Learn from the Masters
By Bob Passaro

It was looking like my final project was going to be late. I was wrapping up two years in the mastery program at Gary Rogowski's Northwest Woodworking Studio in Portland. We had a show due to open, to exhibit these last projects. Gary told us these were to be our “signature pieces,” the culmination of all we had learned in the program. And this large television/stereo cabinet I had conceived was getting the best of me.

I had started looking into intensive woodworking programs a few years earlier. There is no shortage of them: College of the Redwoods, where James Krenov taught for years, and the North Bennet Street School in Boston are a couple of the more famous ones. The NWS program had a number of advantages for me: It's designed for people who have a day job, too. The tuition was reasonable compared to the other programs. And it was close enough to my home in Eugene that I wouldn't have to move.

Each fall, Gary admits five or six students, to begin two years of study. Each year is divided into three 10-week terms, like a college school year, with the summer in between off. We met once a week, sometimes as a group for a demonstration by Gary, and sometimes individually with Gary to talk about our ongoing projects. But most of the work was done at home, alone, working in my shop — a converted old 10-foot-by-16-foot garage outside my 1926 house.

In each term we built one or two projects, usually two. At the end of each term, we got together as a group to critique each other's projects. The projects Gary assigns are broad: a bench, a table with a drawer, a freestanding cabinet, a chair, etc. From there we were free to follow our own design interests. For me, this flexibility is the greatest thing about the NWS program. I drew from Arts and Crafts, Federal style and Japanese approaches. Gary encouraged us to try to find our own styles. It is more than a woodworking program really. You will learn a lot about design if you take advantage of this freedom.

But 10-week terms go fast, and design is time-consuming, I learned. It is easy to spend three or four weeks working with a pencil and paper and not even set foot in the shop. It was critical to try to stay ahead, to work every day if only for an hour or two, to keep momentum.

The times I fell behind were the times when woodworking, for me, was no longer fun, when a deadline forced me to work too fast. I'd make a mistake, make a wrong cut. I would have to tell myself, “Slow down, you're going to end up hurting yourself.” I was forced to make compromises. Time-consuming elements of a design would get tossed out. Some joinery would be simplified. I was disappointed I wasn't always living up to a quote that had lodged in my mind when I read George Nakashima's book, “The Soul of a Tree”: “The object is to make as fine a piece of furniture as is humanly possible.”

Yet much of what I learned in this program had to do with time and deadlines and compromise. I learned to search for ways to be more efficient, without compromising. I improved my skills to get quicker at chopping a dovetail or fitting a tenon. I saw what it would take to make a living at this and was glad I had decided to keep my job and not quit to head off for the College of the Redwoods. I learned I might be better keeping this a hobby — so I can be slow and ponderous and inefficient. And work by hand when I feet like it. And do the small things that probably won't be noticed by one in 100 people — but that make me feel better about a piece.

As Gary told us early in the program, passing on something one of his mentors had said to him: “It's the hobbyists who will keep the craft alive.”

I wouldn't say Gary's program is going to prepare you to go into the furniture-making business. You could, I suppose, but I'm sure he would be the first to tell you that he's not trying to run a trade school. You will learn craftsmanship, you will learn to think in new ways about design and you will become quicker and more skilled simply by virtue of all the practice you get.

But, yes, I missed a few deadlines during the program. I didn't like that. I didn't think it was fair to my classmates. But I always felt that I hadn't compromised more than I could bear — more than I wanted to, but not more than I could bear.

I did finish that final project. Well, it only had one quick coat of finish and some interior drawers weren't built yet, but by the time the show opened it was “ready enough” to be displayed in the exhibit.

And after it was all over this past summer, I was feeling wistful. It had been such a huge part of my life for two years — always in the front of my thoughts, always a deadline hanging over me like an anvil. I won't miss that, but I'll miss the classes, the critiques with my classmates and the individual meetings with Gary, during which he would rip apart some design idea of mine. Most of the time I realized, perhaps later, that he was probably right. I miss how the program — and Gary — challenged me.

But now it's time to explore further some of the designs that did work, not to mention the ideas I never had time to take from the sketchbook to the shop. This program jarred loose so many ideas that I will have plenty to do for a long, long time.