February 28, 2013
1072: Homage to Van Gogh (Olive Trees with Yellow Sky and Sun)
This scene made me think “Van Gogh.” I had to search to find out why. I started with “Haystacks,” which is very yellow, but there’s no sun visible, only lots of sunlight. The search went quickly from there to “Olive Trees.”
That guy had some chops.
February 27, 2013
1066: Late lighted life in a little town
When you live your woodworker life by A) design while at the lumberyard, which means B) buy extra wood, because you are by no means sure of your design when you leave the lumberyard, and C) while at the lumberyard buying one kind of wood for your current project, fall in love with other kinds of wood, because you are the most open-minded of designers (in that there is precisely nothing in your mind)—after all, when you got to the lumberyard you didn’t know what kind of wood you had in mind, so what’s to stop you from having a different kind of wood in mind while you are still there?, combined with D) accept gifts of unloved wood from all of the people in your life who come to discover just what a wood-keeping wacko you are, added to by E) make friends with men who have built their own backyard sawmills and call you when they come into a bit of twisted-up persimmon or beetle-infused box elder, not to mention F) own a pickup truck that is constitutionally unable to return from any wood-related trip at less than the legal weight limit, crowned by G) when you run out of space in your shop, build a barn, and you’ve got H) yourself a life that will have a lot of lumber in it.
It’s not out of the question, at this point in that life, to be able to build a set of three matching side tables from the scraps of earlier projects—that is, without a single trip to the lumberyard. (In fact, I’ve sworn off lumberyards altogether and drive out of my way to avoid passing by them, in the manner of an NBA player who once scored 63 points in a game cut short by a melee begun when he punched a referee in the mouth because he was too slow to toss him the ball at the free throw line and now can’t take the chance of watching his grandson dribble a ball in the driveway.) Inevitably, though, I’ll come to the point in the project that requires me to turn drawer pulls (on a 70-year-old lathe that came out of a mothballed vocational education program at the local junior high, which suggests a whole nuther narrative arc), pull down my boxes of drawer-pull-sized exotics, sort through them for a day or two, and decide that the one species not in my possession, but possibly in the possession of one of my scrofulous pals who I will now hop in my pickup to go see, is what I need.
rpdpod 