ENGLISH BROWN OAK PART III

My year of furniture college in England was a brilliant start to my furniture making career.  Of course, one year of intensive training was just a beginning.  When I returned to southern California, in 1987, I had to return to working on houses, to pay the bills, while I practiced what I had learned by doing little “training exercises” in my spare time.  Beginning with little end tables, I progressed to coffee tables, and eventually to small dining tables.  Then I turned my attention to wall cabinets.  This brown oak piece is one of several, that I managed to make over a period of  about 5 or 6 years.  My goal was to follow in the footsteps of James Krenov and eventually be making cabinets on stands.  As my training projects became more complex, working only on weekends was no longer sufficient.  I found myself needing to take a week or two off, from time to time, just to get things done.  Finally, in the summer of 1991, I managed to take off for two months and attend a summer program with the old master himself, James Krenov.  That was when I built this second brown oak wall cabinet.  I hit it off with Krenov, and he invited me to come back for his intensive nine month program.  Which is what I wanted to do the very next year, but I really needed more time to get my finances together.

The next two years were dedicated to saving up enough money to make it back to Krenov’s school.  So, there was no time for any more projects.  But I couldn’t stay out of the shop completely, and I would spend a few hours here and a few there, regrinding my chisels to Krenov’s specifications, and practicing the veneer sawing techniques that he had taught me.  That was when I dug out those two brown oak sapwood cut offs that I had stashed away.  Looking at what I had, the creative juices started to flow.  I cut the pieces to manageable lengths, and then sliced them into veneers.  I played with these veneers, at my bench, putting them first this way and then that way, making guesses, and then looking and making changes, and going back to the saw for a few cuts, then back to the bench to rearrange things once again.  I eventually came up with a pair of parquetry door panels, that, when I stepped back for a final look, quite literally blew me away!

This was in the Spring of 1993.  I glued up these veneer door panels using six vertical pieces and two horizontal pieces for each door.  Looking at the photograph at the left, there is a seam in the middle of each section of sap wood, and there is a seam in the middle of the four thin heartwood stripes.  The natural fuzziness of the transition from sapwood to heartwood makes for a very impressionist feel.  I made the cabinet while at Krenov’s school, in the Spring of 1994.