Each pew has an ancient script scrawled upon tattered and stapled pieces of paper. 4/4 S&B S Map Rough Sawn, 12/4 VGDF, 5/4 S4S QS WO. The pews go on, each requiring me to pause a bit to translate...4/4 is an inch thick, S&B is Select and Better, S Map means Soft Maple and Rough Sawn means how it comes from the saw mill.
Every time I go to a real lumberyard I feel like I'm going to spend time in a holy place. There's a quietness to them even though the forklift choir may be singing it's beep beep backup music. I think the heavy amount of dead trees that make up the place sucks up the noise. The flap/slap of the occasional person flipping boards over to look at them a reminder that you are not alone, others share your same beliefs.
I bring my sketch book as I ponder the wood. The measurements of course are important but also the drawings give things to think about as I look at grain patterns or how woods may look next to one another. You flip and look, you pull it out, maybe stand it up, stand back and feel. Put it back, flip some more. Maybe you move onto a new pew. Maybe what you're looking for is not a figured exotic but a domestic quiet Vertical Grain Douglas Fir. You can't go in with a closed mind.
I don't use CAD when I'm designing something although I know CAD. I find it to be clumsy and anti fluid. It's so much easier to just to let your hand to quickly sketch something and move onto to another thought. And even though I sketch out things on paper, they are always just that, a sketch. I change things constantly as I'm making something, sometimes in the middle of a cut.
I'm circling back to a personal project I started last year. And even though I've done some drawings of it most of the designing I draw in my head. It's much faster that way, I can create 3D renderings in my mind in seconds and do fly overs or twist it around as I look at it from different viewpoints.
Yesterday afternoon we went to see a documentary centered around the human construct of the concept of time. A beautiful film on all levels and it was during the film that I thought I should do a huge change in this personal project so when I got back I started to sketch out this new direction. Got into bed and spent a bunch of time constructing 3D renderings of different ideas.
In the morning sometime I awoke from a dream. I was the new Pope and I was also making a chair for the Pope at the same time. I was showing a prototype of the front of the chair to some random Vatican clerk, it really was nice, some sort of squat cabriole leg arrangement and I was telling him how I was going to incorporate a series of curves of changing radii on the real chair. In the dream I used the phrase "a disintegrating series of curves"...I have no idea what that means though. Upon awakening I started to think about that and drew a new leg design in my head. It might change but for now that's the plan. A Pope dream leg.
Phase one of this project is here.
