Twenty-three years ago I was invited to attend the Fine Woodworking Program offered by the College of the Redwoods in Ft. Bragg, CA. It was a life altering experience in many ways: for me, certainly, and I think for most who have attended the school. We had the opportunity to study with and work alongside a world-renowned master craftsman for 9 months – 8 hours per day, 6 days per week. I have always compared it to a group of earnest music students, thrilled at suddenly having the chance to study with Mozart or Beethoven: a rare privilege.
Our teacher was James Krenov who, after a rich life of quiet work in his adopted Sweden, was persuaded to move with his family to California in 1981 to establish a small but intensely purposed school for craftsmen making furniture in wood. The program was supported and underwritten by the College of the Redwoods, part of the California community college system. The College provided a first-rate facility and equipment for the school, while offering the course at standard community college tuition fees. It was, and remains, a remarkable arrangement.
The school was a place for seekers: people with romantic yet very real ideas about wanting to work well, in harmony with their materials, confident in their abilities and their tools and their aesthetic senses, and perhaps most of all with great care. The people drawn to the school wanted to learn something of the kind of craftsmanship and work and thinking that Jim Krenov had described so eloquently in his books.
In those days Jim worked at his bench along with the students, when he wasn’t giving a talk or leading a group critique, or helping an individual one-on-one with a problem or design idea. In addition to being taught in a more-or-less formal way, we got to simply watch him work. From time to time he would ask us all to gather around his bench, and he would share with us whatever he was facing in the piece he was working on at the time. Struggle, success, failure, serendipity, disappointment, wonder. Inspiration. Doubt. Elation. Revelation: something had been not quite right, and suddenly making this part or that a millimeter wider, or shaving a bit more arc into this curve, or finding a bit of wood with just the right color or grain, and “Boom!” — as Jim was fond of saying — there it is! We marveled at the obvious “rightness” of his solutions, and his ability to feret that one little detail out from all the others. When we found ourselves making similar discoveries in our own work, I think we marveled at ourselves a bit.
People often talked about Jim’s work as being “perfect”, which of course it wasn’t. He made things largely by hand, once the machinery had done the grunt work of sawing, jointing, and planing. He liked to talk about leaving “fingerprints” on the work, by which he meant the scant traces of the tools used to make it, and the inevitable small flaws known to the maker but rarely, if ever, noticed by anyone else. The goal was an overall “rightness” rather than minute or obsessive perfection. He challenged more than one overly reverent visitor to relax and touch one of his pieces. “It doesn’t glow in the dark!”, he would say, “My pants go on one leg at a time!”
Jim has always called himself a craftsman rather than an artist. His work is craft at the very highest level, but the artistic elements that set his work apart from all others are unavoidable. His use of natural patterns and colors in wood is legend, and his eye for subtle detail and proportion elevates his work to rarified heights. Over the years Jim made some non-functional or strictly sculptural things, but as a general rule his cabinets are meant to be useful, and to be used. The fact that they are visual and tactile works of art – sometimes achingly so – is really icing on the cake. His drawers are well made and fit to run oh-so-smoothly. He is a cabinet maker, first and foremost.
At the school, Jim’s teaching approach to fixing mistakes was direct: learn how to do things well, and right, and simply don’t make mistakes in the first place. This seems a little arrogant on the face of it, but hardly arguable as a philosophical approach to craft (or life, for that matter). Of course being human, that goal is always more than a little out of reach, and Jim knows as well as anyone the despair of a misplaced saw cut or a joint that didn’t quite go home when it counted. Mistakes inevitably happen, but you will find ways to deal with them – no need to make it a validated part of the teaching curriculum, or a way of working. He calmly bailed most of us out on more than one occasion.
When I arrived in Ft. Bragg in 1984, James Krenov was to me a persona of mythical, god-like proportions. I had not met or talked to him. I knew him only through the words and pictures in his books, and it is not overstatement to say I was completely in awe and apprehensive of our first meeting. It was a surprise when we were finally introduced. He was a solid but slight fellow, not quite the imposing physical presence of my imagination. Rather than the low, Russian-tinged voice I expected, his high, lilting delivery was mellifluous and completely American. In my two years at the school, and over the many years since, I was disabused of any notions I might have had about his general qualifications for sainthood. I came to know Jim as friend, and as a regular person, no more or less worthy of a pedestal than most of us. On the other hand my early perceptions of his place in the world as a craftsman, philosopher, and teacher have never been challenged, then or now. In fact they have been reinforced daily over the past near quarter century. Every time I pick up a plane or chisel; every time I effortlessly shoot a “perfect” joint; every time I contemplate a piece of timber, wondering what secrets it will reveal; every time I revisit the passages in his books or my own yellowing notes from his lectures; every one of those times and more, the “rightness” of so much of what he wrote and practiced and taught emerges and is reaffirmed.
Jim scaled back his teaching schedule as the years passed, and retired from active involvement in the school in 2002. He has continued working in his own shop, but vision problems caused him to finally stop making cabinets about a year ago – just shy of his 86th birthday. I’m looking forward to seeing him – for the first time in several years – when the school hosts its 25th year reunion in Ft. Bragg in early September.
Even back in 1984 many of us wondered in whispered tones what would become of the school when it reached this pass. Fortunately the spirit of the place remains strong, resting on the foundations laid by Jim and carried on by the staff. Michael Burns, one of the original instructors, continues to teach and is now the director; Jim Budlong, a second-year student when I arrived at the school in 1984, has been an instructor at the school since 1988; and David Welter, also a student for two years (1983-84), has maintained the school equipment and taught since 1986. Two other graduates from the early 90’s also teach – Greg Smith and Ejler Hjorth-Westh. The school continues to get several applications for each place in the 9-month program, each year, and the shorter summer classes are always filled.
Beyond the doors of the school itself, the influence of Jim Krenov and the CR Fine Woodworking Program can be found around the country, and indeed the world. Many CR grads can be found teaching seminars and workshops at such places as Anderson Ranch (CO) and the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship (ME). Two of my classmates, John Shaw and Rodney Hayward, direct programs in fine craftsmanship in their home countries (New Zealand and Australia, respectively). Former CR instructor Robert Lasso helped to start the now well-known fine woodworking program at Santa Fe Community College (NM), where my classmate Michael Hoffer still teaches. Ted Brown (CR ‘94) established the Rosewood Studio School of Fine Woodworking in Almonte, ON Canada. Inside Passage, a small school very much in the Krenov mold, was founded in Roberts Creek, BC Canada by Robert Van Norman (CR ‘00).
Twenty-five years on, the school remains a place for seekers and romantics, people looking for just the same things now that we sought there more than 20 years ago. Most of us found what we wanted, in those early years, and were infinitely enriched. Judging by the work I see currently coming out of the school, and the later graduates I’ve met and come to know, I think today’s kindred spirits continue to find the same sort of inspiration and fulfillment.
May it ever be so.
Here’s to you, Jim. Thanks. Be well.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Jim Krenov’s web site:
The school web site:
http://www.crfinefurniture.com
Jim Krenov’s 2004 interview with Oscar Fitzgerald for the Smithsonian:
http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/oralhistories/transcripts/krenov04.htm
Books by James Krenov:
- A Cabinetmaker’s Notebook (Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1976)
- The Fine Art of Cabinetmaking (Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1977)
- The Impractical Cabinetmaker (Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1977)
- Worker in Wood (Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1981)
- With Wakened Hands (Cambium Press, 2000)
Links to other schools that have been influenced by Jim Krenov’s teaching:
Centre for Fine Woodworking (Nelson, New Zealand)
The Australian National University School of Art (Canberra, Australia)
Santa Fe Community College Fine Woodworking Program (Santa Fe, NM)
Rosewood Studio (Almonte, ON Canada)
Inside Passage (Roberts Creek, BC Canada)
Those “yelowed notes” caught my ear. Are they worth writing up for your reunion or for sharing anytime?
Said by David Richardson June 29, 2007 at about 3:23 pm