A,

Instead, what you need to do is take some time every week and exercise your design brain. Take it out for a stroll. Give it some air. Let it see the world and absorb some new information. Here is something which I encourage you to do. It is an exercise just like a 5 minute dovetail or sharpening your small chisel before taking on a 2″ wide plane iron. Draw. Draw with a pencil. Draw with a pen. It doesn’t matter. [Do not be too hard on your drawing skills either. It does not matter if your drawings are not good. Good drawing skills will come with practice. Shut off that critical voice and just draw.]

Draw for form: pick and draw out shapes that intrigue you. Draw for balance: frame the scene in your mind and draw the interesting shapes within. Draw for rhythm or pattern: look for the patterns you see in buildings or nature and use them as decoration or the central theme of a motif.

From a student:
I have jumped between many different styles (federal interpretation, contemporary, krenovian – if that’s a style) in the past year, I feel myself being drawn more and more towards the work of the mid-century modernists -the Scandanavians in particular. The simplicity, functionalism, craftsmanship, and the reverence for materials are all things with which I agree. While I think the designs from this period can feel a bit dated in today’s home, I think there is a firm base from which to begin.

Anyway, I guess my question to you is how do you go about coaching students to develop their own voice? Do you coach them through distinct steps, or do they just naturally gravitate towards it during their development? I know this is sort of like asking the magician to reveal his secrets, but I was hoping that you could share some advice with me that would help me begin this process. Woodworking is something to which I have made a serious dedication and I feel that the development of a voice is lagging behind the development of skills.

A,
Good to hear from you. It’s a large subject you want me to comment on. Let me just say this about design. Bad design copies shamelessly from its sources. Good design is reverent theft. Designers learn to soak up ideas, forms, shapes, motifs and develop their own vocabulary from these varied and various sources. How you do this is up to you but I use architecture, nature, jewelry, pottery, glasswork, and oh yes furniture to inspire my designs. Then I start sketching like a madman and see what pops up.

Design is not like building, you see. It uses a completely different side of your brain than the left brain. The left brain is march step, do one thing and then do the next logical thing until you come to the end and then start over. It’s that kind of approach. The right brain is the wacky let’s run through the sprinkler with our clothes on side of your brain, the inventive side, the creative side that we don’t use often enough. We mostly use the left side to be precise and rational and not make mistakes on the table saw. Don’t get me wrong, this side is good and important. It keeps us clothed and fed, but to design things, to be “artistic”, to be creative requires that you use that underused right side of your brain. That’s the side that synthesizes well, that likes to spit out wacky possibilities and the key here is to let it do its thing without the left side shutting it down or shouting it down constantly saying: Well that’s a stupid idea.

Of course! Many creative ideas are surrounded by a field of stupid ones. It takes that many tries to come up with something good or something great. It doesn’t happen just at once. It takes time and practice and mistake after mistake. If you’re not throwing away design ideas, you’re not designing, you’re copying someone else’s work. To be creative means to be unafraid. It means that you have to be fearless in the face of your worst critic: yourself. That voice that usually shuts us down and shuts us down so quickly because it’s easy to convince ourselves that we cannot design. And then it’s even easier not to design and not create and not develop your own style if you listen to that inner critic.

So, you want to design in your own style? Learn to be foolish. Practice inner freedom. Let your ideas spill out without filters and then learn to fine tune them. Learn the vocabulary of design that appeals to your senses and sensibilities. What about Scandinavian design appeals to you? Is it the simple lines, [which can be incredibly complex] or the lack of decoration? Is it the blond wood or the sculpted hard lines on an edge? Figure out exactly what you like and don’t like about a style. Take what you like and leave the rest.

Only then will you start to create work that is truly and uniquely your own. Design must be learned just like sharpening. They use different sides of the brain, but both require practice. Keep a design notebook. Open your eyes to the designed universe that surrounds you and start to pick out the ideas, the themes, the patterns that appeal to you. Then learn how to use them all mixed up in that mind of yours. Expect that some ideas will be clunkers. That’s part of the game.

Our Mastery Programs try to instill this sense of design but it’s really up to you as to how much you’re willing to be fearless and willing to make mistakes. But design is not a switch you can just turn on and off. It has to be practiced, like drawing or singing. It needs work to get better at and time to develop your skills in it. But I know you can do this. Okay. Have fun. Do good work. Gary

My friends and colleagues and to those who after all this time just manage to speak to me at all:

I want to thank those of you who wrote letters of support for the Studio during our dance with the City of Portland over code issues. We won some battles and lost some others, but your help, your assistance during these times and your letters were invaluable. If not for their actual worth in the court of City code, then certainly in their worth for me personally. To know how you supported the work of the Studio meant a lot. You’re all busy folks and taking time out of your schedule to write a letter was a huge thing. I thank you again.

Let me cut to the chase and then fill in. We have our Certificate of Occupancy from the City of Portland, finally. We can now open our doors as a manufacturing facility in the City. Yes, we are a manufacturer still in their eyes. [Now the State just contacted us and wants to call us a trade school, but that’s another letter for another day.]

The story played out like this: we collected your letters and put them on a hidden page on our website. Conversations with Commissioner Randy Leonard’s office proved fruitless. His Small Business/ BDS liaison, Sara Petrocine, was unwilling to help us convince the city that we were not a manufacturer. That we were instead a school, a place for adult education in a dying craft. Although I referred often to your letters of support and quoted many of them, I never pulled them out as my banner or as my club.

However as a result of that effort and with your letters behind me, the Plans Examiner was willing to accept the fact that the basement was indeed used for storage. Suzanne Vara, former Small Business Liaison, may have been working behind the scenes as well. Because of these factors, the requirement for a second exit in the machine room was rescinded. This was a huge victory because of the space it would have eaten up with a door and a stairway inside of our machine room. There is already a roll up door providing egress.

The front entrance was a bit trickier. The City had us remove the existing 16″ thick concrete ramp into the roll up door entrance effectively removing our wheelchair ramp. They also had us remove the front door and put a new door into the Studio with steps inside the building. Then they wanted an ADA ramp put back in based on the Federally mandated standards requiring that 25% of our remodeling budget go to ADA improvements. Since the remodeling was the City’s idea and not mine and they were making us get up to manufacturing/ warehouse standards, this seemed a bit odd to me. At one point, I was quite ready to throw in the towel and give up. Find out what my choices were and quit this fight.

But we worked the numbers hard. Massage was called for to meet the letters of the law and so we massaged. The design was worked over carefully. Our plans were approved by the City, a remodeling permit was issued, and we began to redo our front entrance over this past fall and winter.

With a successful inspection, our COO was issued and we are now street legal. Wiser, oh yes, for the effort. You know us Catholic school boys have always had a hard time not stepping forward to take our hard medicine. But what the City dishes out is something else again in my opinion. I learned a great deal from the experience. Come by for a tour someday and I’ll fill you in on what.

Just know that I really appreciate your help. We made it through and we can move forward with the work of the Studio offering the best instruction in woodworking that we can provide, a haven for woodworkers of all stripes, and a place of inspiration for all of us to do our best work. Thank you. Gary

Gary Rogowski
Director
The Northwest Woodworking Studio
1002 SE 8th Avenue, Portland, OR 97214
503-284-1644
www.NorthwestWoodworking.com

Some years ago, I worked in a large old building that had once been a furniture factory. It had been  converted mostly into a large empty space, but it also sported about a dozen small woodworking shops up on the second floor. It was a great old space if a bit difficult to find under the freeway and across the tracks. Built in a long ago time when the train tracks ran right through the back parking lot to unload lumber and load up furniture. Across the hall from me there was a friend of mine, Michael, who built custom made furniture as I did. Over the years we would always help each other glue up, or talk about designs, shoot the breeze, lift many heavy objects together.

The interesting thing about our relationship was how we relied upon each other. For myself, I needed Michael to bounce ideas off. He would come in and I would say what do you think about such and such a leg shape. He would tell me what he liked and I would usually pick the opposite shape. But I needed this conversation as much as he did, I’m sure. Just someone to push against, to test out ideas, prove to myself that I was right or stubborn.

One of the curious things about us though was when something had gone wrong in a piece. This plague, unlike the seventeen year locusts, was far more frequent. More reliably frequent too as mistakes are such an integral part of the woodworking game. So something would go awry in a new project for him or me. Something that to my eye or his looked terrible and we needed confirmation of this fact. It could be a dent somewhere, or a screw tip poked through a door, the misplacement of a hinge, or any number of things in a list so long I hate to think of it. The mistake would occur and then I, for one, had to decide was it obvious? Was it just me or did I need to launch into the costly fix? First I needed another set of eyes to confirm what I saw.

I would call Michael over and ask, “Do you see it?”
And he’d say, “What?”
“You don’t see it?” I would ask incredulously.
“What?” he would respond.
“I can’t show you. I want you to find it. Don’t you see it?”
“No, what?”
“It’s right there,” I would say, but point nowhere.
“What?” Michael said growing more impatient with his cuckoo neighbor.
“Well I… I can’t…I’ll show it to you, but are you sure you don’t see anything there? It’s so obvious,” as I grew more impatient with my cuckoo neighbor.
“No not unless you show me where.”
“It’s right there.” I would point it out.
“Oh that, oh yeah I saw that. So what?”

Next came my grimace, the gnashing of teeth, the inevitable question in my mind: Is the man blind? Has he lost his values? Does he not see this neon sign of a mistake pulsing out HERE LOOK HERE! But no, he wasn’t blind and it was always true. He never saw the mistake like I did. Never.

Nor would I see his mistakes like he did. It was never as big a deal for the observer, the neighbor, the client even, as it was for the maker. The maker whose ten thumbed approach, whose blindness and incompetence, whose woeful lapse of concentration again, had caused this flagrant violation of all design and construction principles. That maker, that idiot. No one saw it like him. No one was as hard on his work.

It is a sad constant for us woodworkers that I, for one, work on minimizing. Our focus is so small, our constraints on our obsession so meager that we think everyone can see all the mistakes that we make and see ourselves with such clarity. I laugh when I think about the old saying of not offending god by making a perfect piece, by including one mistake so as to not offend. God must be plenty satisfied with me and not offended by now with how many mistakes land on my work. But few others seem to even notice them.

Bear that in mind. Step away sir or madam. Put down the hammer and step away from the project. Try to see it with someone else’s eyes. It’s not so bad. You do pretty good work. It’s worth remembering.

I just reread Steve Jobs’ commencement address to the Stanford graduating class of 2005. Look it up. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. These are his final words of advice to the students. It is a wonderful speech about the value of failure, the incredible connections that can occur between disparate worlds, and the inevitability of death goosing us to take more chances in our life.

My own words to my students are a bit different on this day. It really has been a most wonderful journey and I have to say that advice such as Mr. Jobs’ is important. I remember when I had just started the Studio and it seemed that every other month somebody would call me up and say, I really like what you’re doing. I’m going to start a school of my own. And then they would utter something really charming like, Would you like to teach at my new school? Or, tell me how you started your school. Give me some information so that I can start my own.

At first I was kind. At second I was diplomatic. At third, I was a bit put out and by the fourth time, I was simply grumpy. After that I became philosophic. My advice to anyone was simply this: Here is what I can tell you about opening a woodworking school. It will take on your personality, it will take over most of your life, and it will take more energy than you knew you had. Good luck to you. Each path is singular.

There it is. Your path can only have your stamp on it. So why worry if it doesn’t look like someone else’s. Why concern yourself with appearances or try to emulate someone’s success? Let it take on your personality and the rest will come to you.

I often tell my students that my best marketing efforts came through the Psychic Network. No, I didn’t mean the one where we sat around and talked to my dear dead dog, Buck the Magnificent. But through putting out positive energy, but staying upbeat even when faced with difficult tasks ahead, you find a way. You will always find a way. And that’s what I told them. When the work would start to dry up, and I would be at my bench wondering how I would pay the next month’s bills, the phone would ring. The world knew and it came to me and helped me out. It seems wacky and I would doubt it every month but in the end, enough came through. Enough of my own energy leaked out to the world and it came back to me.

This is why at this difficult time in my life I want to thank everyone who has helped the Studio thrive up to this point. You are the ones who have truly made it succeed. Without your support, it could not have made it this far. Of course things change. We have seen so much change in the past 13 years of our existence. But we gave the push and the energy to this idea and people appreciated this. Students learned lessons about commitment and the value of learning. All these things are important to me and I am glad I was able to help spread this gospel of education. It is the best thing to do when you’re sad or when you’re glad someone told me: Learn something new.

The value of failure is of course hard to discuss and appreciate. I have failed many times. It gets tougher to get off the mat every time you get knocked down. This time will be tougher yet as I have tried to paint for my students and teachers and associates a rosy picture these past few weeks. Going so far as to proclaim that the City has finally approved our presence here on the street.

Alas, it is not true. We have not received their glad benediction as I told everyone. The City will close down our days here soon. Or if not shut us down, fine us into submission. It’s a familiar story I’m afraid in Portland. Anyone want to buy an inflatable octopus? Well how about some used hand planes?

But it is what it is. We’ve all learned so much from this journey. How to stay upbeat and positive. How to stay on top of our responsibilities. But they have caught up with us. They have found the means to make their Code mean more than my dreams. So I want to stay thank you. We will keep the doors open for as long as we can. The City will shut us down because we are a school in an industrial zone. We are a warehouse but we produce nothing. They will close our doors because they can. Because Code is more important than education.

I understand this. I get this. But we gave it a helluva shot before economics did us in. I cannot afford the Code requirements the City has mandated. It’s really no surprise when you consider the state of our government these days. Inept, lacking grace, ungrateful to the people who support them, unaware of how hard it is for the little people to make a living.

The Fire Marshal wants all of our sprinkler lines now to be replaced with brass lines. Shiny brass lines. They must be shiny brass lines filigreed with the appropriate City code on their exteriors. This will cost a pretty penny I can tell you. The toilet seats now have to be Air Force issued seats. No reasonably priced $12 seats or even the fancy no slam the lid seats I have on now. No, we have to use Air Force seats. This puts their cost in the stratosphere not down on the earth where they need to be. Our carbon credits will give out when we buy these $640 seats.

The entry doors all have to change as well. Doors cannot open outward over a property line nor can there be a step on the sidewalk. Instead we will have to create a vacuum sealed entrance/ exit that whisks people from street level down to the basement and then up again thus eliminating a front step or front door but using the resources of the famed Portland Water Bureau and their pumping system.

The door knobs must now be on both sides as well as both faces of the door so left handers will not feel put out by our right handed approach. Again, a small thing but it adds up.

What about putting the Made In Oregon sign on top of our building? I can’t afford that. Put it on top of Nike Town as a joke. Yet the City insists. Well I’ve said my piece. We’ll be moving soon. To a land where the bureaucrats can’t harass us. Perhaps somewhere on April 2nd when I stop fooling around.