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| The College Magazine - Winter 2006 | |||
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 Michael Wiener (SF69) sought rigor in his life and found it in boatbuilding. These Johnnies make different things: timber-frame homes, jewelry, wooden boats, furniture. What they share is the desire to build something enduring and beautiful and to improve in their craft with each new project they take on. They are idealistic and practical, enterprising and imaginative, and when they finish a day’s work, they have the pleasure of standing back and regarding the fruits of their labor. Michael Wiener, SF69 Although the boatyard in Sausalito, Calif. is just big enough for a half dozen wooden boats in various stages of reconstruction, it’s humming with activity. Two young men are carting planks from one neat stack to another, an older man in a straw hat is cranking a hand-operated crane, and from inside the wood-beamed warehouse comes the hiss of welding equipment. In the middle of the yard a group of adult students peers up at the partially de-constructed hull of a 100-year-old pleasure boat, Freda. The atmosphere is of steady, unhurried industry. As head of the yard, Wiener can’t go more than two minutes—even on his lunch hour—without being called over to consult on one of the dozens of tasks at hand. Wiener answers each question with the same measured, precise attention. Under his soft cloth cap his expression is affable; his eyes, while alert to the yard’s activity, are relaxed. When he tells the story of his journey to this boatyard, it’s clear how consonant Wiener’s character is with his craft. The patience, elegance, and deliberation that characterize boatbuilding are just as evident in his words as in the boat frames all around him. He came to the work, Wiener explains, “theoretically.” While he attended St. John’s, Wiener’s developing interest in the manual arts was encouraged by tutor William Darkey (class of 1942), who built his own harpsichord. But it wasn’t until graduating that Wiener set himself to training his body “in as rigorous a fashion as I had trained my mind at St. John’s.” The desire for rigor led him to boatbuilding. It was, in his way of thinking, the “most uncompromising” of the woodcrafts, the one with the lowest margin for error. “Furniture,” he says, “has to hold up to the demands of the human body, but ships have to hold up to the full force of nature out on the water.” However, learning to build wooden boats in the United States in the early 1970s was no easy task. After an unsuccessful search for a boatyard in Maine, Wiener returned for a time to his native San Francisco Bay. There he found one yard whose boatbuilders were “taken aback and flattered” that he would request an apprenticeship in a dying art. But after he’d put in a year learning the rudiments of the trade, he recalls the yard’s Irish foreman taking him aside and asking, “Do you know what you’re doing?” When he answered in the affirmative, the man said, “Well, my lad, you’re doing it in the wrong place.” That recommendation sent Wiener on an international hunt for a traditional boatyard willing to take on an American apprentice during the height of the Vietnam War. He found it eventually in Denmark, where he spent four years as an unpaid apprentice, studying from master boat builders. When he returned to the United States, Wiener was well qualified to build wooden boats, but uncertain whether he wanted to. Instead, hoping to integrate his academic and practical training, he went to work for Charles and Ray Eames in their famous San Francisco design office. The Eames were intrigued by Wiener’s combination of intellectual and hands-on experience, soon put him to work on one of their most ambitious projects, the feature-length science movie Powers of Ten. Wiener designed an innovative camera stand and shot the film, which has since become something of a cult classic. Though his work with the Eames family brought him closer to the fusion of knowledge he’d envisioned in Mr. Darkey’s freshman math class. (“Lining up a 20-foot animation stand, I used plenty of Euclid,” he explains.) Wiener wasn’t quite satisfied with that compromise either. Wiener worked instead as a jack-of-all-trades builder in the tiny Tomales Bay town of Marshall, co-founded the first organic dairy west of the Mississippi, and taught himself to build furniture. Slowly though, the boatyard began to pull him back. “I thought that when you learn something rigorous like boatbuilding, you can apply it to anything,” he says. “That’s not true.” Wiener moved back to Sausalito with his wife and two daughters, joined the Spaulding yard in 1978, and took over yard operations in 2000. In 2002, following the death of its founder, the yard became a nonprofit, the Spaulding Center for Wooden Boats. Wiener is on the board of directors. It would be a pleasure to talk more, find out what he’s reading, if he finds time to sail, and how he thinks St. John’s has changed. But the lunch break is over, and Wiener’s eyes are already darting back to the corner of the yard, where his expertise is needed. For more information on wooden boat restoration classes at the Spaulding Center for Wooden Boats, call 415-332-3721.  In her work, Kait Schott (SF91) struggles with materials and "The 'Eidos' of the thing that's in your head." Kait Schott, SF91 Kait Schott may have spent the years since her graduation learning fine craftsmanship of the most demanding sort, but for Johnnies her most impressive achievement is one seemingly unrelated to her professional life: Schott completed freshman lab five times, once as a freshman and four times as a lab assistant. After graduation, rather than taking up a career as a professional baros specialist, Schott returned to her native Minnesota. There, after spending nearly five years employed as a goldsmith, she now crafts her own jewelry out of metal and glass. But all those years in freshman lab helped lead Schott to her work. Her lab experiences contributed to her interest in working with actual, not metaphoric, materials. In freshman lab, she explains, “there’s a struggle with a physical object, with the tension between you and the physical stuff.” In freshman lab, the stuff in question is likely to be clay weights, simple chemical solutions, or cat innards. For goldsmiths, the stakes are somewhat higher. But Schott maintains that both are expressions of the same contest, “over whether or not you are going to achieve the eidos of the thing that’s in your head.” Having grown up in a family where her mother and grandmother were “always making something,” she was inspired by the wealth of materials available in Santa Fe. While still a student at St. John’s, she began visiting the bead dealers at the city’s flea market. Soon she was making simple jewelry for friends and giving it away. Later, she began selling her work “just to support the habit.” Though she had had no professional training at this point, Schott had already identified one of the key principles drawing her to work with jewelry. “Jewelry is so personal,” she says. “It’s expressing a really primitive urge. You find a little trinket that just has something about it, and you want to take it with you. So you put it on a string.” She also realized early that she wasn’t interested in making jewelry that looked like everyone else’s: “Jewelry is also very personal in the sense that it’s expressive. The pieces I make are not particularly narrative, but the person who wears them makes a decision about what they want to portray.” Schott’s own decision, after graduating from St. John’s, was to continue the experiment she had begun as a student, “to really engage the physical stuff of the world.” Her first steps took her to the San Francisco area, where she took metalsmithing classes at the Richmond Art Center. Armed with new technical skill, she moved back to Minneapolis, found a glass workshop, and eventually attended trade school for metalworking. There, she learned to cast, polish, solder, and set stones in an atmosphere that encouraged neither creativity nor discussion. Though, she muses, “it was like St. John’s in that everything was laid out for you.” After graduating from trade school, she worked for four-and-a-half years as a hired “pair of hands” in a large jewelry shop specializing in complex and expensive gold wedding bands. The work was challenging, but not creative, and it demanded speed and skill. “As a goldsmith, there was a constant battle of will between me, the stuff, and the clock,” she says. While the first two elements of that equation were familiar, the third posed more difficulty: “Given a choice between more perfect and more quick, I always chose more perfect. I do have an appreciation of having some efficiency and speed. But I also know that there are limits to how fast I’m ever going to do something and still enjoy it.” In 2003, Schott quit work as a goldsmith, moved to an artists’ co-operative, and decided to concentrate on her own work. “I want to sit back and think for a while again about what I really wanted to make,” she explains. Lately, that has led her to work extensively with glass; she’s fascinated by the way that glass responds to heat. “I think most people can anticipate what metal will be like when it’s heated. But glass becomes really fluid when you work with it. It’s just magic. The material itself is a seduction.” The new work pattern has also given her time to return to her roots. With a local alumni chapter, she recently revisited Goethe’s “On the Metamorphosis of Plants.” At this distance from freshman year, she sees in the essay a meditation on the artist’s struggle. “It’s a great metaphor for feeding yourself creatively, for developing into something new and different,” she says. “The sense of striving that Goethe seems to ascribe to the plant is like the struggle to take the world and try to making something out of it.” Kait Schott’s work, including a recent series of plant forms in glass inspired by Goethe, can be viewed at www.kaitschott.com.  Ben Shook (SF00) works on a chair, "The most human kind of furniture in his Portland shop." Ben Shook, SF00 Ben Shook explains his decision to become a craftsman as though it were composed, like a wooden joint from one of the chairs he builds, of two separate pieces which fit together perfectly: “St. John’s left me with student loans and some inextricable idealism. I probably already had the idealism. So I had to make a living.” Shook’s tone is self-mocking, but he’s perfectly serious about the idealism. It kept him up nights as he was beginning his apprenticeship, practicing in his own shop the skills he’d observed during the day. And today it’s the driving force behind the thriving small business he runs out of his Portland home. Shook felt the first stirrings of interest in fine woodworking while visiting a museum. He spent the year after his graduation traveling and working in France. One day, he visited the Musée des Arts et Métiers, the Paris museum devoted to the finest products of French craftsmanship and engineering from the Middle Ages to the present. The masterworks in wood, stone, and metal that he saw there convinced him that “the depths to which one could take this craft are unfathomable.” Shook returned to Dayton, Wash., found a job as a bartender, and bought some tools. Working from books and studying furniture, he began to build what he now calls “rustic things,” rough-hewn desks and bookcases made using wood salvaged from old barns. He still had no formal training, but the results were compelling. “One day, this woman who owned a gallery came by,” he recalls. “And she bought everything, about 20 pieces. She just said, ‘I’ll take all of it for my shop.’” Encouraged by the sudden success, Shook decided to get serious. In 2002 he apprenticed with a French master carpenter in Washington, working for low wages and “asking him questions every second there wasn’t a machine on.” By the end of the year, Shook had learned the basics of timber-frame construction and felt ready to strike out on his own. Today, Shook employs two assistant woodworkers in a large shop attached to his Portland home. His business has grown rapidly in the last few years, mostly through word of mouth. Working by hand and with power tools, he and his assistants spend at least one month on each major furniture piece. The shop spent nearly half of last year furnishing a whole house for just one client. Slowness is one of the qualities Shook appreciates in his work, one of the principles he’s distilled from his beginnings in the craft. “Working with wood requires a different orientation to time,” he says. “The time is so great with some projects. You just have to let go of the male perception of working at something from beginning to end. You have to think in days and weeks. You have to have a real patience for letting glues set up, for just learning to let something sit.” Shook’s latest passion is building chairs. “I’m getting really into them,” he confesses. “Chairs are the most human kind of furniture, the thing that you put your body in rather than on.” The chair design he’s working on now has no metal parts; the seat is hand-shaped. Its secret, Shook says, is a special central joint originally designed by master builder Sam Malouf: “It’s such a beautiful and simple joint, and it’s so strong.” Joints are, of course, the heart of the furniture maker’s craft, and Shook has spent some time considering them. At the moment, it seems to him to be a question of creating union. “The marriage of two pieces of wood in a joint is such a delicate and precise thing,” he says. “And when it’s done right, it’s a forever marriage.” If Shook sounds as though he’s been considering words closely as well, that’s no accident either. When he isn’t working in the shop, one of his interests is writing poetry, which he says is “sort of like making furniture.” Visit www.benshook.com.  Quinby (A02), Jordan (A00), and Aurelia Finch, in the home Jordan is building in Virginia. Jordan Finch (SF00) Jordan Finch’s career as a builder of beautiful homes has its roots in his junior year at St. John’s, when he experienced a revelation. Having enjoyed woodworking as a hobby, he knew he wanted to build things—big things, beautiful things—after graduating from the college. “I had this idea that I wanted to build cathedrals,” he says. “I went on this long search to learn about them, but it never quite panned out—there just weren’t many cathedrals being built.” However, Finch has found something nearly as satisfying in building timber-frame homes, characterized by soaring ceilings, heavy exposed beams, craftsmanship, and durability. He is rapidly becoming a master of the same post-and-beam construction methods that contributed to the majesty of Europe’s great cathedrals. Timber framing has been practiced for centuries, but in modern times, stick-built construction—faster and cheaper—has prevailed, “until the 1960s, when hippies began reviving the craft,” says Finch. Picture an old-fashioned Amish barn raising and you’ll get a sense of the work Finch does. Without a few dozen men to raise the frame that serves as the skeleton of the house, Finch relies on the modern crane. But in every other way—the precise fitting of tenon into mortise, securing joined timbers with pegs of solid wood—Finch uses time-honored and traditional methods to build homes. “There’s a great geometry to it all. When you’re building these homes, you have to hold this visual image in your head. It’s like doing Euclid in 3-D,” he says. Finch took up carpentry as a teenager, and he has been perfecting his craft since graduating from St. John’s in 2000. While spending junior year in Annapolis, he stole time from his studies to build a boat. That summer, the college’s Placement office (now Career Services) helped Finch find a job with Steve Whalen (SF83), who had a carpentry business in Southwest Harbor, Maine. “I told him I was attending St. John’s and knew how to use a hammer and he said, ‘come on up.’ ” After graduation, Finch served a two-year apprenticeship with Vicco von Voss, a custom furniture maker in Chestertown, Md. “It’s probably been the highpoint of life in craftsmanship so far,” he says. Von Voss began designing his own timber-frame home, and Finch contributed his construction expertise to the project. Along the way, he recognized that he had found a solid substitute for cathedrals. When his apprenticeship ended, Finch found a job with Lancaster County Timber Frames in Pennsylvania. “I had the basic skills, but I wanted to get faster,” he explains. “There are shops like these throughout the country and a lot of them do beautiful work, but it really is high tempo.” Finch’s “meditative” methods weren’t a good fit with high-pressure shops, so he took his tools and went out on his own as an itinerant joiner, subcontracting for other timber framers on projects in Georgia, Florida, Virginia, and Massachusetts. After a year and a half of honing his craft on the road, Finch moved to Virginia to marry Quinby Owen (A02) and settle down in the Shenandoah Valley town of Mount Jackson. When Quinby’s parents needed to find a builder for their home, their new son-in-law talked them into hiring him. It was his first opportunity to design a home and to build it from start to finish. Never mind the 16-hour days; it’s been well worth it, he says. “We raised the frame on Oct. 23, 2004. I’ve been involved in quite a few raisings, and there’s always a sense of expectation and eagerness in the air, but this time, it was really satisfying,” he says. There is a wholeness to the work that appeals to Finch each time he takes up his tools. “I’ve gone from milling the tree to sanding something to a mirror polish. Sometimes you smell like a chainsaw, other days you need a surgeon’s touch just to take a sliver of wood away,” he says. “That really gives me a sense of fulfillment—it feels natural and complete.” People are surprised to hear that timber framing is a green building method, he says. “Timber framing does take larger, mature trees,” he acknowledges. “But if a building will stand for 300 years or more, that’s a responsible use of materials.” Happy to create anything out of a beautiful piece of wood, Finch still makes furniture and recently accepted a commission for a dining room table. With Quinby expecting a baby when he started his business, Finch named his shop Finch and Sons Fine Woodworking. Since the arrival of daughter Aurelia, now almost one, he’s had to reconsider the name. “How does Finch Family Woodworkers sound?” For questions on timber-frame construction, contact Finch at Jordanafinch@yahoo.com or at 540-333-0054. By Caroline Knapp (SF99) and Rosemary Harty |
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Copyright © 2006 St. John’s College
