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 half of the village were
working on the project. It was quite something to be working
alongside all those old world artisans, rural specialists in
different skills and trades. Those men all lived and worked
according to certain "rules of thumb". There was an unwritten code
according to which beautiful houses had been built with pride to
endure through centuries.
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. I still love the smell of Jeffrey's glue! Men
who even then represented probably the last trade that still
maintained the indentured apprenticeship system replaced the old
rigging with cables and rope. If I were working nearby one of them
he would turn his back to me because they jealously guarded their
trade secrets.
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. The ship was
being refurbished into a floating restaurant.
It was in England where I received my first complete set of woodworker's
tools. I had decided to work on my own. In those days people would
still call a carpenter to work on their house and fully expect him
to be able to make cabinets, doors and windows on the site. Which I
did. On one house in Cornwall I replaced all the old rotted windows
making the new ones myself and including a door for the
conservatory cut one hundred and ten tenon and mortise joints by
hand using only an electric drill for cleaning out the
mortises.
I had put an ad in the paper for the tools
simply asking if someone had some used carpenters tools for sale. A
man called Sid Trapnel answered my ad and I went to his home to
meet him. He was a retired carpenter and having recently lost his
wife was moving into a small apartment. He set me up with every
tool I could ever need. I had a full set of molding planes,
chisels, saws, a lovely vise for my bench and the list goes on and
on. The handles of the tools were polished by his hands. He had
sharpened all his saws himself. He charged me five pounds. At that
time I worked for a pound an hour so you can see the tools were a
gift. He just wanted to see his tools go to a good home.
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 and at the local high school. All this extra
work not only helped financially but also made me realize that I
preferred not to teach but to do the creative work myself.
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.
As a regular woodworker I would never have had all that technical
exposure and the enormous variety and range of projects to work on.
I also enjoyed making exciting devices that would belch out smoke
or squirt water or rise up using pneumatics or swing on cables
through the air! That is surely not something every woodworker has
the opportunity to do.
I returned to the quiet life of furniture making three years ago and now have a
spacious shop in Ashland, Oregon at the foot of the Siskiyou
Mountains. I still maintain the rhythm and disciplines I learned
working decades ago with those craftsmen in Austria. Sadly, I have
only a very few of my old hand tools from Sid Trapnel in England.
Most of them I had to pass on to other wood workers twenty seven
years ago when I came to live in America. My art education has
served me very well developing over the years before and after the
theater into a unique style inspired by the forms and activities
observable in nature. The pictures on these pages show some
examples of my work.
Julian Hamer
