nearly ripe Hachiya Persimmon, ready to be peeled and hung to dry Looking up at the persimmon tree’s wild constellation of fruit still languidly dangling, you’d hardly know we already picked over two bushels for drying. Ene recently discovered the Japanese art of Hoshigaki, a technique of drying fruit by a combination of open-air hanging […]
Tag Archives: traditional craft
Boatbuilding the Fish Sculptures
Boat-Building on the Stour, oil on canvas by John Constable, 1814-15 People who know me well are not surprised by my obsession with wooden boatbuilding. Though I’ve completed just one actual boat, each year I’m gripped with boat fever, especially during the winter months, when I scan plans and dream of the perfect cruise, surveying […]
Radical Board Boat
the lateen-rigged ‘jangada’ of Northeastern Brazil Over twenty years ago, Ene and I built our first and only boat together one winter on the porch when we lived in a one room cabin perched over the Hudson. The cabin was built atop a sea wall on a narrow spit of land to the west of […]
The Week in Bloom
stacks of cedar dry in the warm September air I counted five Kestrel perched along barbed wire as I wound down Marshall-Petaluma Road towards Tomales Bay from Evan Shively’s mill. I had been inspecting the deodar cedar (Cedrus deodara) Evan milled for my latest interior design commission, and I was delighted to find the fragrant […]
In Praise of the Bead Plane
Around the autumn equinox is typically our hottest, driest time of year, with golden brown fields and chalk dry dust under the orchard trees, now barren after harvest. The tips of the redwood branches have turned an orange-y yellow, and happily soak up the sea fog of a rare night. I can feel the rains […]
Field Lab
Bodger’s camp in the Chiltern beech woods, late 19th century (from The English Regional Chair, Bernard D. Cotton, Antique Collector’s Club, 1990) The strategy behind my residency at Mildred’s Lane will be multi-tiered, ranging from the development of a working, craft production facility on site to the promotion and marketing of Goods to be produced, […]
Stellate Geometries
The more time I spend away from the urban grid, the more I fall under the spell of non-rectilinear geometries. Straight lines and right angles are on the wane in my imagination, replaced by radial, spiral and stellate forms wherever I roam. I have a new appreciation for domes and geodesic thinking, and increasingly want […]