Charles' stand-up mirror #1, designed and created back in the 80's as an early result of Tom's carving shown above. It's this effect we'll look to in the #204 gates. Creating distinct planes with the use of carved reliefs.

Ready for some African Wenge, beginning with planks that will get worked into our various grids.

Nothing much has changed when joining an edge. The Stanley #7 Joiners plane that belonged to my step-father's father's father. But not something dwelled upon, as there are dozens of such tools in the shop and still performing their job as they once did back in the late 19th century.

The two branches, or limbs. We'll further the illusion in the coming days with the carved confluence of where the branches interconnect with the gate's stiles and rail.

Whackin it feels good.

With that in mind, I'm reminded of a recent gift from my friend Eric Johnson, of Iota Press, who retires as a carpenter and takes up a career with the lost art of letter press printing. An excerpt culled from a Cormac McCarthy novel, printed one letter at a time as a broadsheet. One of those adages that hangs around, like footprints on the brain.

To some this woodworking is a craft to behold,
A methodical science if truth be told.
The reverence of forethought and a studied exactitude,
With yet more thought to imprison the attitude.
Do away with the plans, and those drawings you must set aside,
To trust the presumptions of an instinct decried.
The success of this effort is to all a nebulous thing,
They might groan and bemoan or your praises they may sing.

Wrist watches and clocks and time cards gone away,
Accountants and bookkeepers and managers with minds of clay,
Missing the boat with their ephemerous calling,
Their columns of figures rising and falling.

Tell them, you must, of this meaningless platitude,
The quality of life is a blessing of gratitude.
He sings, he dances, he whistles in the wind,
To the language and rhythm misconstrued as a sin.
The work builds and grows at a pace unbeknownst to time,
Deafened by the distractions of a poignant rhyme.
Dr. Seuss, Lewis Carroll, and Ogden Nash,
Dictating his work and his life like an impervious rash.

So below we begin to see the growth of our secondary planes. Having spent inordinate hours sketching trees as an art and architecture student, the lessons of perspective and vanishing scales return to dictate the separation from the primary and secondary levels. This will be furthered when the gates are actually assembled and glued to a final position, followed only then by the remedial carving that will distinguish the limbs on their distinctive planes. We would hope to see, from a distance, a sense of depth we see when actually viewing a tree; how the limbs and branches in the background are foreshadowed to those larger limbs in the foreground by the existence of size and shadow. In a two-dimensional work, we'll create the illusion of shadows by carving reliefs at strategic points of confluence.

We are in the infancy. We are incalculably lost to the ravages of logic and common sense. Really, there is no plan. No template. There is only an aesthetic's apprenticeship for planes and dimensions and perspectives to be coupled with fundamentals of a 15-year apprenticeship completed 30+ years ago, to be coupled with a fondness for the gone-missing light-heartedness of E.B White and Ogden Nash and Lewis Carroll and Rudyard Kipling and Dr. Seuss.

This is followed by chiseling away the stock with the thin shavings of once again, a blade that is kept honed to a razor's edge.

Mr Prowell prefers the sunlight to the florescents in the shop,
The California sunshne for twelve months non stop.
The colorless complexions of decades spent indoors,
The insescance for the florescents of, say, the Scottish Moors.
The decades of toiling deficiency from a lack of vitamin D,
In Oslo, Munich, New England and St Louiy.
This love of the natural light unencumbered by raftered claustrophobia,
This preference for simple sunlight with California over Manitobia.

He prefers working shirtless like a primate born in the woods,
Who hasnt brushed his hair since the election of Bush and his hoods.
He once bathed, but there are no witnesses under the sun,
To verify such an event since the battle of Bull Run.
That it was even a proper bath and not left naked in a raining shower,
Which would have, could have, may have, gone back to Carter's reigning power.
Or was it the reign of that insouciant Eisenhower?

Mr. Prowell has grown bored with this white elephant,
Which to all things considered is wholly irrelevant.
This tree that's not a tree,
And the smaller tree that's rather hard to see.
The joinery is painful and the scrollwork what a headache,
The whole thing just an illusion and a slight-handed fake.
And what to do with the open spaces here and there,
Requiring a solution to this project for which I no longer care.
But now and again the lull of a mid-stream malaise,
Gives pause to an idea of better means and ways.

Returning after an absence of weeks that were not spent, as you might imagine, laying by the pool. I have been busy with the endless convolutions of these damnable tentacles and their ridiculous joineries and where this project rests among hundreds of projects remains an unknown. It's place within the scale of success / failure, and fun / tedius.

Getting our first sense of perspective and how the various layerings succeed in providing the illusion of depth when viewed from a distance in the same way an impressionist painting changes its effect when viewed at close range and at a distance. In this sense, we've succeeded.

But the overall impression is stymied and convoluted and clearly intended for a patron who dances to a distinct tune.