Intrepid Makers Who Have Paved the Way for Innovation

Boundary Breakers. That was the working title for this article, and it was that concept we had foremost in mind as we chose the people to feature in it. Surveying the field over the 50 years since Fine Woodworking launched in 1975, we selected makers whose careers helped redefine furniture making as a form of self-expression. We sought work that was unique to its maker but also exerted a strong influence on others in the field.

The makers we chose vary in many ways, but all have grappled productively with the question of how much—and which parts—of furniture’s enormous legacy to rely upon, or relinquish, as they established their own personal forms of furniture making.

All the makers we chose have seemed to thrive at the boundaries, drawing power from the tension between the familiar and the unexpected, the useful and the beautiful, the traditional and the newly hatched. However far these makers may have stretched the dictates of traditional furniture, they have never snapped the line, recognizing, perhaps, that the history and traditions of the field have been essential in giving their work its meaning and vitality.

Judy Kensley McKie

After graduating from art school with an MFA in painting in 1966, Judy Kensley McKie figured she had better get to work making paintings. But she found it difficult to will herself to paint; it felt more natural, and more enticing, to make practical things: shelves for the bathroom, a couch, a kitchen table. “I discovered I wasn’t comfortable making things that you just put on the wall and looked at. Whereas if it was something you used, it was worth the time it took to make it.”

Near her home in Cambridge, Mass., she found bench space and shared tools in a co-op shop where most members were Harvard and MIT grads looking for a livelihood they could pursue with their hands. Almost no one had any training, and the work tended to be utilitarian. McKie spent six years or so eking out a living building purely practical furniture and cabinets. She loved the environment and the activity, but eventually she got a little bored with the furniture she was making. “I started feeling like I wanted to bring it to life,” she said.

She remembers sitting in her living room at the time with the very simple furniture she had made—all straight lines and flat planes. “I would look at it for a long time, the way you might look at clouds in the sky. And as I looked I’d turn the armrests into animals. Or in the stance of a table I would see a four-legged creature. And I would think, well, that would be one way to bring this stuff to life.”

She had been doing shop drawings using drafting tools, but now she went back to freehand sketching. And she realized she needed to learn how to carve. “For some reason, instead of going out and taking a carving class, I just bought some tools and started hacking away. I still am a hacker, but I can always get what I want.”

Her carved furniture made an immediate impact; the very first animal form pieces she made were scooped up for a traveling show, which led to the first of what would become dozens of one-person shows at prominent galleries, where the work invariably sold. In the 1990s, at the urging of Garry Knox Bennett, she had one of her pieces cast in bronze, and that experience led her to have many pieces cast in bronze and others carved in stone. These works sold well and extended her fame, and they continue to attract extraordinary prices at auction.

McKie has built a body of work that is unparalleled in contemporary furniture. Her pieces, which fuse function with sculptural vibrancy, have made a deep impact within the furniture field and well beyond it in the realms of art and design. “I love that you can make a useful object beautiful,” she once said. “For me, that’s the ultimate challenge. I want to make art that people love.”

Michael Hurwitz

Michael Hurwitz is a poet among furniture makers. He embraces the constraints of utility the way a poet might accept the structure of a sonnet. Without seeming to strain, he produces beautifully functional pieces that sing with self-expression. The language of his work, shorn of all cliché, derives power from clarity and compression: A couple of his silky curves elevate a piece; several more would overcomplicate it.

Hurwitz trained under Jere Osgood and Alphonse Mattia at Boston University’s Program In Artisanry in the late 1970s, and like many other extraordinary students in that program, Hurwitz went on to make exemplary furniture that helped write the definition of the term studio furniture; this was work that arrived with a distinctly personal presence. Making idiosyncratic furniture is a tricky business, however, and not too much other studio furniture has aged so beautifully as his.

Hurwitz’s creative process can be sparked by many stimuli. The catalyst for a piece might be a particular gesture—the base of his latticework Lantern cabinet was inspired by arms folded in repose. Or it might be a building—his arch-topped silver chest, elevated on a gridded base, sprang from a visit to a mountaintop temple in Japan. Or it might be another piece of furniture—his sublimely sinuous rocking chaise was a response to Samuel Gragg’s Elastic Chair of 1808.

A consummate craftsman, Hurwitz constantly explores techniques and materials—bringing Japanese latticework, mosaic-tiled surfaces, bamboo, Damascus steel, urushi lacquer, stone, silk, papyrus, and cast epoxy resin into various pieces. He has a lyrical way with lines and patterns, and an unerring ability to combine curves and planes, voids and solids, structure and detail so each is strengthened by the presence of the other.

Wendell Castle

Wendell Castle was 43 and already widely known when Fine Woodworking launched in 1975. Having taught through the 1960s in the School for American Craftsmen at Rochester Institute of Technology, he had settled nearby and built a reputation with furniture sculpted from stack-laminated solid wood.

Castle had originally intended to become an artist, but in 1958, while studying sculpture at the University of Kansas, he paid a pivotal visit to Wharton Esherick in Paoli, Pa. It was not a warm encounter, but seeing the house and furniture and artwork that Esherick had made convinced Castle it was possible to merge sculpture with furniture. And it was this hybrid that fueled Castle’s long, varied, and extraordinarily successful career.

Sculptors had been laminating blocks of wood into carving blanks for centuries, but Castle refined the technique by gluing up stacks of blocks so their overall form approximated the shape he intended to carve, greatly reducing the amount of work and waste involved in the carving.

Carving furniture out of blocks obviated the complicated process of traditional solid-wood furniture making, of course, and allowed him to shed the long legacy of furniture design.

Having achieved worldwide renown for his stacked work, Castle made a U-turn in the late 1970s, when he began producing trompe l’oeil pieces like his chair with a carved coat draped from its crest rail. These pieces generated excitement with their technical bravura and sense of humor, but they surprised those who had read Castle’s earlier work as a rejection of traditional furniture.

From there, it was a short step to another controversial body of work, his Fine Furniture line: hyper-traditional, high-style pieces aimed at a wealthy clientele. It drew attention for the difficulty and high quality of its construction; its cost, which was intentionally precedent-setting; and its dizzying stylistic departure from his stack-laminated work.

Next came a series of clocks, some of which would stand with the strongest pieces of his career. His stellar Ghost Clock, depicting a traditional period tall clock obscured but still recognizable beneath a carved white sheet, could be seen as a self-portrait of the man and the tension in his work between furniture and sculpture, tradition and innovation.

Wood itself was never a particular draw for Castle. In a field that worships its chosen material, he was a heretic. He held the opinion that wood was simply another useful substance and should be worked like so much stone or clay or plastic. He wanted the focus to be on the shape of a piece rather than on its materials or structure. Throughout his career, and especially in his late work, he embraced an array of materials from gel-coated fiberglass to cast resin and concrete.

Garry Knox Bennett

Like Judy McKie and Wendell Castle, Garry Knox Bennett arrived in woodworking after attending art school and never received formal training in the craft. Also like them, he had a brain teeming with unusual ideas and an enormous drive to get things made.

Drawing was second nature to Bennett, but he didn’t waste time with it before making a piece of furniture. “I don’t do any drawing except right on the wood, at the bandsaw,” he said. He could see his pieces before he made them. “I work out most of my designs at night instead of counting sheep. Then I come into the shop the next day and start sawing.”

He made nearly all his work on speculation and in series. He would choose a furniture form—the chair, the clock, the bench, the dining table—and make a dozen, two dozen, three dozen of them in a stretch, each one different. The pieces in a series might have a shared structural approach, but the finished pieces would look nothing alike. His series of trestle tables, for example, all had thin, light tops and heavy bases, and the same sophisticated techniques he devised for attaching and supporting the tops and for joining the trestle assemblies were applied to many of them. But the exuberant shaping of the trestles, and the colors, textures, and materials he used varied wildly. The shared structural approach enabled him to work at a breakneck pace; when building his trestle tables he was making one per week.

Bennett’s work can be off-putting. Stuffed with ideas and always exclamatory, it strikes some as bombastic and ungainly. That’s the way I felt about much of it when I had seen it only in photos. Then I attended a large show of his work and found that in person the same pieces could be delightful. The range of materials and the dexterity with which he employed them were a revelation. The work was rich with detail that could read as busy from afar but beautiful up close.

Bennett was a provocateur; although plugged into the furniture world, he was determined not to play by its rules. His work drew on traditional furniture forms, structures, and joinery, but it was never enslaved to them, and he often made sport of the worshipful attitude toward wood and traditional craftsmanship that he saw around him. When his Nail Cabinet ran on the back cover of Fine Woodworking in 1979, it ignited a fire in the editor’s inbox and led to quite a few canceled subscriptions. Bennett had built a display cabinet in padouk—decorous and dovetailed—and then driven a carpenter’s nail into one of its doors. “I wanted to make a statement,” he said. “I think tricky joinery is just to show, in most instances, you can do tricky joinery.” His provocation might have succeeded too well. Decades later, having made thousands of pieces of furniture that were bursting with creativity (and not a little tricky joinery) and that sold widely and wound up in museums, he kept hearing about one particular piece. “I’m sick of the Nail Cabinet,” he said.

Kristina Madsen

One tiny chisel tap at a time, Kristina Madsen has built one of the most powerful and inspiring bodies of work in contemporary furniture. Sitting in her workshop in Southampton, Mass., with window light flooding over her left shoulder, Madsen uses a painstaking chip-carving technique she learned from traditional carvers in Fiji to create the multilayered moiré patterns that embellish her furniture.

Beneath the carving, you’ll find classical furniture forms and impeccable traditional craftsmanship, both of them rooted in Madsen’s apprenticeship with the talented and eccentric English furniture maker David Powell. Madsen was 18 when she discovered Powell, who had emigrated from England and was then working alone in a former potato barn in central Massachusetts. Powell wasn’t a teacher, but Madsen, who had left college after one semester to seek out a woodworking mentor, kept asking if he would show her a few things. After finally consenting to teach her, Powell trained Madsen in the traditional European cabinetmaking skills he’d learned in Edward Barnsley’s Arts and Crafts workshop in England. (Other aspiring woodworkers heard about Madsen’s arrangement with Powell and began signing on for lessons, and in 1977 Powell and John Tierney opened Leeds Design Workshops in the One Cottage Street mill in Easthampton. The school produced excellent makers through the 1980s.)

Fifteen years into her career as a furniture maker, Madsen spent nine months in Fiji on a Fulbright grant studying freehand intaglio carving with Makiti Koto, a master of the traditional Fijian style. Since then, she has used those carving techniques to decorate the surfaces of all her furniture. Madsen’s work has had a distinct impact on the field of contemporary furniture, inspiring many other talented makers to explore the use of carved and incised patterns and color in their work.

Madsen’s devotion to careful handwork as well as some of the patterns for her carvings derive in part from the lacemaking and other needle arts she learned from women in her mother’s family. Her great aunts and grandmother showed her how to make things well and patiently and how to fold them away for the future. Lacemaking, chip-carving, cabinetmaking: Kristina Madsen’s furniture is a beautiful braid of three traditional crafts that she binds together to produce strikingly original furniture.

In the late 1990s, Madsen moved home to devote herself to her mother’s care. She built her shop next door to the family home, working there when she could spare the time. Since her mother’s death, Madsen has gone back to woodworking full-time. Despite the wide acclaim her furniture has received—it is in a number of museums and many private collections—it can be difficult to find clients for pieces whose heart and soul is handwork. Yet Madsen is uncompromising, often devoting half a year or more to a single piece. She and her work both evince profound integrity. She works with consummate skill, unstinting dedication to her craft, and a strong personal vision.

Brian Newell

Brian Newell’s furniture has the power and mystery of a dream—an emotional force that can be at once thrilling and frightening. With its bulging, quilted, compound-curved forms and its stunning pierced carving, it relentlessly seeks new ground both technically and aesthetically. Without abandoning utility, it takes us into territory we’ve never visited before.

Newell was raised in a working-class family near Flint, Mich.; he learned furniture making under James Krenov on the rugged coast of Northern California; he honed his fabricating skills as a patternmaker in the model-car industry in Chicago; and he lived and built furniture for 10 years just outside Tokyo. But the astonishing forms and imagery of Newell’s furniture are native to nowhere but his imagination.

His relentless inventiveness as a form-giver requires an equal fearlessness as a craftsman. And his solutions to never-before-posed technical quandaries constitute a high-wire act nearly as absorbing as the pieces themselves. His approach to furniture, he acknowledges, “is a little risky.” Technically, it’s like “careening down the road almost ready to lose it at every corner.” And he embraces that. “I love engineering, but I also love spontaneity, and I think that suits me a little better. I can’t plan five minutes ahead in my life, and that’s the way I make furniture too.”

A Brian Newell piece can seem to peel the cover off the maker’s subconscious to expose a world that blends the beautiful with the bestial. In his furniture there are occasional traces of Arts and Crafts structure or Danish Modern lines, but mostly it feels like Newell and nothing else.

The otherness of his work, though, has at least one very familiar spring: “I share with Krenov the love of wood,” he says. “Sounds banal, but that’s the starting point of everything. Crazy about the stuff. My happiest hours are spent bounding around on piles of logs and crawling through stacks. If there’s a shrub or a hedge that nobody has tried to use before somewhere in Texas, I want to know about it. I want to try it. I want to run a gouge through it.”