall. The new one was this sort of Jack in the Box fast foody thing plunked down in the bombed out post-urban renewal parking lot that was downtown Kingston, circa 1969. The Old Town Hall, now finally re-opened, was, according to the town's nicely written history, a high point of Victorian Gothic, but of course, growing up, it was just a wreck. I'd never been in it...kind of amazing to stumble my way to this post on the Ruins site and see how beautiful it still managed to be, even before restoration.

PULL UP A CHAIR

So. I stared at the bowls and platters and Hal's two CHAIN SAWED chairs (the one to the left is carved out of one piece of red oak and is about three feet high) for a few weeks wondering I could sell them...and him, as outsider art. I went to last year's Outsider Art show at the Puck building, got the booklet of galleries, and feebly started making calls. Are you accepting new work, I enquired of the Phyllis Kind Gallery. No, came the answer. The woman at the Andrew Edlin Gallery was actually kind enough to invite me to email pictures, which I did, but...guess it wasn't quite right. And then I just dithered some more, because selling my brother's work is not what I do, alas.
So he took his work back and the next thing I knew, literally--he'd gotten a gallery show with one other artist, a photographer, at Donskoj Gallery in Kingston, one of the oldest galleries in Kingston, and not far from where I grew up. The show was great--one piece sold the night of the show to one of his treework customers for $400, the opening itself was packed (and this on a rainy night--had more people than some openings I've been to in NY). I brought 2 shopping bags of cheese, for no good reason (guess I was afraid they wouldn't have cheese in Kingston). The show was extended another month, and he has some pieces in a group show there this month. I haven't been up, don't know what's in it, but if you're up there, stop in.

EXPLODING WORLD

A year ago my brother Hal asked me to find a gallery in New York that would show his work.

I, who could not sell Girl Scout cookies to save my life.

Hal lives in Kingston, a few hours north of New York City. He cuts trees, hence the wood. He's been taking woodcarving classes for years and had recently gotten a decent lathe, so he could work on it on his own instead of going to his instructor's shop. We had discussed whether he should get a huge lathe, so he could make huge (and he said, more marketable) BIG things. I, not being there, didn't even really know what he was making until he brought a box of things down for me to try to sell ((eek, eek, eek--BAD MISTAKE--I CAN'T SELL ANYTHING)) but I read the lifestyle mags, I do know big wooden things are in these days--big ole slabs sell for $12,000, etc..

I think this one is burled maple. Hal says a burl is a diseased part of the wood with wood forming in protective layers over the ill part (I'm paraphrasing, I'm sure I could google a better definition). Anyway, in his work, he runs across a lot of burls, and he saves them because they are beautiful. This one is, isn't it? It's like a rorschach butterfly end- of-the-world kind of scenario--everything streaming away into the universe.