A Redefining of Workmanship

I was once lectured by my boss when I was a first-year apprentice. My boss (who never considered himself to be an artist or a ‘creative'), espoused that work as a carpenter was governed purely by pragmatic and utilitarian foundations. As an 18-year-old apprentice who was on the precipice of life’s next journey, I found that perspective to be wholly depressing and utterly uninspiring. 

Ten years later, (with a little more grounding, understanding, and life experience), I think I began to understand what he was trying to tell me. Albeit a rather pessimistic approach, his perspective was one that valued workmanship; a quality that he considered to be of paramount importance in furniture making. 

Such a journey beckons the question: what is workmanship? 

Let’s start by exploring what workmanship is not. Workmanship is not a restricted range of qualities that are so loudly pouring out of mass production. Workmanship is not a uniform output that one witnesses in an assembly line. Workmanship is not accepting of a lack of depth, subtlety and diversity. 

Yet workmanship is not the ignorance of the user’s needs or wants. Instead, workmanship embraces the challenge of using the infinite range of possibilities to solve a need. Workmanship challenges uniformity by recognising a unique problem and breaking repetition by delivering a quality design that is specific and valuable. Workmanship courageously pursues the endless array of artistic potential in a piece, while simultaneously achieving the utmost utility.

A closer look of workmanship reveals the analogy of a tightrope; a tightrope that the artist walks on, slowly trying to reach completion while maintaining the careful balance between success and failure. Such a balance is evident in the workman’s process, as the quality of the final product is not predetermined, but depends entirely on the skill, dexterity and consideration of it’s maker. Such an approach can be called (to use the words of David William Pye), ‘the workmanship of risk’. 

When it comes to the art of furniture, the tightrope balance seems to exist with ‘creativity’ on one side, and the seemingly banal ‘pragmaticism’ on the other. To walk across such a tightrope successfully means utilising the full canvas of creative options that exist, to design and produce something that is truly useful and pragmatic. So a fine furniture maker must first understand, develop and reassess his or her positioning on the subject, as this process is the basis of the quality, integrity and honesty of all work that results. To pursue a project without such a foundation and thought, would compromise the potential for the work to evolve into objects that we can connect with emotionally and spiritually. 

The challenge of a fine furniture maker is to truly understand their medium with clarity and accuracy. Additionally, there is the challenge of honestly considering the needs and desires of its users, in order to create a piece of true value. Combine this with the artistic investment (and the contained discipline, patience, and persistence) of understanding and mastering the essential techniques and systems, and the process can allow for the fruition of individual pieces, along with bringing these pieces together to achieve something greater than the sum of its parts. 

While my apprentice’s dream was somewhat deflated by my boss’ ethos (an ethos that seemed overly focused on utility and pragmatism), I have come to understand that utility and pragmatism are just some of the many essential characteristics that make up the multidimensionality of workmanship. In other words, ‘workmanship’ is a convergence of many elements; a multiplicity that must be considered in order for the completion of a successful piece, and for the manifestation of true artistry.