The key is found in linking growth curves together, using old living trees to make connections to sawn lumber, timbers in buildings, and old furniture. Going back to our example of that 200-year-old pine: Imagine that there is a 150-year-old house nearby, built of timbers cut onsite. Many of those timbers came from trees that were likely far older than our standing grandfather pine, with which they share 50 years of overlap in their growth curves. Once that overlap is confirmed, it becomes possible to count backwards in the rings of the old house timbers and create an extended chronology. Utilizing local structures and archaeological finds in this way, a regional “master chronology” can be built that extends many centuries...
Traditional icons are the culmination of many different arts. The hands in the studio are engaged as woodworkers, gilders, painters, and finishers, and our eyes see as historians, theologians, and artists. The interplay of these disciplines means that it is the joy of the studio to work with many different people in our tasks (for instance, the list of people I need to call back as I write this includes a sawyer, a priest, and a professor). It also means that what’s done here can offer a unique perspective on the purpose and consideration of the materials and methods it employs. The making of each icon begins with wood. A panel is its foundation, and like any home, the icon...
John Hemmings’ introduction to the properties of wood and the tools used in its exploitation came in his early teens as an out-carpenter on Jefferson’s Albemarle County estate, Monticello. Carrying axes, hatchets, froes, and mauls, teams of young, able-bodied men would trek into the old-growth forest at the edge of the Virginia wilderness to harvest trees for sustaining the body of Jefferson’s nearly 5,600-acre plantation estate. Near the age of 14, Hemmings was considered big enough to handle the heavy and unforgiving tools necessary to render raw trees into a usable commodity. For the last several years during his childhood, he had helped the older field hands with the lighter work of collecting the harvest and planting, but this year would...
Solar activity does more than steer climate cycles on earth – it alters the very make-up of the atmosphere. Solar storms, and the resulting cosmic radiation that strikes our planet, changes the ratio of carbon isotopes in the atmosphere. These specific isotopes are absorbed and locked away within the growth ring formed the year that a major storm took place. These carbon “markers” exist in other organic materials as well, and early artifacts – basketry, papyrus – that demonstrate the presence of these isotopes can now be dated precisely, all because of the exacting timescale laid down in ancient tree rings. Trees are the scribes of nature, “remembering” events in the physical sense: A tree takes again the effect of...
“I am not very good at visualizing the final outcome of my projects. Unless taking the time to make a detailed prototype is justifiable (almost never in my case), I often employ what programmers and software designers have come to call “iterative design” – a cyclical method of tweaking and refining the product as the user provides feedback. This is merely a fancy-pants way of saying that I make it up as I go along. So, seeing the bench at its final height, I decided to remove some of the bulk in the middle. I laid out a relief where my legs will be, and sawed several relief cuts, then chopped out the waste with a chisel. The top and...
“I worked outside in the open air under the cover of a woodworking shed. The wood I was given was a trunk of greenwood, freshly cut from a tree. Unseasoned wood like this has a naturally high moisture content. I had no choice of wood during the television program, but usually when choosing the best wood for splitting you need to take great care to pick a vertically grown tree with no twists or knots along its surface. This ensures that once the wood is split it will be far less likely to bend or crack. It’s also important to make sure you have more wood than you might need. This ensures you have “spare parts” in the event of...
“The ultimate aim of every wooden icon panel is to carry a little vision of the world full of God’s presence. The final step in preparing the board is setting aside a special space for that revelation. Turning the icon over again, a shallow recess is carved out of the front of the board. This space in Slavonic is called a kovtcheg, and in Greek is called a kivotos, but both words have the same meaning in English: an ark. After marking the ark’s frame on the panel, the center of the board is hollowed out. While different iconographic schools vary on how deeply this is done, in the studio it is usually kept relatively shallow. Given the general flatness...
It was also in this 15-year period that Hemmings crafted several pieces of furniture for Jefferson and his family. Though there are several references to furniture produced by Hemmings’ hands, no known examples currently exist with the exception of a round-top rotating table that was mentioned in a letter from Jefferson to Edmund Bacon; that table is now on display at Monticello. Other furniture pieces attributed to Hemmings include a sewing worktable for Jefferson’s granddaughter, a Campeachy lounge chair for Poplar Forest, a couple of bedsteads, dressing tables, and his “masterpiece:” a writing desk for another of Jefferson’s granddaughters. The aforementioned furniture can only be credited to Hemmings through written accounts, including the writing desk that was tragically lost at...
Recently, dozens of coopered vessels from three museums in Austria were analyzed for their growth-ring secrets. Wooden vessels, ubiquitous items a century ago, were often fashioned from staves rived from a single tree. Even though each individual stave might be small, featuring just a few growth rings, researchers found that they could visualize a model of the original chunk of wood by virtually plotting out the growth rings – kind of like putting together a complex puzzle. About half of the vessels studied were successfully dated (ranging from 1612-1940), but even more information was gathered on the methods of early coopers. Especially notable was the lack of wasted material when the craftsman split out staves – even after shaping with...
Francis Nicholson is generally regarded as the most important figure in early American planemaking. He was the first documented planemaker in the Colonies, he was inventive and original, and he appears to have been highly prolific: An astonishingly large number of his planes survive. But I believe it’s time for a reconsideration of Chelor’s significance. An exhaustive survey by Ingraham found that over three quarters of the surviving planes with Francis’s mark were made after he moved to Wrentham. Further, the number of surviving planes with Chelor’s mark actually exceeds the number of Francis’s planes with the Wrentham stamp. Taken together, these facts suggest that Chelor may have been responsible for an explosion of productivity in Nicholson’s shop during the...
