Visit Daniel Marcou’s very nice blog www.woodenspooncarving.com where he has graciously posted an interview with me about spoon carving.  While there, check out Daniel’s writing about his own spoon making, other interviews, and links to other spoonmakers.  Thanks for your efforts Daniel!

This shaving horse was a commission for a fellow who took one of my spoon making workshops a few years ago out in Roxbury, VT.  He came to pick it up in Montpelier while I was spoon vending, so I had a chance to play with it for the morning out in the park in front of City Hall.  The bench is maple, with red oak sapling legs.  The riser, riser pin, and pedal pin are all ash.  The clamping head that passes through the riser and bench is all one piece of red oak from the crotch of the tree.  The pedal is a nice thick piece of clear pine salvaged from an old door.  The wedge near the draw knife is beech.  This design allows the hinged riser to be adjusted to different heights simply by placing different sized wedges (which can be made from any scrap one has on hand) under the riser, then tightening down the wing nut under the bench.  Each time I make a shaving horse I begin thinking about the next shaving horse I want to make…so many ideas about how to simplify and improve these amazingly utilitarian devices.  They are incredibly fun to make, and quite a workout splitting the log, hewing the surfaces flat and using t-augers to cut the mortises.  A good all around exercise regime, especially if you haul it up and down some hills…

Thank you for such a welcoming response to my spoon making demonstrations at City Hall Park in Montpelier this August!  I talked with many wonderful people the 8 or so days I was working, and made and sold many spoons.  I appreciate so much your interest in and enthusiasm for this traditional craft.  We are still working out a schedule for the months of September and October.  As soon as I have it, I will post it here, and you will be able to pick a card up with the schedule printed on it at my tent.  Once again, thank you for your generosity and curiosity!!

My father Richard Souligny, now 75, is a retired working-class goldsmith.  He was born in 1943 and raised in small-town Minnesota.  In the late 1970’s, after the navy, college, and teaching internationally he began to call Tucson, Arizona his home.  In the mid 1980’s he settled into the house he lives in now, where he converted the car-port into his studio.

My father Richard in the late 1970’s

Over his career, he has designed and fabricated likely in the thousands of individual pieces of jewelry.  You can see pictures of the inside of his studio and some of his work in this post.  His work is wholly unique.  He never clamored to join the design cannon, or enter contests, but rather he practiced the craft earnestly, and blazed his own design trails.  No dimension of the ring itself, as you can see in these few examples, is off-limits as a design space or repository for sparkling colorful gemstones.

Recently, while my father and his friend stepped out of the house for coffee, in broad daylight, his studio was burglarized.  In a matter of a few minutes, the thieves emptied my father’s safe of a lifetime of his personal jewelry creations, artifacts, supplies, and his nest egg.  What took minutes to steal took a lifetime to create and collect and is quite simply irreplaceable.

I admire my father’s designs, and more than that, I admire that he is a champion of the full process of goldsmithing, from wax to casting, metallurgy to stone setting, drawing to macro film photography.  All of this, very humbly, just off the kitchen of the house, three steps from the coffee maker.  He took on complex projects year after year, raising the bar for himself, and burned the late-night oil to complete them.  He also made time to share his process and knowledge with others and made his services accessible to friends and family members without regard to their ability to pay him.  He is still, to me, a mystical creator from hobbit land, and his studio is a lair of creation, stories,artifacts, and special tools where he plies his fiery craft.  This is probably one of the reasons I have always dreamed of finishing my own wood shop to create in and share with others, as I observed my father doing over the years.  “The Studio” is a place you want to be.

For people who create three-dimensional arts, it is the orchestration of our hands, minds, our senses and our tools that help manifest our creations.  Some create for themselves with readily available materials.  Others work in rare medium, and unless wealthy themselves, have the added and unique relationship with the commissioner, who brings the precious raw material, the gems, the blank wall, the acre of land to the skilled crafts person or artist, and the two enable the project, hopefully to a copacetic conclusion.

Artists often create and produce the things they know they can sell, to make a living, and in that, they are honing their skills.  But other personal projects lay dormant within them, waiting for the time and resources to emerge.  For a goldsmith, these things might rest in the safe.  Saved for another day, for a special person, for posterity, for the dream deferred.

As I sat at Sterling College yesterday, sharpening woodcarving knives for the spoon making class, I listened to an old man and a young man sitting next to me as they talked with each other.  The old man was giving an account of the time he loaded a large piece of American Hop-hornbeam into his furnace, and nearly burned down the house due to his ignorance of its extremely high BTU value.  It made me think of my father’s aging kiln, and how he monitored it carefully as he burned out a wax, for fear of burning down the house, and how difficult it was to stay awake all the hours of the process.

I’ve seen a lot of different derelict and abandoned work spaces in New England, corners of barns where work took place essential to the lives of people.  In some the tools hang on the nail in a cobweb, in the very place where someone last placed it 100 years earlier.

When we visited Scapoli, Italy recently, we went in the shop of maybe the very last Italian bagpipe maker, which lies in the recesses of an abandoned castle.  Another magical place that time is forgetting.  And I wonder, historically, if time is perpetually forgetting craft, art, design, then remembering it again in its twilight, the twinkle in the eyes of young spoon makers, poets, blacksmiths, basket weavers, soap makers, gold smiths.  The old timers sitting by young and enthusiastic individuals who are asking question after question, seeking the insight of a lifetime of practice from the expert.

For the working class goldsmith, the ring made for the patron becomes the property, and heirloom, of the patron’s family.  The bread and butter derived from the work of the goldsmith was eaten long ago.  The goldsmith’s personal gain was in experience, solving a new problem, expressing a new idea, facing and overcoming a new challenge, and the secret stories of near disaster.  And perhaps there is the glory, in the revealing of the finished piece, the pride.  The goldsmith can also squirrel away the gold dust and the trades, the amalgamation of which can become the rings for his daughter and the two sons, and the grandchildren, who are the keepers of the story of the goldsmith, more so than the goldsmith’s patrons.

So here you can see what someone received, and the place where it was created, and, back at the top, the young man whose decades of experiences culminated into these creations.

Value is a matter of perception, in the context of one’s reality.  The reality of the goldsmith is in contrast to the reality of the thieves who robbed him, although they are copacetic at that moment.  Truly, since all of our lives are so ephemeral that any importance we attach to our own, other than the importance of caring for one another, is really egotism by definition.  In this context, life itself, our ability to live, to breathe again and again, to sleep and wake up another day, is simply more important than the things in the safe.  Even these beautiful irreplaceable things.

This is simply because living for another day is not living today.

These recently finished spoons will be available on spoonderlust on Etsy in the next few days.  The wood was harvested on our land last spring, processed into billets, and stored to retain moisture.  I am working on finishing 11 more spoons from this batch of wood.

Paper Birch

Close up of some embellishments.  Done by pressing the tip of my carving knife into the wood.

Large Maple serving spoon.

The bowl from the top.

Yellow Birch

Maple.

Maple.

Maple.

Maple.

People of all ages and from all walks of life and from all parts of the planet benefit from the complex living breathing organism that is a forest.  Some may never have the distinct benefit and privilege of setting foot in one, and others may never stay in the forest for long enough to consider it an experience.  Still others live on the edge of, inside, and with the forest.  Those who have spent time in the forest might agree that, if nothing else, it is a remarkable place, a place that draws us in.  Forests are complex places, and no less complex than everything else outside their edges.  But somehow, unlike everything else, they are a place of their own.  You can tell when you’ve entered, and when you’ve left, when you are close to one, and when you have been away from one for too long.

Reverence for trees might sound odd coming from a person who cuts trees down for the purposes of trail building and firewood, craft and more garden space.  All that I do could be a mistake; I am at best fallible.  But I do take from the forest, slowly, “by hand”, without a tractor or horses.  And in 15 years getting to know a small part of the forest, I’ve seen and been a part of the changes there.  I’ve never felt greedy or wasteful.  I believe that what I have taken is from an abundance, and what is left behind is a reflection of the changing, vivid, diverse, and ever-evolving or devolving person that I am.  It is a relationship, impacting both parties.  Gratitude ebbs and flows depending on whether I am dragging logs uphill or downhill.  But I’m not fickle; my passion for the forest overrides any temporary difficulty I may be having.  I sometimes feel if I stay too long, I might not be able to come out.

The students I had the distinct privilege of working with last week at Sterling College in Craftsbury, VT were graciously friendly.  I feign teaching, as what I do is really share something that is such a joy to me it is difficult to contain myself.  I have to really slow down in describing and demonstrating the steps in making a spoon, yet all the while I do not want to bore the students or belabor the points.  I don’t think I’m making this up:  Spoon making has a disproportionately large number of “ah-ha” moments.  On a small-scale, we realize what we are capable of.  Wheels start spinning.  The disconnection and displacement from all that was for thousands of years narrows quickly.  The hands, making things, using tools, together, talking.  I’m a sap, and it is beautiful.  So as I always say, thank you for sharing your time with me, and tending my fire.  Your enthusiasm is a joy to witness.

The view from Paradise…