Contemporary Art
Furniture - Notes
Julian Hamer - Biography
Biographical Sketch
In 1968 I went to live with an Austrian family near Innsbruck in the Tyrolean Alps. They owned a country hotel, which they wanted to enlarge to accommodate the burgeoning tourist industry. The building was a multi-room extension and the entire family and most of the village craftsmen were working on the project. It was working alongside all those old world artisans, rural specialists in different skills and trades.
After Austria, I worked in Plymouth, England on the restoration of a three masted schooner at Milbay Docks. Again shipwrights, specialists in the art who would move from one such job to the next all over the country, surrounded me. The entire deck of the ship was replaced with Iroko, African teak four inches thick. I enjoyed doing the caulking, wedging oakum into the cracks and pouring hot tar into the seams.
Below decks another artisan has set up his lathe and was making belaying pins of Iroko, deadeyes and bullseyes from lignum vitae. Someone dropped a piece of lignum vitae overboard and it sank! I was astonished. That was the first time I saw wood that did not float. Another man was carving an eagle for the figurehead while yet another was making furniture.
Some years later I had the good fortune to attend Emerson College in England on a scholarship where I studied sculpture for two years. It was an excellent program with the students spending the entire day, every day in the studio working with clay or carving wood and stone. For my third year I attended a sister college in New Zealand in the education program where my emphasis was on learning to teach fine art including clay modeling and woodwork. Ironically, I was hired to teach my fellow students sculpture throughout the year and also worked at another educational facility, a home for handicapped adults and at the local high school teaching teachers clay modeling as well as six weeks at High School practice teaching.
For five years I worked as a theater properties artisan at the world renowned Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland. Generally when we usually think of stage props we imagine fake and flimsy items that only have to last through a couple of shows. This is not the case at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival where the season lasts for nine months with eleven shows in repertory. The furniture we made in the prop shop had to be even better constructed than usual and stronger so that it could be moved about and stored after each show. The versatility I developed while working with theater and with theater designers was phenomenal. I probably made fifty different styles of chair and settees as well as ornate beds, tables and elaborate chandeliers. In a conventional woodworking shop I would never have had all that technical exposure and the enormous variety and range of projects to work on.
Seven years ago I returned to studio furniture making and founded Fine Art Furniture in Ashland, Oregon. I still maintain the old world rhythm and disciplines I learned working decades ago with those craftsmen in Austria and England.
Brazilian Rosewood
I recently received from a friend and former neighbor a gift of Brazilian Rosewood. Dr. Stephen Cary and his wife Christine live in Ashland and are soon to be moving from the hillside above town to a smaller home in the valley.
The veneer and solid wood had been intended for a desk project for Stephen’s office but other interests and a busy medical practice prevented that from happening.
When I had my shop on Benson Way in Ashland, Stephen was my next door neighbor. He and his business partner were involved in restoring vintage cars. When I moved in there they had already been working for about a year and were the first tenants in the building. They left the next year to continue their beautiful creative work at another location.
I received an email last week from Stephen’s wife Christine. Christine mentioned that they had been schlepping some wood around from house to house since the Sixties and now that they were moving to a smaller property they really had no room for it.
When I met Stephen at his home a few days ago I did not at first recognized him from about seven years previously. He showed me the wood and I agreed to give it a good home. First though, I had to chase the cat out of the basement to the upstairs so that it wouldn’t escape outside. That was when the saying, ” It’s like herding cats” really hit home.
Finally we got the wood to my van and I stayed a few moments to chat. In the course of our conversation we suddenly recognized each other from those years ago. That made the gift of the Brazilian Rosewood doubly meaningful.
I plan to make something very special from it although I am uncertain yet what that might be. Perhaps a blanket chest or a coffee table of my new contemporary design. In the meantime it is safely wrapped up in cardboard in my shop. At almost fifty years old I figured the wood could wait a little longer until I can dream up something really special for it.
