Furniture by Pat Edwards
30 July 2010
“Moving On”
Just about every woodworker I know in this day and age not only works with power tools, but does so almost exclusively. Some of the people I know apply an occasional detail that requires the use of more hand and eye coordination than the use of power tools, and I myself have done a handful of simple carvings that involved hand-held chisels throughout. In that regard I do know of a fair number of woodworkers who create carvings that absolutely blow my mind, and they do the entire thing with a handful of carving chisels. But even those who spend weeks or months on glorious carvings then turn to table saws and the like when it comes time to form the cabinet in which a particular carving might reside. And the reason’s pretty simple. It just doesn’t make sense to use hand tools exclusively when power is so readily available. At least that’s the excuse I use! But the other part of it, I think, and here I will speak only
for myself, is a certain surety one has with power tools that does not exist with hand tools. I can run a board through a table saw in a matter of seconds and get an absolutely straight cut at ninety degrees. Doing that with a hand saw is a bit of a dicey operation.
But in the North Park area of San Diego there is a woodworker who does the most glorious things and does every bit of it with hand tools only. I actually had the opportunity of meeting Pat Edwards some years ago when a woodworking class I was attending at Palomar College made a field trip to his shop for a demonstration of marquetry, which was what we were studying at the time. In all honesty, long before we got to Pat Edwards’ shop I was convinced that marquetry required a precision I was not going to be able to produce, but after I saw the work of an absolute master I knew, and knew full well, that I was not going to involve myself in that branch of woodworking. It would just be too demoralizing to forever compare my work to his. Interestingly enough, Pat has become that kind of woodworker, in large part, because he embraced the very thing I have avoided: the workmanship of risk. I will have more to say on that, but for now his work beckons.
Pat is a consummate master in every aspect of woodworking, but the one item that gets most of the ink-and deservedly so-is his marquetry. Knowing that our blog site format will only permit one full-sized picture, I was really torn with which one to feature at the top of this blog, but I decided on the two tables he made (he designed them so the tops would tilt upright for display when the tables are not in use) as a graduation exercise when he graduated from the ecole Boulle in Paris. And therein lies a tale. Pat developed an early interest in marquetry and went as far as he could with determination and self-study. When he realized that the masters of the discipline had a school in Paris, and that it was there that he could learn both method and tools-as one of the things they taught was how to make the hand-operated scroll saw known as a marquetry donkey-he set about petitioning the school for acceptance of a foreign student. Pat ended up learning fluent French, one of the requirements, and producing a body of work deemed acceptable to the entry panel, another requirement. During the fourth year of his study in Paris, he began a graduation piece that consumed some two years of his life. He cut some 6000 separate pieces and executed the masterpieces above in rosewood and satinwood to provide a positive/negative image. As a result, Pat was able to achieve accreditation of his San Diego workshop as an “atelier” by ecole Boulle, which was a major achievement. Between 1995 and 2000 Pat received
18 students for a “stage” and supervised their work, which turned out to be a wonderful learning experience for both teacher and students.
Since then, of course, Pat has both studied and improved as a woodworker, although how a person with that kind of expertise gets any better is beyond me, but there it is! The second example of his work that I wanted to point out is the jewel chest Pat made using Gaboon ebony, legal ivory and 32 different species of sawn veneers.
I also wanted to include some of the pieces that did not feature marquetry, because it gives us a chance to examine Pat’s workmanship up close, as it were. Again, as it is with all of the woodworkers I admire, I downloaded considerably more pictures from Pat’s site then I will be able to use in this blog, but one piece that struck me as particularly illustrative of the utter rightness with which Pat approaches all of his work is the Biedermeier “Tulip” Armchairs. Re-created from a unique design made in Vienna in 1825, the armchair has a solid wood frame with a French walnut veneer surface, finished on all sides. The traditional horsehair stuffed upholstery foundation is covered in a black silk stripe. And from here, it looks like Pat applied a French Polish, as he tends to use this method for a lot of his furniture.
A French Polish is a subject all unto itself, so here I will simply state that it’s a wood finishing technique that produces a very high gloss surface, with a deep color and a shimmer that has to be seen to be appreciated. The process itself consists of applying many thin coats of shellac dissolved in alcohol using a rubbing pad, but, as it is with so many things, there is considerably more to it than that. The process itself is difficult, and only a few ever master it, both because of the amount of work involved in properly applying it and the aforementioned difficulty in getting the finish exactly right. Every picture I’ve ever seen of Pat Edwards shows a slender man, and all those years spent applying a French Polish may well have played a factor in that!
The other aspect of the Biedermeier “Tulip” Armchair that I found myself admiring was just the chair itself. It has a wonderful grace to it, and the wood itself has all been shaped using only hand tools. On his website Pat says, “I strongly believe that ‘For
m Follows Process,’ therefore these antique re-creations are made entirely by traditional hand techniques ‘at the bench,’ in the same manner as the originals.” Of course, the people who made these items some centuries ago used only hand tools, but that was of necessity. Pat does it of choice and does it superbly.
Relative to Pat’s use of hand tools, I have already referred to another item on his website, which is the workmanship of risk. Before Pat was a woodworker, he was a student and a history buff, and one of the people he came across in his readings was David Pye, who was a British master craftsman. Pye wrote a book on woodworking in which he discussed woodworking and art and workmanship. This last he defined as existing on two levels: the workmanship of risk and the workmanship of certainty. Factory made furniture requires nothing more than the pressing of a few buttons to produce a perfectly formed chair-the workmanship of certainty. David Pye, and the people he influenced, Pat Edwards clearly being among their number, work with hand tools to produce the same chair, and in so doing, they expose themselves to the workmanship of risk. Handle the tools incorrectly, and the piece is ruined or badly shaped or inadequate.
But as Pat points out on his website, most workers hate going to work on Mondays, and especially, I suspect, this holds true of those who work in factories. Yes, they will produce perfect work, but nothing of themselves will have gone into it, so there is no joy in that work. They go to the workplace on Monday, there to die a bit each day until the weekend when they can “live a little.” Pat, by way of decided contrast, walks to his workplace in North Park each morning and stays as long as he can, endlessly absorbed with the daily risks and rewards of the work he produces each day. For him, and for the ancient masters in whose footsteps he treads, perfection is always a journey, never a destination.
Joseph
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4 Responses to “Furniture by Pat Edwards”
July 30th, 2010 at 8:05 AM
He does that kind of fabulous work without using ANY power tools? I will have to remember this for the next time my husband wants to buy another big expensive power tool.
Kat
July 30th, 2010 at 8:17 AM
There has been plenty of “french” spoken in my studio as well. Pat certainly does nice work, but as a tool junky I like working with both hand and power tools.
Joe
July 30th, 2010 at 10:05 AM
Thank you for the kind words and appreciation of my work. I have been working in the same location for over 40 years and love North Park. I started a blog of my own last week, since I have not kept up on the website, and have a lot of work which has been made and sold in the past few years and I never posted it. Please visit my blog and comment; I appreciate feedback very much.
http://www.WPatrickEdwards.blogspot.com
(I think that hyperlink works…)
Patrick
July 31st, 2010 at 9:36 AM
Patrick is my professor…………..take his marquetry classes, you’ll love it.
Gives good advice and help.
Keep teachin’, Patrick