The seventh and eighth graders have just finished a project making canes with a Lee Valley round tenoner. It is a very simple process. Shape a piece of hardwood round or octagonal using planes and or sanding blocks, use the tenoner mounted in an electric drill to shape 5/8" round tenons on each end. Shape the handle and drill a hole in it with a 5/8" Forstner bit. Glue the handle on one end of the shaft, and put a 5/8" rubber tip on the other. Done! With finished canes at left are Ryan(left) and Caleb.

The seventh and eighth grade students have decided that they want to make marionette style puppets during the last weeks of the school year. A challenging part of this project is making working elbow and knee joints. The photo at left is a simple layering technique for making bridle joints. Using a bench hook and Japanese pull saw, the students will be able to make their own knees and elbows with ease using this technique. We have the materials prepared and they will start on Tuesday. Shown in the photo are from top: upper leg, knee joint, lower leg, and foot with ankle joint ready for glue and clamps.

The letter:

You may have noticed that March of this year was particularly hot. As a matter of fact, I understand that it was the hottest March since the beginning of the last century. All of the trees were fully leafed out and legions of bugs and snakes were crawling around during a time in Arkansas when, on a normal year, we might see a snowflake or two. This should come as no surprise to any reasonable person. As you know, Daylight Saving Time started almost a month early this year. You would think that members of Congress would have considered the warming effect that an extra hour of daylight would have on our climate. Or did they ?

Perhaps this is another plot by a liberal Congress to make us believe that global warming is a real threat. Perhaps next time there should be serious studies performed before Congress passes laws with such far-reaching effects.

CONNIE M. MESKIMEN
Hot Springs

Is this what happens when the hands are left out of our fundamental understanding of reality? No, not really. Connie M. Meskimen is a Little Rock attorney with a great sense of humor. While there are many people in the world as dumb as the letter might imply, Mr. Meskimen is not one. The letter is real, but written in fun!

For some reason this morning I found myself thinking of one of my first art students, Leon Douglas, age 9. At the time (1972) I was working in a children's center in Memphis Tennessee as alternative service for the draft. Porter Leath Children's Center was a former orphanage converted to a social service non-profit serving families with emotionally disturbed and at-risk children. My first job with Porter Leath was the director of their summer arts and crafts program.

I remember sitting with my students at a grassy area at the intersection of Manassas and Jackson amidst the kinds of broken bottle debris that can infect nearly every poor community in the U.S.

While some of my students were drawing mothers, children, cars and trees, Leon was working intently with dark colors in broad strokes filling the page from side to side, top to bottom and every angle between. I asked him what he was drawing and he surprised me with the mastery of his work. "Can't you see? It's the Viet Nam War!"

At this point, Leon is no doubt grown with children and grand-children. The United States is in another war with images on television filling the minds of his children. They have hand-held devices that they can use to play along with the violence. Is this something we need to reconsider? Personally, I prefer crayons. And personally, I would prefer a more thoughtful and responsible nation.

A friend, Elliot Washor, co-founder of the Met School in Providence Rhode Island reminded me of the following quote from Stalin: "A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths a statistic." Statistics are the territory of the "values damaged." It is easy to throw numbers around if you are detached and disengaged. Where your hands and heart have no connection, the mind can gather facts unaffected and unscathed.

We hear the numbers each day in the news concerning death. 33 at Virginia Tech, 161 in a car bombing in Iraq. These are numbers that can be quickly entered in a ledger if anyone cares enough, but when and where the hands are engaged, things become far more personal. For instance all the students at Virginia Tech, all the bystanders in Iraq, the tragic gunman and suicidal car bomber were held as children in the hands of mothers and fathers who felt love for them... and each left a legacy of lasting deeply felt connections that isn't severed when the statistics are delivered in the nightly news. Behind the news are the hundreds of stories that won't be told or that can't be told but have deep personal effect on those closer than arm's length.

Can you see what I'm talking about? Where the hands are restrained from their normal engagement with reality and when learning is put at greater than arm's length things are cold, things become cruel, and important human values are shredded on the alter of statistics.

The motto of the Met Schools and the parent organization The Big Picture Company is to educate: "One student at a time," recognizing that each is special with gifts that are unique. In essence, it is all about the hands.

Neurophysiologist Professor Matti Bergström states:

"The brain discovers what the fingers explore... If we don't use our fingers, if in childhood we become "finger blind", the rich network of nerves is impoverished - which represents a huge loss to the brain and thwarts the individual's all round development. If we neglect to develop and train our children's fingers and the creative form building capacity of the hand muscles, then we neglect to develop their understanding of the unity of things; we thwart their aesthetic and creative powers. Those who shape our age old traditions always understood this. But today Western civilization, an information obsessed society that overvalues science and undervalues true worth, has forgotten it all. We are value-damaged"

So, the concept of finger blind is easy to get, at least for those of us who work with our hands. What is meant by "values damaged?" A healthy individual or a healthy society works on a broad range of values that must be considered in the process of decision making. Those values are diverse and often in conflict, but lead to an exchange of ideas resulting in thoughtful action. Those who are values damaged see only one side of an issue and act from a perspective that can be best described as narrow minded. Single issue voting blocks are one example. Sometimes the worst values damage is related to the monetary value of objects. Those who have become fixated on money will look at a beautifully crafted object only in terms of its price, supply vs. demand and scarcity, seeing nothing of its beauty, historical significance or the significant growth that took place in the life of its maker that resulted from his or her efforts to create.

The loss of the hand's role in education results in flat people, thinly dimensional, with little depth of real character or aspiration beyond their very narrow range of interest. Those who know nothing of the significance of their own hands won't get what I'm talking about. Those of you who do understand are also empowered to do something about it.

Today we took our hand made looms and weavings to visit a professional weaver, Eleanor Lux in her studio in Eureka Springs. It was a wonderful visit and the students were very pleased to receive Eleanor's commendations on their beginning work. Some of the students have been working on their weavings during recess and had a lot to show. Eleanor showed the students how to spin yarn and how to weave on the various looms in her studio. It made for a wonderful morning.

The box in the photos at left was made when associate editor Tom Begnal from Fine Woodworking was here in early March. The making of the box will be featured in an upcoming Fine Woodworking Magazine. The article will cover a variety of techniques involved in box making, from cutting miters to using the router table and story stick technique for installing the butt hinges. The box is made from maple and mesquite.

Earlier, I had mentioned that there were two types of objects, art and not-art. Another way of looking at things (literally) is to classify as follows: tools, vessels, furniture and non-functional decorative objects. Of course, it is difficult for things to adhere to their normal categories. For instance it is common in today's woodturning for vessels to be infused with worm holes or voids, eliminating any possibility of use. An old tool that the owner has no skill or intention to use would also fit the category of non-functional decorative object, even though in the hands of a trained craftsman, it's category would change.

There is a temptation in the establishment of cultural and economic values to propose the highest worth to the objects for which there is no utilitarian purpose. A bowl that leaks from worm holes may be regarded as higher in value than one that can be used in the making of bread. It is surely "art." Tools have their greatest value when they are least efficient, obsolete and therefore "collectible." Furniture is often of greater value when it is involved in making a statement of discomfort. The value of the non-functional decorative object is supreme in today's American culture. This may be an expression of our affluence. If you look at what is truly required for human subsistence, tools and (functional) vessels are supreme.

I had an interesting exchange with a woodworker who asked me to review his products with an eye toward helping him achieve success. His things seemed somewhat impractical but well made and I asked him, "where does your work fit the concept of art?"

I wonder, is it easier to sell art, or "not art?" In which direction will success be found? Is a woodworker's career better served by making things that hang on walls or sit on pedestals and shelves that may inspire intellectual exploration, or by making simple useful things of beauty that will be used up, worn out and at some point discarded? Ultimately, we may never really know. The simple useful thing may in time become both cherished and sacred. But if we get the opportunity to spend our days making something with our hands we are miles ahead.

There was one piece in the Crafts in America Exhibit by an Arkansas artist.
Robyn Horn's piece entitled "Already Set in Motion," sawn and shaped from a single piece of Cocobolo, 25"h. is from her "Slipping Stones Series." More of Horn's work can be found at del Mano Gallery

Last week when I went to see and hear Sam Maloof speak at the Arkansas Art Center in Little Rock, his visit was in association with a new exhibit, Craft In America: Expanding Traditions. The exhibit will travel from Arkansas to a number of museums throughout the United States and was produced in association with a documentary series on PBS called Craft In America. Part 1 premiered last week and you should check your local listings for parts 2 and 3. In Arkansas all three parts will be aired in succession on May 30.

In case you don't get a chance to see the exhibit or the documentary, you can check in on Craft in America through the website www.craftinamerica.org

The exhibit was reviewed in this morning's Arkansas Democrat Gazette. The reviewer expressed regret several times in the course of the review that things in museums cannot be touched by the hand, but concludes:

Between the artist's hand and your questioning hand stands the museum guard. But you're free to learn what you can by looking and to carry away whatever inspiration might apply to your own things, the things you make. Make them better. Do your best. Recognize others who have more skill than you and celebrate creativity with them. That's what all this fuss is about.

I hope the average reader of the Democrat Gazette is actually engaged in making something. It would be a shame if he or she were not. The basket shown in the photo above is from the exhibit.

From wikipedia.org

"Ornament and Crime is an essay written by the influential and self-consciously "modern" Austrian architect Adolf Loos under the German title Ornament und Verbrechen in 1908. It was translated into English in 1913, under its challenging title. "The evolution of culture marches with the elimination of ornament from useful objects" Loos proclaimed, linking the optimistic sense of the linear and upward progress of cultures with the contemporary vogue for applying evolution to cultural contexts."

"In the essay, Loos' "passion for smooth and precious surfaces" informs his expressed philosophy that ornamentation can have the effect of causing objects to go out of style and thus become obsolete. It struck him that it was a crime to waste the effort needed to add ornamentation, when the ornamentation would cause the object to soon go out of style. Loos introduced a sense of the "immorality" of ornament, describing it as "degenerate", its suppression as necessary for regulating modern society. He took as one of his examples the tattooing of the "Papuan" and the intense surface decorations of the objects about him; Loos considers the Papuan not to have evolved to the moral and civilized circumstances of modern man, who, should he tattoo himself, would either be considered a criminal or a degenerate."

Sadly, Loos seemed to have little understanding of craftsmanship or the nature of artistic expression. When we make something, we are not just making an object, we are re-creating ourselves through a process of learning and growth. That may involve the exploration of the clean lines of modernity or the exploration of texture and adornment.

There are essentially two types of objects, functional and decorative. The boundary between these two types is obscure and sometimes ironic. As an example I am reminded of a passage in Stranger in the Forest: On Foot Across Borneo by Eric Hansen. During Hansen's incredible journey across Borneo and back he was invited into the home of a native where he found brightly colored Tupperware hanging on the walls similar to the way a modern American would display artifacts from another culture. Hansen notes that an American would laugh to see Tupperware displayed with such reverence, but an American, decorating his home with 3rd world artifacts in an effort to display his sophistication may may have journeyed no further than the local Pier One Import store. For the native of Borneo, the Tupperware reflected the actual sophistication of a difficult and hazardous journey on foot across centuries to a modern era and then back.
The interesting thing is that for the Borneo native, Tupperware was art. Can we get to a point of cultural renewal in which the common objects of our daily lives will be art? I believe it will have to start with our hands.

"Form Follows Function" and "Ornamentation is a Crime". These were the catch phrases of modernism that led directly from the Bauhaus to our current age of characterless products and cold, clinical design. You might be interested in the saws at left. The photo at the top shows in descending order a common carpenter's saw from the 19th century, a saw from the early part of the 1900's and one from the 1960's when the dearth and death of ornamentation intruded to the core of American craftsmanship.

The photo at left shows a close-up detail of the earliest saw. It is from an age that valued both ornamentation and skilled craftsmanship. You might wish to call those days the golden age of the hand.

I am going back to some things I mentioned before in the blog... "In Bali they have no art, they do everything as well as they can." In the west, we have the terms "art" and "craft" to describe objects with particular personal expressive intent that contrast with the typical objects of daily life, which may be made near perfectly by machines with little or no human attention. These objects both "art" and "not-art" may be used for personal expression or to establish cultural identity, but are produced by companies or people separate and isolated from the end user.

If you go back to the time in which a cultural anthropologist asked the man in Bali about their "art," you would realize that nearly every object at that time was a form of personal expression. These objects would normally be made with a great deal of care, as the expression of care or caring is the fundamental value of a civilized culture.

In the United States, even art and craft are fundamentally estranged from the end user by a system of wholesale and retail distribution. We buy our objects and clothing with little regard to the specifics of their manufacture or distribution. The question, "what is art?" is a matter of endless debate and one that I wouldn't want to touch with a 10 foot pole, except to offer the following:

We are healthiest as human individuals when we are engaged in a creative process. You can call it art, craft or Tiddly Winks. I'm not talking about buying art, or owning art, or collecting art, but about the process of making. We would or will be healthiest as a society, when as in Bali, we have no art, but the objects that fill our lives are objects of our own making, or reflect the creative engagement of our friends.

I don't have time at the moment to go deeper in this, but it is a subject to which I will return.

Our tiny house was featured in today's Christian Science Monitor.

I had an interesting email exchange with Frank Wilson, author of the book, The Hand, about my "Stowe hypothesis". He reminded me that people have been trying to work on investigation of similar hypotheses for at least 25 years, and what I propose actually has many authors. In addition, the science involved in coming up with the clear proof required just isn't available yet.

The question I have, is how much proof is required? And to what standards? We have a clear problem in America with experts, expertise, and credentials. Those things are required because people as a whole are lacking in the training to be clear observers of reality. We learn only from the recorded expertise of others and are left unwilling to trust our own judgment. We are taught to regard our own experience as suspect due to our own lack of credentials.

Frank tells of a time in the last 25 years when music teachers were marching in the streets in response to an earlier round of funding cuts with posters that read: "Save the right side of the brain!" The fact that we don't see any movement now tells that we have been fully acculturated to passivity and complaisance.

In the meantime, we can see from Virginia Tech what happens when people are immobilized by passivity and complaisance. If the hands are truly connected to mental and emotional well-being and health, then we should do something about it.

My conclusion: We aren't ready to prove anything from a "scientific" perspective, but still, if we can incite people to gain a greater awareness of the relationship between their own hands and brains, and lead them to have greater confidence in what they observe, we will be better prepared for round 3 in what may be a 10 rounder.

Following up on my comments over the last couple days, I want to state a hypothesis. Lacking anything better to call it, I'll name it the Stowe Hypothesis.

The creative engagement of the hands is so closely linked to mental and emotional states of well-being as to be considered causative. The decline in the use of the hands in creative activities (music, art, crafts, cooking, sewing and gardening) is proportional to the rise in the incidence of anxiety and depression and the rise in dependency on mood altering drugs.

I state this hypothesis based on my own experience in the wood shop and on the reports of other artists and craftspeople of the feelings engendered by their involvement in their own creative activities. We should also note that the current epidemic of anxiety and depression is concurrent with a drastic decline in hands-on creative activities.

Anyone have any ideas how to test such a thing?

The book mark in the photo above was made by a convict on death row in Arkansas. On shaving day, he takes his razor apart to cut out the paper in the few moments he's allowed before the razor must be returned. Then he decorates them. We all need the opportunity to create.

Today in the Clear Spring School wood shop, we made wind-up paddle wheel boats, following a plan from a woodworking book. My assistant Luke and I concluded after class that we still have a long way to go in teaching them to follow plans rather than being dependent on personal instruction. It is a worthy goal as it will open the world to our students as lifetime independent learners.

In the previous post, I mentioned Procrustes' "one size cripples all educational system in America." So, what about the successes? What about the students who fit the learning style and move through the system to gain high salaries and all the earmarks of success? How could I have the gall to state that it fails them as well?

There are the invisible in today's society. I can put a face on one. He works at Chicago O'Hare airport and there are thousands very much like him in every city, large or small, working similar jobs. This man in particular, moves quietly, almost invisible to most as he empties the trash containers of the refuse hastily abandoned by all the thousands of important individuals heading for their flights. As I watched, I wondered how many spent even one brief instant in acknowledgment and appreciation. There is an under-appreciated America and on the other hand, at the other extreme, a thankless and self-important, self-absorbed one.

According to Otto Salomon:

If we would get rid of the antagonism between the different classes of the community, and bring about a good understanding between them, it is absolutely necessary that each should respect and appreciate the work of the other; and that everybody alike should understand that all work, mental or manual, gives dignity to all who engage intelligently and properly therein.

The consequence of our social stratification is that many of the "successful" people in our society, in order to preserve their own safety and security, must reside behind walls, security fences, alarm systems and the false security of guns to protect themselves from the society they have played a part in creating.

Is that a joyful expression of the heart? If they were to look within their own hearts, what kinds of feelings would they find there? Can you see the consequences of Procrustes bed? You might even feel it... It reflects both success and failure and lies as a heavy weight one hand's width below your own chin.

John Grossbohlin wrote to share the following:

A number of sad things occurred at Virginia Tech. One was that, based on the press reports, the shooter was apparently known to be in emotional trouble, i.e., depressed. Two, no one in the school was able, or perhaps willing, to stop him. Lessons learned? Probably none... Those closest to him are somewhat culpable here in that the reported depression combined with weapons possession shouldn't have been condoned.

I've got some first hand experience with aberrant behavior by associates and have wondered if perhaps I didn't do enough... A college roommate of mine bombed a dormitory. He built the bomb while the other three of us were at a slide presentation. He was an odd fellow, totally lacking in self esteem, who came from an affluent family. Dad's idea of taking care of his son was giving him $100 per week spending money on top of his room, meal card, and tuition. With $100 per week 25+ years ago a kid couldn't help but get into trouble... Another of my old college roommates committed suicide. He was unable to cope when his wife took off with another guy. We collectively thought that in the few weeks prior to his final act that he was getting better, that his depression had subsided. My last phone call to his answering machine went unreturned as he was dead in his bed, but as yet undiscovered. A mutual friend and I both wonder if we could have or should have done more... at one point we even discussed holding his guns for him...

Let's face it, not everyone is college material and not everyone is a 4-letter athlete--this became abundantly clear to me while I was teaching at colleges and teaching college courses inside maximum security prisons. What is also clear is that some people learn better by putting their hands on things rather than reading about them or watching them on a video. A long time good friend of mine has led a very successful life by learning through doing--recently selling a successful business to start a new one--and he is technically a high school drop out. Reading is torture for him though he can read and comprehend things like computer programming manuals and technical manuals successfully. By no stretch of the imagination is he stupid or ignorant, he simply learns differently.

Thanks John for the thoughtful observations.

There was a Greek monster that I may have mentioned before in the blog, Procrustes. He would invite you into his home to sleep in his wonderful bed that would fit all. It was equipped to cut your legs off if you were too tall or stretch you on a rack if you were too short. We have created a one size cripples all educational system in America. The pressures for some to compete in a world in which they don't fit may have something to do with students reaching a breaking point. I think America's dark fascination with guns and video game violence may play a part as well. We know that at Virginia Tech, mental disease and our failure to address it adequately in our society plays a big part in tragedy.

The challenge here, isn't to find fault, but to find solutions, and I am convinced the solution can be found in a more thorough understanding of our own hands.